Well, I play them on my (very nice) home entertainment system, and they sound marvelous to me, and I have a pretty good ear... but let's take a look.

There are six files... entitled "Intro," "Town," "Dungeon," "Catacombs," "Caves," and "Hell." Each, as I have them are, MP3 files. I converted them to this from the original WAV format packed into the game archives, though.

Each is 128 kbps. Standard MP3 format. The highest quality MP3 format is 320 kbps, but that's a lot less common in use.

128 kpbs isn't super-high, but "CD quality" isn't that much better to most people's ears. "Redbook" audio is 176 kBps (or 1,411,200 bits per second). That's quite a bit higher than the standard MP3, at 128,000 bytes per second. But it's hard to find people who can actually hear the difference. You need HIGH END SOUND REPRODUCTION hardware to be able to actually hear the difference, and few people have that.

I do, by the way, but the difference is so small to me that unless I'm listening to some intense, acoustical music, I can barely hear the difference, using my nice 7.1 home theater system, and can't tell it at all using my high-end Sennheiser headphones. There may be some people with better hearing than mine who can, if they work hard at it, tell the difference... but they're a lot rarer than "audiophile" culture would have you believe!

(The main example of being able to hear the difference, to me, by the way, is in my "audiophile" versus "mass market" versions of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here.")

Yes, you're right... the sound extracted from the game files isn't "audiophile quality." And if you're one of those 1 in a thousand people who can tell the difference... AND you have the high-end sound preproduction equipment to make it worthwhile to do so... I can see why you'd be bothered.

But... it's not nearly as much of an issue as people might be thinking. A good sound reproduction system can show the flaws of the lower-quality recording, sure, but not enough to ruin the effect. The sounds were DESIGNED to be played back at this lower resolution, and that's how they were intended to be heard. They sound terrific at 128 kbps.

That's my 2cents... take it for what it's worth.

Come on, higher bitrate lossy formats can be indistinguishable from lossless, but MP3 128 is pretty bad. 256, 320, or V0 are OK, but 128 is noticeable difference, unless you're using $3 headphones.

The problem with Diablo soundtrack is that even for the paid CD released way back, the quality is low, because the master was lossy. They probably just took the files from the game CD, if they had original recording master, it would be much better

so i tried to write something 4 times.

@CLBrown

i am not talking about mp3.

what i said was the following: the original files do not have cd quality.

i do not care if you love mp3 or not.

mp3 is a very old codec and you should not use it anyway, still people sell it because it's industry.

if you do not hear any difference, i do not care.

files on the CD are 22.050 hz only (maybe even less), and they are not lossy … the original game CD.

i do not use mp3 at all. it's bad for various reasons, mainly i use flac, ogg (vorbis) and opus.

so if they decide to add 44.100 hz audio files, i'll probably buy.

also mp3 is extremely old .

you could probably convert 10 times between various formats and still not hear and difference but what if you want the original file? you can not convert to the original again, but you can convert to some lossy format.

so what if you want to use some different codec, mabye not now but maybe later ??? because for example opus is much smaller than mp3 at the same quality.

now converting from mp3 to opus ??? no no no … you'll need to original file (lossless).

an there will new codes in the future. from my perspective mp3 is obsolete; still it's standard here and there but i never use it in no context.


also there are online-shops for lossless music ; the do not sell mp3.