
What sound quality is better than 320 or 128?

What are bit rates? How do they affect the quality of music and video? Optimal bit rate for various musical styles

There is a lot of talk these days that we have lost real music with the advent of compressed audio formats like MP3, AAC and the like. Is it really so? Will lossless music save music? Can an inexperienced listener tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC music? Let’s take a look at this problem.
What is Bitrate?
You’ve probably heard the term “bitrate” before, and you probably have a basic idea of what it means, but it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with its official definition to find out how it all works.
Bit rate is the number of bits or the amount of data that is processed over a period of time. In audio, this generally means kilobits per second. For example, the music you buy from iTunes is 256 kilobytes per second, which means that every second of the song
The higher the bit rate of the track, the more space it will take up on your computer. Audio CDs typically take up quite a bit of space, so it has become common practice to compress these files so that you can burn more music to your hard drive (or iPod, Dropbox or whatever). This is where the “lossy” and “lossy” formats conflict.
Lossless and Lossy formats: what’s the difference?
When we say lossless, we mean that we haven’t really changed the original file. That is, we copy a track from the CD to our hard drive, but we do not compress it to the point of losing data. Essentially the same as the original CD track.
However, most of the time, you will probably extract your music in Lossy format. That is, you took a CD, copied it to your hard drive, and compressed the tracks so they don’t take up a lot of space. A typical album is probably about 100MB. The same lossless album as (aka Apple Lossless) will be about 300MB in size, so it has become common practice to use lossy formats for faster boot times and more hard drive savings.
The problem is that when you compress a file to save space, you are removing chunks of data. Just like when you take a high-quality image and compress it to JPEG, your computer grabs the raw data and “tricks” certain parts of the image into being basically the same, but with some loss of clarity and quality.



