Actually I’ve been around Hi-Fi and Audio forums for quite some years. People who say they can hear difference in power cables to their CD players, it’s all the same. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of ideas and feelings people have about audio.
actually i know these stories quite well. and i know i can’t trust my hearing (or rather my perception) if i want to judge soundquality unless i’m doing a blind test. which i did with mp3, musepack and ogg vorbis. Makes me think though, because that was pretty exactly a decade ago. i kept up with the lossy audio compression for some years then, but there came a time when diskspace didn’t matter anymore, so the codec of my choice became flac.
i’ve got to admit i don’t know if there has been serious improvement in highbitrate mp3 in the last say five years or so. anyway, at that time ogg vorbis and musepack did discourage me to take further tests, because i wasn’t able to distinguish them to the original file at only 200kbps and musepack at even lower bitrates.. i cant recall if the reference mp3-encoder was lame or fraunhofer, anyway the mp3s of certain problem samples were always pretty easy to spot. horrible pre-echo in castanets.wav. i should check that out again.. when i find the time.
And the reason I bring this up is that this isn’t about what I can’t hear, it’s about what even the best ears can’t hear, as has been the case test after test.
ok, who then has the best ears? how can you tell? only the person with better ears than then person with the best ears you could judge that. (i know mine are shitty, thanks to the real psy-experience :D)
The ripping-software alone can change the sound drastically.
i have not checked profoundly on that. but there seems to be a real technical evidence that some drives produce more errors than others. though i doubt that i could tell the difference.
I’m sure you’d pass a blindtest with little problem, and would put people who have been working with audio for years to shame, like in the link I posted. I’ve done several blindtests for fun, contrary to your surprising assumption that I don’t know what I’m talking about.
i can’t say passing blindtests is fun. i had to concentrate real hard to tell a difference in some cases and listening fatigue doesnt make it easier..
The whole FLAC debate is really about the idea that something intuitive (like FLAC being uncompressed) HAS to sound better than something compressed, barring the unbelievable amounts of much more significant variables that goes into improving your sound system / Head-fi setup.
yes, that seems to be the case here.
It’s a pointless divergence from the things that actually matter in audio.
yes.
Claiming that 320kbps MP3’s represent some sort of bottleneck is preposterous.
that’s your opinion.
My question remains.
.. and always will.
ps: sorry to have this ‘debate’ take place in this thread.. to any mod, please feel encouraged to move it somewhere else. this thread should be about music.
