mp3 and highend components?


Ok i'm extremely new to the high end world (but a music freak).I'm in the process of buying a tube intergrated amp.But with the advancement of music storage(mp3).I'm thinking that it might be wrong or taboo to hook up my line out of my Ipod to this tube amp.
I have moved away from going through my hundreds of cd's.I have about 100gigs of music stored on external hard drive,aswell as a 60 gig Ipod.My question is,should i bee getting the cd's out of the closet to play on my new tube amp??.Am i offending purist by using the ipod ass my source?
What is everyone else doing to move along with the times??.Any ideas?
If all my music is on mp3 should i not bother upgrading my stereo gear?
thanks for any thoughts you might have for me.
bunkertoyd2ba

Showing 1 response by sfar

There have been quite a few threads on this subject over the last few months and a search on "mp3" or "iPod" will probably find most of them for you.

While it's true that either uncompressed files, played from the CD or ripped that way to a hard drive, or files saved in a lossless format will sound better, your mp3's may sound fine, depending on how you ripped them.

iTunes will let you rip mp3's at anything from 16 kbps to 320 kbps. At 192 kbps or above, mp3's can sound pretty good to me, at the more typical lower rates they can be not so great. Whether the sound is acceptable depends on many factors including the quality of the original, the resolution of your system and, most important, your own standards.

There's no reason to be too concerned about it, though, just try it and listen. It may be that you can't hear enough difference to go to the trouble of re-ripping or playing from CD. It's also possible that it's worth it only for a few albums. I ripped three or four hundred CD's to Apple Lossless format, even after I had at least have of them as 192 kbps mp3's. I'm not exactly sure it was worth it but I figured I'd only have to do it once and it's really not all that much work.