Does comperessing a mp3of 160 bit to 24 bit & again decomperessing it to 160 bits make the song quality poor?

Answer 1

Oh yes, if you take an mp3 of 160kb/s and re-encode it to only 24kb/s and then re-encode it again back to 160kb/s, you'll have the same size file as the original, but it will sound like the 24kb/s one...pretty crappy. Converting up to a higher bitrate is not a wise idea. If an mp3 was made at a certain bitrate, it can't get any better quality by converting to a higher one. You'd have to re-rip and re-encode a new mp3 from the source cd at the higher bitrate to get a good quality. 192kb/s is really good quality for most uses, but 128kb/s will work also. Use a good encoder like LAME.

Answer 2

SURE...

Let me explain the concept:
the computer can't store the sound wave as it is, Why? because the original sound wave is analog (continuous) while the data in computers are stored in a digital (discrete) form, the only way to store a voice is to take "samples" of the original voice and store them, and when the computer plays the sound again, it just asume that each sample is connected with a straight line. Think about it this way: a curve consists of infinite number of straight lines.

Theoritically, infinite number of points are needed to represent a curve (no matter how close two points are, there can be placed a third point between them). but in practice, it was found that you can reach a limit where no more points are needed (actually, more points will be a headacke, with no more gain!!!).

now... 160 bit sound means that every second of a song consists of 160 bits (160 bits per seconds - 160 bits = 20 bytes). when you convert it to 24 bits (3 bytes), around 1/7 of the data would be lost (I mean, if each point on the sound curve can be represented with 1 byte, instead of taking 20 samples for every second, you are taking only 3 now, and the computer will try to "guess" what between them, the simplest ways are to asume straight lines!!!).

now when you want to convert it back to 160 bits per seconds, the program that is performing that process, will have no access to the original data, so it will have to "guess" the data in between, but this time not to play them, just to store them. So you gain more data to process, more storage is needed, and less quality.

Enjoy ;)

Answer 3

The compression algorithm governs the result.