Eclipse CD3403

2003-10-08 00:03:45

I recently bought this headunit and have some LAME abs encoded songs on a CD that play in the unit fine. But the problem is that the manual says it only supports 32-128kbps MP3. It also makes a point to say "does not support free form encoding." I assume this means VBR? If it does play, is it possible that either the unit is downsampling everything above 128 to 128, everything to 128, or actually playing it correctly? Its hard to tell just because my car is kind loud by itself. It also says supports mono, joint stereo, and stereo if this matters. I was very mislead by the "Fully supports MP3" in all caps on the label. I figured since Eclipse was a pretty well regarded brand that I would be ok. Also was hard to tell in the place I bought it because they only had them hooked up to one speaker, and no other place near here carries Eclipse. Anyways, my main concern is that my HQ audio is being raped down to 128kbps. Do head units do this?

/MLS
Audiophile Wannabe

Eclipse CD3403

Reply #1 – 2003-10-08 01:11:00

1. "Free form encoding" is not the same thing as VBR. It is an special mode where the bitrate can be higher than 320kbps. Support for this is almost non existant.

2. It is not possibel to "downsample" from one bitrate to another because bitrate has nothing to do with sampling. If your player is playing something that sounds like the real music, without clicks and strange "jumps" in it, it have decoded the frames correctly, and is though capable of playing all bitrates that the file contains.
If it is not capable of handling some bitrates it will not be able to decode those frames correctly, and this will lead to clicks or drop-outs etc...

Conclusion: If you can't here anything obviously wrong in the music, your player is probably ok.

Eclipse CD3403

Reply #2 – 2003-10-08 04:08:35

Excellent, thank you for replying.

/MLS