| HappySqurriel said: Just as a point on Audio ... DVD-A and SACD came out and offered much higher than CD quality audio and were (essentially) killed by MP3s which most people encode at 192k (which is dramatically lower than CD quality). For (roughly) 90% of the people out there 192k encoded MP3 is just as good as DVD-A/SACD so I see absolutely no reason why the audio could not be compressed 100 to 1. |
Mp3 is about 10-to-1 compression vs redbook CDDA at 128kbit/second. You could get better compression algorithms and compress more tightly, but 10-to-1 lossless is about as small as devs would probably want to go.
And people with decent equipment will know the difference easily. With my equipment it is clear that 192kbit LAME encoded mp3 played over digital coax is inferior to regular analog radio.
While I agree with you in theory about lossy compression being good enough for the vast majority of people, and perhaps 98% of people couldn't tell the difference on their equipment, I disagree with you about the compression ratio you could achieve to accomplish this. 5-to-1 or 10-to-1 would be as compressed as I'd hope to achieve while retaining enough quality to keep the vast majority of ears from knowing any difference.
