Hello, I searched but didnt find anything that answered my qusetion. Anyway, the question is if there is any quality loss after you download some songs at say 128kbps, then burn them onto a cd, then back onto the pc at 128kbps. My guess is that quality would not be affected too much, but I would like to make sure
yes there would be significant quality loss. For starters, 128k is not that great of quality to begin with. 192k VBR is pretty much the standard these days. by decoding a compressed file (burning to audio cd) then recompressing it to mp3 or other format, it severly reduces the quality. Imagine making a copy of a VHS tape. the quality gets worse every time you copy it. Its the same way every time you decode then recode a compressed file.
Too re-itirate what djscoop said. There is a significant quality loss. You won't loose any quality going from 128K to PCM (CD). But when you rip the CD-R, since the quality wasn't uncompress to CD just copied, the file from the CD will be compress^2. which normally would yield the square-root of 128K. But most audio encoders are smarter than that. Especially if you use a VBR scheme for encoding. 1) 128K auido file 2) 128K encoded at over a thousand Kbps PCM. yieldding no audio lost (and no audio Gain). 3) Ripping the audio from the CD at 128K. Producing a file with the quality less then before. The Moral: If you know a CD-R was created using audio files that where 128K (assuming you are ripping using the same encoder) you should rip at a quality twice that of the original (128K would need to be ripped at 256K) too maintain the quality of the original. That is just my hypothesis No facts yet, Ced
