Originally Posted by
djrupey I am a bit of an audiophile. I listen to vinyl via my Linn LP12 turntable and Cyrus 2 amplifier. The sound quality is awesome.
I also listen to music on my BB Storm. I listen a lot, but mainly in the car. My favourite tracks are ripped to PC from CD as lossless .wav files or in the case of vinyl recorded onto CD first then ripped. Then they end up on my Storm, as .wav files. They are played in the car either through the cheapo BB headphones, or more usually either plugged into the Denon amp that lies under the seat, or via a cassette adapter into the Denon head unit.
When plugged directly into the Denon amp, the music quality is very good indeed, and even the cassette interface works pretty well. As an audiophile I will not accept poor quality music reproduction and in my opinion the Storm works pretty
well.
Using .wav files obviously means that I can't store anything like as many songs on the microSD card as I could were they MP3s, but frankly, I think compressed MP3s are crap. The sound quality is noticeably inferior. It is OK if you are not listening to anything better on a regular basis, but the minute you play a lossless file back to back with even the best MP3 bitrate, the difference is obvious. Sure MP3s are great if you want thousands of songs on your media card but don't kid yourself that the sound quality is great. It might be acceptable, and it clearly is to millions of users, but the MP3 format is a triumph of mediocrity and quantity over optimum listening pleasure. Discussing the merits of BB and other media players stuffed with MP3s is like debating cassette players full of cheap D-quality tapes instead of chrome or metal, or turntables all with their styli covered in fluff.