Question to Spoon

[Unregistered]

Hi Spoon

Question here. I have read everything you wrote about quality of music between bitrates. I realise you can not make a 192 out of an original 128 Bitrate. Or, better can not technically improve the sound quality to an actual 192 bitrate level. My question is this: If you have a 192 bitrate song, originally, (then for the sake of minimizing HDD space) you convert the song down to 128. Then, for burning reconvert the song to the original 192 bitrate; will the song restore to the 192, original, when converting back up? Sound quality wise.

Thanks,

Knighthawk

[RossRoy]

No, the quality will be even lower than your original 192 file when you try to revert back up to 192 after transcoding to 128.

The reason being that each time you encode a file to MP3, no matter what the bitrate, some information is lost. So, from the original CD to MP3 192, you lose information. Then, you take the 192 MP3 and convert it to MP3 128, you lose some information again. And from 128 to 192, you lose yet again some audio information. So, no matter what you do, each time you re-encode the file to another lossy format (WMA, MP3, OGG, etc.) you lose some audio quality.

[Spoon]

As RossRoy said you would still have a 128Kbps file, that takes up the space of 192Kbps (well actually slightly worse than 128Kbps because lossy to lossy looses quality).