Firstly...what does MP3 mean?

If you already know about the mp3 format - skip this section!

It is essential to have an understanding of what mp3 is before considering a purchase, not knowing anything at all is comparable to buying a box for your friend to keep his music collection in when you don't know whether he has cassettes, CDs, vinyl LPs, a music box, a pianola, or even a real live band. If you get a nice box for CDs and he has records it will be useless.

MP3 is the name of the file extension that is given to audio files which have been compressed used the MPEG-1 layer 3 format. MPEG is the acronym for the Motion Pictures Experts Group, this is an industrial organisation set up to try and standardise the digital compression of entertainment media such as film, video, animation etc.

There are three layers of MPEG compression for audio signals but we will skip layer 1 and 2 here. Layer 3 effectively takes a very detailed audio file and compresses it by removing all of the frequencies that are technically inaudible to the human ear but which are contained in WAV files which are generally around 12 times the size.

Audiophiles often argue that MP3s are not as high quality as other formats, and to an extent it is possible for inaudible frequencies to effect the listener (very deep bass for example can be felt through vibrations although they have no perceptible tone) and the energy that is emitted with the audible frequencies can effect very minutely the way the audible part is heard. Many people however cannot tell the difference at all, and some find MP3s to be sharper.

To further complicate matters MP3s can be compressed into various stages of quality usually measured according to the speed of transmission for each measure of music. This is measured in the same way the bandwidth of your internet connection (how fast it is). If you have a dial-up connection it generally runs at 56kbps (kilobytes per second) but some may still run slower at busy times, due to firewalls, noisy phone lines, or the distance from the telephone company's transmission center. Wireless units, (laptops, mobile phones) usually run slower but expect to see rapid improvements over the coming years. Broadband luckily is available or becoming available to most people now and can handle much larger files in much shorter times. An MP3 file compressed to 56kbps is often of noticably inferior quality to larger files, 128kbps is often no different from hearing a CD, and 196kbps is very good qulaity indeed, you can get MP3 files with much higher values too.

One thing that makes MP3 so useful is that it is a comparatively small digital signal and therefore takes up less digital storage space and can be transmitted much faster.

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