Can an mp3 sound with the same quality as a CD? Yes
The Great Experiment of the bitrate in the MP3.
A programmer decided to check if there was really much quality between different bitrates and the quality of a professional CD.
He put on one side the CD, also a FLAC (without quality loss) and on the other different mp3 with different options of CBR, VBR and 128,160,192,320 kbps.
The encoding of a music file is a balance between quality and size.
Normally using good mp3 encoding it is possible to store 5 to 10 times more music than saving WAV formats from a CD.
In order to measure, he put thousands of people to listen to music files, they are telling them if they were listening to a CD, a FLAC, an mp3 with different boirates, The results:
The absolute winner was the mp3 at 160 kbps VBR.
It was the one that received the best ratings, even above the CD. This is possible to understand because programs like Mp4Gain significantly improve the volume, the quality, they do bass boost, etc.
An Mp3 at 192 kbps is indistinguishable from a CD according to the results of this study.
This comes to destroy many preconceptions of people who, based on things they have read, but are exaggerated, make believe that the mp3 is dead or at least obsolete and this is not the case at all.
As we mentioned, an mp3 with the appropriate settings sounds the same or even better than a CD.
