I've been using nothing but the wma files since RealDrums/RealTracks came out.

I've produced stuff for airplay, jingles, commercials, underscores and CD demos.

Not one customer to date has said a word about any lack of audio quality.

I think that there is a lot of misunderstanding concerning the technology being bandied about.

First, the wma format started out at its inception as not suffering from the problems that mp3 files needed to sort.

Then, Fraunhofer, the original license people of the mp3 format, stopped development entirely several years ago. LAME encoder project kept right on developing and today, IMO is the better codec choice. For mp3's. Nuts -- we are talking WMA here anyway.

There is also another fact involved. If you are recording say, a single track of a lone solo trumpet player, as an example, you do not need "DC-to-Daylight" frequency response at all. The fact is that you could use wmas at a "reduced" bitrate and still capture the vast majority of the sound spectrum that is important enough for our ears to know that it is a cleanly recorded Trumpet. That is just one example. Direct Injected Pedal Steel Guitar or Mic'd Electric Guitar might be more apropos to the users around here. Again, the amplifier/speaker combination itself is actually an intentional bandpass filter in many ways. Most guitar speakers that are considered to be great sounding don't make much if any energy above about the 6K mark and are usually centered well below that, around 2K or so. The bottom end is also truncated due to the need for AC hum filtering, etc. No need here for DC to Daylight, either.

Now here comes the fellow who wants to talk about those delicate harmonics way up there and how they add a lot to the music. I'd like to see that dude's actual hearing test results (grin). Especially if he's over 40. And I can tell him that his soundcard, while maybe able to produce response above the 20KHz mark, is in almost every case delivering that high frequency energy to a speaker monitoring system that is rated out to only 20KHz or so. Couple that with the FACT that he can't hear 10KHz reliably and what do we really have here?

Yes, the WMA format chosen by pgmusic sounds pretty darn good!


--Mac

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