Following a comment by gkamp in The Good, the Bad and the Queen of the previous week , i examine relationship between quality and quantity. And I mean the music and especially the transition from vinyl to CD and then to mp3. Or how we got here. A long time ago a disk type the younger know (very) little of dominated: the vinyl. There were a few different forms but ultimately it resulted in the large black plates that some of you recognize. And while we thought that was it, we started hearing about CD and Hi-Fi. The difference was supposed to be that the sound quality in combination with the «fresh» and «digital» audio sound systems would be what we only dreamed of. Reality, however, challenged expectations. Soon music lovers noticed that a sound recording on vinyl was of higher quality of that of CD.
It is a little complicated but I will try to explain. Vinyl is copied from matrices that in turn are written directly from the recording. The procedure is similar to the original photograph and negative relationship. With this procedure copy (given the errors from the machines) can be amazingly accurate. But it needed quite a space for the, really big, album. Another problem is maintaining the quality both in the construction of the disc and the playback. Basically the problem was that both the matrices and discs wear from contact with machinery. Thus the quality consistently worsened, or after a mistake in the procedure of the manual placement of the needle (through which the disc is read) suffered irreparable damage. Of course today you can buy a pick-up (expensive) with laser technology to avoid damaging the disk.
The CD works differently : converts the sound into a series of numbers to be read by the computer. In the procedure many concessions happen for easier construction , beyond the simple fact that we did not have genuine sound, but the numbers that produced it. But that is also its power : the reproduction is consistently good and does not change with time. Also the size is much smaller and irreparable harm is more difficult to occur both when playing and after , having inserted laser beam technology. Even more , it is clearly cheaper and simpler in construction for the record companies. Even for the simple user to copy and use one is now very simple with the same results as professionally.
Wav audio file is the kind that has the same kind of coding as an audio CD. It contains all the information contained in digital format as the file from a CD. The problem is physical space as a CD containing only 20 something songs that the initial speeds of the Internet made quite time consuming the transfer from computer to computer (upload-download). The problem also existed for companies wanting to use new technology to sell their material.
The solution was given from the different encodings of files , that were made in regards to transfer with the best size-quality ratio. Because size was more important than quality, concessions were made that resulted in loss of some of the original data, but enough to not be especially perceived by the client. There are, actually, four types of mpeg coding . Mpeg-1 is found in Video-CD and from it came the famous mp3 , mpeg-2 is known from DVD - video (films) and mpeg-4 is known by the names divx, xvid, mov (quicktime), wmv , nero digital and others depending on the company and the exact source. The problem of course is that mp3, like the others, places more importance to the information (sound) that the human body (ear) is more sensitive to and can more easily be reproduced , losing information on the rest. How much depends on how much space we are prepared to «waste» on it. For the record the human ear can hear frequencies between 20 and 20.000 Hz. Also , the smaller the frequency , the more easily its reproduced. Whatever happens, however, some data is lost forever. For those who want more take a look at the wonderful piece by mimi in mixgrill forum:Mix Grill Forum > Γενική συζήτηση > Αρθρογραφία > ΗΧΟΣ – ΜΟΡΦΕΣ ΗΧΟΥ – ΚΩΔΙΚΟΠΟΙΗΤΕΣ ΜΕ ΑΠΛΑ ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙΝΑ ΛΟΓΙΑ . 
Finally it seems that in the battle quality against quantity quantity is continuously favored. It seems that we are willing to lose enough quality to have a large quantity of songs, music and all kinds of sounds. I just wonder why professionals continue to deal with vinyl (favored by djs) and wav (for those professionally engaged in sound). 
For the quiz: the song is called Hasta Siempre (Hasta siempre, commandante). Even Dalaras has sung it .
For the following quiz: Since Formula 1 season is starting, who was at his side when Lewis Hamilton celebrated his win of the drivers championship ? I know, i know its easy for the guys.
Buena Vista
Social Club - Hasta Siempre
Commandante