As we age and sustain hearing damage, the high-end of this range drops, often reaching 16 kHz or lower.

However, our hearing becomes rather insensitive at the extremes of this range. The human hearing range is universally accepted as 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. This leads to MP3's main advantage, its brilliant file size efficiency. This decreases the size of audio files by cutting out part of the sound the human ear can't hear (particularly in the high-end frequencies and via masking). The format was popularized in the late 1990s, and the early 2000s as the advent of file sharing on the web meant that MP3's file size efficiency made this format perfect for online music distribution.Īs mentioned before, MP3 uses lossy compression, meaning that some data is irreversibly lost when an MP3 file is encoded. The Moving Picture Experts Group developed the audio file format – a consortium of standards organizations including the ISO. Standing for MPEG Audio Layer III, MP3 was developed in 1991 as the default audio format for the MPEG-1 video format. In this article, we'll explore each format's strengths and weaknesses and ultimately establish which, between. WAV is an uncompressed format containing all the original audio information, making it larger. MP3 is a lossy compressed format with “unnecessary” info removed, making it smaller. Which is a better digital audio format, MP3 or WAV? MP3 and WAV are the most popular formats of compressed and uncompressed digital audio files, respectively. Which is better for music? What about recordings? However, there's often much confusion surrounding the benefits and drawbacks of each audio format. Two of the most popular audio file types are WAV and MP3.

The battle of which digital audio format for both music and recordings continues.

Best wav to mp3