[Storyboy]

Hey,

I've seen a sh*tload of threads on what codec is better, and how quality suffers, and on and on...

...but nowhere can I find info on any quality that is perhaps "recovered" when converting from mp3 back to AIFF and then to a CD. I have a moderate understanding of the science of compression, but I know nothing about "de-compression". What happens when an mp3 is de-compressed? How does the resulting aiff compare to that from the original CD?

I know sound quality is subjective, but how about on paper? If it makes no sense to convert from mp3 to aac just to save disk space (b/c of the double compression deal), what about converting mp3 to AIFF and then back to AAC at a similar bitrate? Will the loss of quality be similar to that of the direct conversion?

Really, am I overthinking this whole thing?

Thanks.

[Jacke]

Originally posted by Storyboy:
what about converting mp3 to AIFF and then back to AAC at a similar bitrate? Will the loss of quality be similar to that of the direct conversion?

Yes. Or rather, almost exctly the same.

A CD made from MP3 -> AIFF will sound about the same as the original MP3 it was made from. Any difference you might hear might be due to playing the CD on a better sound system rather than whatever speakers your computer has.

[bmedina]

Originally posted by Storyboy:
If it makes no sense to convert from mp3 to aac just to save disk space (b/c of the double compression deal), what about converting mp3 to AIFF and then back to AAC at a similar bitrate? Will the loss of quality be similar to that of the direct conversion?

There is no difference.

It's impossible to take MP3 and directly re-encode it to AAC. Any process which goes from MP3 to AAC necessarily decodes the MP3 first (i.e. converts it to AIFF).

Yes. Or rather, almost exactly the same.

Get rid of "almost" and you have it perfectly.