Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: HerrStig
The only way to jam lots of music into a memory of any kind is to compress it, which causes some of the music data to be lost. At some point the compression system does so much to the file folks can hear the difference. Typically, dynamic range and high end suffer the most. In a car you probably won't hear that
That's the thing. In a portable environment, most people don't do any critical listening, so it doesn't matter too much. For car/portable MP3 player duty, I typically encode everything using MP3 VBR2 setting, which results in an average bit rate of around 190 kbps. It cuts off all frequencies above 18.5 kHz. Given my age, my ears can't hear anything above about 17 kHz anyway.
Flash memory is cheap these days. You can get a decent 128 GB USB flash drive for around $30, and you can pack a ton of music on it without having to compress it too much. Just make sure your car deck can actually support this size drives.
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I'm convinced that stereo reached a high point in the late 70s when the CD came along, outfits like Marantz, Mac, Carver, Technics, KLH and AR were building good analog gear, since then "progress" means smaller and cheaper plastic boxes.
First commercial CD titles and players came out in early 80s, but yes, I agree with you in general.
I could have been clearer. I mean't that there were some really good amps and speakers available by the late 70s which could do the CD's justice.
