MP3onChannel Review - Sound quality

I had a decent test setup for the actual sound. The Mazda3 GT doesn't exactly possess a Mercedes-Benz class Blaupunkt piece of kit, but for an unmodified student car I'm not going to complain. I also have the necessary CDs with which to compare back to back with the MP3onChannel. I started with Blue Rodeo's "Lost Together," from which the track "Rain Down On Me" is basically inscribed into my brain at this point. With a healthy combination of acoustic, electric, bass and steel guitar, a dose of organ, and of course Jim Cuddy's voice, it's a good folksy representation of may different instruments.

It was also recorded with a fair amount of stereo separation, which is what I wanted to find out if the MP3onChannel could represent accurately. It failed. I'm fairly certain it's not the encoding either, as playing the same file back in my home theatre through the iPAQ shows the separation of channels that's supposed to be there.

As for other elements of sound quality, the MP3onChannel is around equivalent to what you could pull off the normal FM radio. However, that means it was not quite able to keep up with the equivalent CD plugged into the deck. One reason for that is the ~128kb/s ABR (average bit rate) mp3 encoding I used for most of the tracks. With only 512MB of storage area on the USB key I bought, I wanted to stretch that into as much musical selection as possible without destroying sound quality completely.

Being able to use another codec would certainly have helped there, as mp3 is far from being "lossless." With a proliferation of choices from ogg vorbis to Windows Media Audio, it would have been easier using something else to combine space and quality. Compared to the CD version most of the tracks had a lack of depth, and they sounded "flat" thanks to the frequency cut-off inherent to .mp3's low pass filter. It's definitely not for someone looking for perfect audio quality. Of course, if you can't differentiate FM radio from CD in the first place, you're in business.

Next: Conclusion >>
 

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