Re: [ARSCLIST] Lossy compression losing quality (was Re: [ARSCLIST] Pristine Audio and the Milllennials . . .)

[Mike Richter <mrichter@xxxxxxx>]

Mike Richter wrote:
> Howard Friedman wrote:
> > Mike, you wrote,
> >
> > 3. Copying a digital file either loses nothing or fails; the 
> > exceptions to that are exceedingly rare. That is, if the copy is not 
> > perfect then the transfer will fail, usually due to the dreaded CRC 
> > error. There is a tiny chance of dual failure which would permit 
> > copying a file with an error, but that is negligible in practice.
> >
> > Does that mean that ripping CDA format files from a CD to MP3 format 
> > on my hard drive loses nothing?
>
> No - because ripping audio is not copying. Because a CD-DA is recorded 
> with one less layer of error correction, the probability of a bit error 
> is substantially higher than when copying a file. For better or for 
> worse, playback takes advantage of the ear's insensitivity to very brief 
> transients and just masks out the error - error concealment is the 
> technical term.

First, I apologize for replying to my own post. Second, I apologize for 
addressing the wrong question. Whatever we did not cover earlier in 
discussing lossy compression (perceptual encoding) was well covered in 
Richard Hess's post. Those issues arise *after* the imperfection of 
extracting audio to a lossless format such as WAV, the subject of my 
original reply.

Mike
--
mrichter@xxxxxxx
http://www.mrichter.com/