I have always been fond of higher quality audio files and really dislike compressed audio. The artifacts bother me, the narrow floor and ceiling make classical music almost worthless. CD’s are not as warm as analog in general, but I am willing to sacrifice warmth for lack of noise and accuracy. So when you take a CD/.wav file and compress it, you get the worst of all worlds: Cold audio with noise and no definition. Delightful. So - that’s why rVibe is offering nothing less than 320kbps MP3 files. While not perfect, in the compression space, that’s about as good as it gets while maintaining interoperability and download-ability. I do like lossless (ie FLAC or WMA), but they are really too big to download - and you don’t have much in the way of real interoperability. And it’s nice to see that others feel that way too. In general, I think that as bandwidth grows faster is available to a more mainstream audience, that the question of file size will decrease and the question of audio quality will increase. So the more rVibe is associated with higher quality files - and not just whatever anyone wants to throw at it - the better.

Originally published on WordPress on September 21, 2007. Migrated to this blog on May 29, 2025.