I would just like to say that i was testing out the new ms audio 4 from microsoft (comes with mstools ver 4.) and i was woundering how it compaired to mp3. they say that it's almost half the size with the same quality. Well, i tested a little music of my own and quickly relized that it work well with smaller compression, for example, it sounded better at 64kps 44.1k then mp3 did at that rate, *BUT* for higher quality like 128 and 160 (the speed i use most) it was not as good as mp3! I mean, there were some noticalbe improvements over the mp3 format, like better reproduction of high frequencies, but it didn't sound as close to the origional WAV as the mp3 did at the same speed of 160kps. Hmm..... i'm going to try more testing later this week.. if anyone is interested, email me for more info. (BTY: the song i used for testing by the way was phil collins, "everyday" and i used a very high quality sound card and headphones.)

hmm....looks like mp3 might be in the clear, but i would need to do more testing to find out. Does anyone have similar results? different??



-CHiP

I seem to remember that Microsoft have admitted that their system has problems at low bit rates. I think they also said that they knew what was causing the loss of quality and that they would fix it in future releases.
It will be interesting to see what happens, I guess the chance of empeg ever running MS Audio are virtually zilch (and I'm sure it won't be technical problems that cause this...)

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