Compare WAV and MP3 | features and which is better

The devel­op­ment of dig­i­tal audio dis­tri­b­u­tion has led to the fact that sev­er­al dozen audio file for­mats are now on the mar­ket. Each devel­op­er tried to come up with their own cod­ing method and encryp­tion algo­rithms, and then make them pop­u­lar.

But now, in 2019, it has become clear that MP3 has won the bat­tle of music for­mats. And let the devel­op­ers no longer sup­port it — it’s okay. Any­way, music in files of this type can be played on any phone, play­er, com­put­er, radio, TV, and even some mod­els of smart watch­es.

How­ev­er, with the pur­chase of high-qual­i­ty audio equip­ment — for exam­ple, head­phones and a sound card for a total of one and a half salaries — the dis­ad­van­tages of MP3 begin to appear. It seems that the tech­nique is good, but still the music sounds some­how “flat” and dull. And all because MP3 cuts off pieces of the audio stream.

And then you want to choose a bet­ter for­mat. For exam­ple, a slight­ly less com­mon WAV, which will help the tech­nique to “open up”.

But is this WAV real­ly that good? Let’s com­pare two for­mats — WAV and MP3 — and choose the right one!

What is the difference between compressed and uncompressed music formats?

Because WAV is an exam­ple of an uncom­pressed music for­mat, and MP3 is a com­pressed one, then in order to under­stand the key dif­fer­ence between them, it is worth under­stand­ing what com­pressed and uncom­pressed music for­mats are. We won’t go deep into it, we’ll talk about sig­ma-delta mod­u­la­tion too, just “let’s go over the tops”.

Uncom­pressed music for­mats were among the first to appear. They involve sequen­tial record­ing of every sound cap­tured by a micro­phone in a stu­dio, every note, every attempt by a vocal­ist to hit all eight octaves in a sin­gle song. The end result is an incred­i­bly detailed file as each sound is spec­i­fied.

There are only a cou­ple of prob­lems. Due to the high detail of the audio file, it turns out to be huge. On aver­age, a three-minute song in a WAV con­tain­er “weighs” about 60 megabytes. As a result, a giga­byte flash dri­ve is good if at least one artist’s album fits. And in a time when a 1 GB hard dri­ve was an unat­tain­able lux­u­ry, squan­der­ing valu­able HDD space on songs was at least impru­dent.

Sec­ond prob­lem is that a pow­er­ful and fast proces­sor is need­ed to decode such music. That is, the chip has to con­stant­ly take a dig­i­tal sig­nal and turn it into an ana­log sig­nal that goes to the speak­ers. At the same time, there are a lot of dig­i­tal sig­nals — we remind you, every sound. So the per­for­mance of the chip must also be high.

Thus, the task of engi­neers and pro­gram­mers was to make sure that a fan of some Rob­bie Williams could keep his entire discog­ra­phy (14 albums, 3 col­lec­tions, count­less sin­gles, 8 DVDs) with­out hav­ing to buy a serv­er. This is how com­pressed for­mats appeared, of which MP3 is an exam­ple.

Com­pressed for­mats imply addi­tion­al transcod­ing of music. The audio stream is split into sep­a­rate frames, then they are glued togeth­er, detail is par­tial­ly lost (for exam­ple, two loud­ness peaks are glued into one), it is pos­si­ble — like in MP3 — some fre­quen­cy ranges are cut off … And as a result, the file is much small­er!

On aver­age, a three-minute song in an MP3 file with a high bitrate (320 kbps) “weighs” about 10 megabytes. That is, the vol­ume occu­pied by one song in WAV will fit a whole EP (mini-album) in MP3! And if you reduce the bitrate by cut­ting out even more parts-frames from the audio stream and sig­nif­i­cant­ly degrad­ing the qual­i­ty, then the entire discog­ra­phy of the long-suf­fer­ing Rob­bie Williams can be “crammed”.

On the oth­er hand, it can­not be said that the qual­i­ty loss is too sig­nif­i­cant for the lis­ten­er. MP3 320 kbps pro­vides enough qual­i­ty for lis­ten­ing to music, watch­ing movies, etc. Any “miss­ing details” are either ignored by the lis­ten­er or “thought out” to build a com­plete acoustic pic­ture.

In addi­tion, the qual­i­ty of play­back is also affect­ed by the qual­i­ty of the equip­ment. On com­put­ers with a weak inte­grat­ed sound card and Chi­nese speak­ers, MP3 64 kbps, MP3 320 kbps, WAV will sound equal­ly bad. But as soon as you get a mul­ti-chan­nel audio sys­tem, an ampli­fi­er, a dis­crete sound card with a 192 kHz DAC — and the sound in WAV flour­ish­es. But MP3 will seem too flat and low-detailed.

And now to the descrip­tion of for­mats.

WAV music format

The WAV music for­mat was devel­oped joint­ly by engi­neers from IBM and Microsoft. The goal was to cre­ate a uni­ver­sal con­tain­er for­mat that would store uncom­pressed music and be playable on mul­ti­ple devices.

Actu­al­ly, they suc­ceed­ed. WAV fell in love with both users (thanks large­ly to the native sup­port of the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem) and music stu­dios (min­i­mum loss, fast encod­ing and decod­ing).

True, WAV has not lost the main draw­back of uncom­pressed for­mats — the huge file size. But the sound qual­i­ty is the high­est. In fact, this is almost an ana­log for­mat in which the audio stream is record­ed in waves.

MP3 music format

The MP3 music for­mat was devel­oped by the Ger­man com­pa­ny Fraun­hofen IIS and was orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed for trans­fer­ring audio in video files. Even its name stands for Mov­ing Pic­ture Expert Group Lay­er 3, that is, “the third lay­er in mov­ing pic­tures.” But, as it turned out, the for­mat is per­fect for record­ing any sounds in gen­er­al and is eas­i­ly repro­duced with­out being pack­aged in an MPEG con­tain­er.

Since the task of the devel­op­ers was to reduce the bitrate (“size”) of the audio track, oth­er­wise it would weigh like a video track, they bold­ly mocked the audio stream. And, in addi­tion to com­pres­sion with divi­sion into frames and glu­ing of peaks, they also removed inaudi­ble fre­quen­cies. That is, when encod­ing, every­thing below 20 Hz and above 15 kHz is removed from the audio stream. In the­o­ry, a per­son does not hear this, so he should not suf­fer.

In prac­tice, it turns out that fre­quen­cies below 20 Hz make the bass deep­er, and above 15 kHz, the voice is more detailed. But it does not mat­ter if head­phones or speak­ers can­not repro­duce fre­quen­cies below 20 Hz and above 15 kHz. And bud­get audio equip­ment just doesn’t know how to do this.

But MP3 files “weigh” a lit­tle and pro­vide suf­fi­cient qual­i­ty for inde­pen­dent lis­ten­ing. And in the era of dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion, these two virtues have made MP3 very pop­u­lar.

Difference between MP3 and WAV

Actu­al­ly, the main dif­fer­ence between WAV and MP3 is that the for­mer is uncom­pressed and incred­i­bly detailed, while the lat­ter is com­pressed and not very detailed. But for the sake of music in the first for­mat, you will have to buy an exter­nal hard dri­ve, and in the sec­ond, a flash dri­ve is enough.

1. The WAV for­mat in 2019 is com­mon­ly used in the field of “pro­fes­sion­al audio”. It records musi­cians in stu­dios. It mix­es songs. Only noto­ri­ous audio­philes with excel­lent audio qual­i­ty lis­ten to music in it.

2. The MP3 for­mat is now ubiq­ui­tous. It is suit­able for lis­ten­ing at home, on the road (from a smart­phone or play­er), in a car through a radio. The CD will fit about 50 songs in high qual­i­ty or about 200 in low qual­i­ty.

3. The qual­i­ty, of course, is not sky-high, but suf­fi­cient. And “size” decides.

4. Speak­ing in num­bers, the WAV bitrate is 1140 kbps, the MP3 bitrate is a max­i­mum of 320 kbps.

Which format is better — WAV or MP3?

There is no sin­gle answer to this ques­tion. These for­mats are designed for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es. Com­par­i­son table below:

And when it comes to record­ing music, you should choose WAV. It is eas­i­er to work with him in the future, and the qual­i­ty is high­er.