there's two separate levels of discussion here: The sound staging of MP3 files at various bitrates, and the sound staging.

Actually, we need to add the Eq comments as a separate discussion item too: they have nothing to di with sound stage. Thus there are actually three discussions going on at present. As this all started about sound staging, we should stick to the two issues you refer to: the ability for MP3 in general to maintain soundstage in the compressed files and the ability of the empeg to reproduce (what's left of) the soundstage in MP3.

Well, I've already given away my position in this by the comment between brackets above: I don't believe that lossy compression at the current levele of technology can preserve soundstage. When you closely listen, MP3s sound very nice, but sound different then the original when played on good equipment. Besides compression (throwing out sounds that you're supposed not to hear; thus changing the sound of the recording), I believe it also changes the timing of the signals, with jitter-like effects (which affect sound stage).As you said, the only way to separate these two items is to directly compare WAVs and MP3s on the same equipment. Unfortunately, we cannot play WAVs from the empeg players yet.

As I've said months ago, Emma sounds good: great for background music and parties, but is no comparison for close listening when compared to a well produced CD played from a jitter-free installation using the same (quality) amps, cables and speakers.

Also, most CD players make no serious attempt at all to avoid jitter, and actually I haven't seen a head unit for in-car use yet that tries to avoid it.(This is where playback equipment comes in: to avoid jitter, you can't rely on the rotational speed of the disk to extract the data at the right pace in the first place). So comparing Emma to other car heads will not be conclusive either, but can -- of course -- establish the empeg's relative place with other in-car units. This is what the ICE judge was talking about, I guess.

If someone can tell me where to get the ICE sound-stage CD (and I can get my hands on a Mark2 player), I'll do some more comparisons. Empeg delivering the WAV play-back capability will also help. But let's not fool ourselves: MP3 technology is based on a hearing model. As most other compression models iIt tries tries to compromise between file size and hearing ability with a focus on sound - not timing : there is no free lunch, you can't keep all sound effects in any lossy compression.



Henno
ex 00120