With all the talk about MP3 sound quality, Cnet’s Crave blog turns to audio expert Steve Guttenberg, who offers up some audio-quality tips.

While a 192 kbps MP3 is not going to disappoint many listeners, as I’ve said before the growing use of a lossless format of one sort or another will resolve even the minor issues that remain. Guttenberg’s suggestions are all OK, but it’s suprising he didn’t articulate the most obvious one. If you’re still ripping your CDs to your computer, go inside the iTunes preferences and tweak your settings. If you’re importing as MP3s, make sure you’re bringing them in at 192 kbps.

Anyway, this was the most interesting suggestion:

 *Buy used CDs. Though CDs probably aren’t Neil Young-approved, it’s a vastly better quality experience than MP3s. Plus, it’s kind of a deal, Guttenberg says. “It’s cheaper than buying iTunes (songs) and certainly sounds a million times better.”

Leaving aside the audio-quality factors, this brings up an overlooked issue: Why buy catalog stuff on iTunes for $10 an album, when it might be available at your friendly neighborhood used-CD store for half that or less? You can rip it and pass it along to a friend.

Story idea: What’s the used-CD market like these days?

I took a look at Amazon, to see what the market was like. Why are people buying digital albums, when a hard copy in many cases is so much cheaper? Examples:

Dark Side of the Moon for $7. (With shipping, this is close to being a wash.)

Steel Wheels for 98 cents! *

Their Greatest Hits by the Eagles, $3.99

Pearl Jam’s Ten for $1.49. (Insanely, Amazon’s offering Ten as an $8.99 download as well!)

Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory for $2.23.

Kingdom Come by Jay-Z for 1.69! (Here too, Amazon’s selling a digital version for $9.29.)

Blonde on Blonde for $6.29. (It was a two-record set, back in the day, but a single CD now.)

While the digital era has compromised the music labels’ ability to resell their catalogs in new physical formats, there is the opportunity for at least one such iteration going forward.

It might seem that once you’ve bought a song digitally, that’s it—why would anyone buy it again? But most people don’t really understand what they are getting when they buy an MP3 or its rough equivalent, like the AAC format you get on iTunes.

At some point, the labels will make the judgment that they have reached a critical mass in unloading those catalogs once again as MP3s. Then, I am sure, will come a new PR campaign.

We’ll be told that MP3s are an inferior audio product!

But the labels will have a solution for us: It is called “Lossless.”

Boilerplate background:

• The genius of the MP3 was that it could compress a large audio file down to a fraction of its normal size.
• It did this partly by losing some—not a great deal, but some—audio quality.
• In very crude terms, an MP3 is about a tenth the size of a CD-quality audio file, coming out to about one MB per minute.
• It’s pretty easy to compress a song down to half its digital size and lose no audio quality; that’s what Apple’s “Apple Lossless” codec claims to do.
• The size of iPod storage, leaving aside computer hard drives, has grown exponentially
• A casual music fan can now store a very large collection of music on her 160-gig classic—nearly 1000 albums in lossless format.

I think the labels themselves aren’t ready to embark on this stategy yet, because the digital sales market isn’t close to tapping out. (The trick, remember, is not sales, but re-sales!) But some artists are already looking at the future, among them T-Bone Burnett and Neil Young, who has been talking about bringing his long-delayed Archive project out on Blu-ray discs, which are large enough to contain an enormous quantity of CD-quality sound.

Anyway, there’s an interesting post here detailing some of the treats in store. Blu-rays hold 80 gigs of data, it says:

But Hollywood has seen the light and is putting lossless audio formats on Blu-ray. The HD video contained on a Blu-ray Disc is still massively compressed (in a lossy kind of way). How massively? It would take about 21 Blu-ray discs to store an uncompressed two-hour film. The soundtracks are actually getting a pretty good deal, since their compression is at least lossless. DTS-HD Master Audio is a lossless format that’s a bit-for-bit match of the original audio track, and Dolby TrueHD is also a 100% lossless coding technology. Of course, these formats are still compressed — they save space compared to WAV files — but the compression doesn’t affect audio quality.

But a column on Wired News is moving to debunk lossless fetishism before it even gets started! Writes Eliot Van Buskirk about the above commentary:

According to the article, lossless codecs will “destroy” the MP3 format because hard drive and media capacities are on the rise, Blu-Ray movie soundtracks are encoded losslessly, iPod docks are showing up in high-end home stereos and Apple could flick a switch and have iTunes start encoding into Apple Lossless by default. Balderdash, I say!

He’s got five reasons, Nos. one and five have some validity, I think, but he’s still far too ahead of the game. You can’t start debunking lossless unil it gets a seat at the table, and it’s not there yet.

The NYT has an astonishingly misinformed story on Ipods and audio quality today, a matching bookend with Lee Gomes’ in the WSJ from a few weeks ago.

[O]ver the last decade the ranks of true audiophiles have been thinning, in large part because of the growing popularity of MP3 players and iPods. These nifty devices enable you to store thousands of hours of your favorite music and take it with you as you bop through your day. You can listen while shopping, while jogging or even, depending on your job, while at work. No one, not even devoted users of MP3s or iPods, claims that the sound reproduction on these technological marvels is equal to that of the best home CD systems. After all, they work by eliminating some of the digitized sound bits to open up storage space for multiple compressed files of music, rendering the sound a little thinner. Still, for consumers, easy access has trumped high fidelity.

The writer, classical music critic Anthony Tommasini, meanders on and on pondering the end of high fidelity. Like Gomes’ story, the point is true, as far as it goes. Mp3s do have inferior sound quality, in a relative sense; they are compressed sound files that make sonic compromises. But as the cost of computer storage continues to go down, the situation will slowly begin to right itself as more and more fans begin to listen to uncompressed files on their ever-bigger Ipods. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has scooped up a discounted half-terabyte drive and is busy digitizing CDs in the Apple lossless format.

(Another issue the audio bemoaners overlook is that, like most other electronic gear, the quality of even low-end audio equipment, particularly speakers, is much higher than all but the best stuff from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.)

As I’ve written before, the change will give the record companies one last resale opportunity, as they mount a campaign to inform iPod owners that the audio quality of their songs is inferior, and to give them the chance to rebuy their music, one last joyous time, in a lossless format.

To hear the public press tell the story, things always used to be better. Music was better, movies were better, TV was better.

This is almost never true, for all sorts of reasons. One is the selectivity of history. It’s easy to think that every movie made in the 1940s was superior because every ’40s flick you see is a stunner. That’s because you’re only watching 20 or 30 films from the era–the ones that people still want to see today.

The flipside of that is neglecting to mention the bad stuff. When CDs came in, paeans to the LP were heard everywhere (and still are). One thing you didn’t hear is that response on an LP plummeted as the needle headed toward the center of the disc; that’s why so many album sides begins with loud rockin’ tracks and end with softer ones. Isn’t that an unforgivable technical compromise?

Anyway, Lee Gomes in the WSJ ($) tells us how mp3s are ruining music:

If it seems like you are listening to music more but enjoying it less, some people in the recording industry say they know why. They blame that iPod that you can’t live without, along with all the compressed MP3 music files you’ve loaded on it.

Those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry — producers, engineers, mixers and the like — say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as MP3s on an iPod music player. That combination is thus becoming the “reference platform” used as a test of how a track should sound.

Wasn’t it ever thus? Didn’t kids walk around with crummy little cassette Walkmans? (In the mid-1970s, I am embarrassed to recall, I had a funky little portable 8-track-tape player I lugged around.) And what about AM car radios? Isn’t it pop lore that Motown producers carefully listened to their productions through tinny car speakers?

But now all of a sudden the iPod is ruining fine music:

All these engineers tend to be audiophiles, the sort who would fuss over a track to make it perfect. But they’re beginning to wonder if they should bother.

“I care about quality, even though the kid on the street might like what he hears on MySpace, which is even worse than an MP3,” said Stuart Brawley, an L.A. engineer who has recorded Cher and Michael Jackson. “We try to make the best quality sound we can, but we increasingly have to be realistic about how much time we can spend doing it.”

Howard Benson, who has done work for Santana and Chris Daughtry, says members of a studio recording crew will sometimes complain after a session, “I just spent all this time getting the greatest guitar and drums solo, and it ends up as an MP3.”

Sigh. Gomes is a smart guy, and notes a lot of caveats at the end of his column, but his thoughts are ill-timed. The fact is, as I noted below, the compressed mp3 sound will be an evanescent phenomenon. Already the new 160-gig iPod will hold 9,000 or 10,000 songs, or the entire CD collection of most music fans, in the Apple Lossless format, which promises full CD-quality sound.

The story ends with this indefensible quote from studio owner Skip Saylor, nostalgia-monger extraordinaire:

Still, engineers experience some nostalgia about earlier technologies. Says Mr. Saylor, “What we’ve lost with this new era of massive compression and low fidelity are the records that sounds so good that you get lost in them. “Dark Side of the Moon” — records like that just aren’t being made today.”