Originally posted by Dr. Isotope
And another nerdy-tech note, most humans cannot differentiate between tonal variations above 12,000-14,000hz-- they can hear the sounds, but they all just sound alike. We may be able to walk upright, but we have a really narrow hearing range.
LOL! I know. I was being a goof-ball. I'm glad someone else found that mildly amusing. I'm one of the weird ones that can differentiate the higher frequencies. I was tested up to 16,500 (which was as high as the test went) and I passed, but that was in a soundproof booth. In a car with road noise and vibration it would be impossible to do that.
I just wanted to point out that the dynamic range of frequencies and signal strength would be cut down in the broadcast. I read reviews on the Griffin iTrip, and it suffers from some of the things I was describing. So did most of the low-end units. I wanted to find a way to hard-wire it because FM transmission isn't really all that necessary. It's convenient, but I'd sacrifice that for sound quality.
Another problem with the Griffin iTrip specifically, is that it automatically cuts off after 60 seconds of silence, so long interludes or pauses in a recording could cause you to be blasted by X db of white noise while you're driving if you've got your system cranked, and this condition happens in the recording. That could hurt.
As for MP3 quality... I have over 900 CDs, and I encoded them all at 44,100hz and 256kbps. It comes out to 53GB of music. Enough to play for 43.72 days without repeats. And at that bit rate, just like with higher frequencies, any losses from the compression are completely imperceptible. It's the bitrate encodings at 128kbps and lower where you can begin to hear the compression. At least I do.