[vorbis] mp3-wav-cd-audio "acoustically equivalent" to wav-cd-audio ?

[Yusuf Goolamabbas]

A friend of mine made the following comment in a discussion I had with
him that on a website we adminster we should offer

a) WAV or maybe shorten files
b) Ogg as a decent reference lossy encoded version

He's been trying to convince me that we should offer MP3 (in lieu of
WAV) and possibly Ogg.

The audio files are primarily vocals

I am not a physics guy but his statements don't intuitively feel right. 
Maybe he has a misunderstanding which can be clarified

Regards, Yusuf
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regarding WAV, we used to store the masters on the disk, but moved them
offline due to space concerns. If a user downloads the MP3 and creates a WAV
from it, that is going to be precisely equivalent on the audio CD in
quality. I have tested it myself in MATLAB using spectral and phase analysis
(I am a physics guy, after all).

recite WAV -> MP3 -> WAV -> CD Audio is *acoustically equivalent* to recite
WAV -> CD audio.

to confirm, Perform this experiment at home (I have done so)

1. recite to WAV. save as A.wav
2. encode A.mp3 from A.wav
3. create B.wav from A.mp3.
4. ask someone to burn A.wav and B.wav to an audio CD (double blind -
neither you, nor they, shoudl know which is which).
5. listen to the CD in a standard player. You will hear zero differrence in
sound quality.

I am NOT saying,  not to make WAV available. But I am pointing out that the
vast majority of repackagers only want to create CDs. And that they will not
be able to improve upon the sound quality , though it is quite possible they
may degrade it, during their own post-processing stages. We can safely
assume that most repackagers will choose to go the easy route, and we can
easily have a note saying "true WAV masters for many audio files are
available for more advanced processing. Please contact Webmaster etc etc".

as an aside - there are already several excellent freeware tools which allow
you to create playlists of MP3 files and burn them straight to audio CD,
doing the WAV interpolation for you directly. No such tools yet exist for
OGG of course, but they too will come in a year or so (the ones I have seen
for OGG are still quite unstable - if it doesnt come from vorbis.com, I dont
trust it).

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