Why Mp3's?

I was reading a couple of questions people had about why we still use Mp3's in an age where audio quality can be so high. A couple of reasons:

Mp3 players, iPods, Smartphones, etc. How are you listening to music from these devices? Big bulky headphones? Nope, you're most likely using ear buds. Unfortunately, ear buds suck at being accurate. Especially in the bass range. Even the high end ear buds aren't that great, sonically. I mean, by definition, they are so small they can fit in your ear. The speakers they use physically can't reproduce some of the frequencies true to the recordings.

Big quality also means big file size. The point of having mp3's is so you can have a lot of songs at your disposal on a relatively small device. A 3 minute pop song sitting on the hard drive at the studio it was recorded at, is probably 3 Gigs if it was recorded at 96/24. For you to have it on your iPod, it needs to be 3 Mbs. Gonna lose quality to do that!

The final reason, is people. People like things loud. So the producers or record companies ride the mastering engineer's ass to put on loads of compression and limiting on the song so when you hear it, it's "loud" and for a short time, you like it. This comes at a huge sacrifice of dynamic quality. If redbook specifications now allowed CD's the be released at 96/24 (instead of 44.1/16), you have a ton more headroom to make things louder, and thus, suckier.

Now, not all mp3 encoders are equal. There are some very good ones. I use WaveLab 6's, and export my mixes that need to be mp3s at the highest settings I can. That actually yields a surprisingly good result. But even those mp3's are about 3x the size of your standard mp3. If you're looking to make your own mp3 collection from CD's, I'd suggest finding a high quality encoder and use the best settings rather than buying them off iTunes.