people just want lossless for the sake of it, they probably listen to it through a set of $10 bargain bin speakers.
I have a pretty good setup (wharfedale diamond 9 series speakers) and to be honest theres no noticible difference between flac and 320kbps mp3. This is running through the optical line in my macbook too. To me, the size difference isnt worth it, lossless is about 6x the size of a 320kbps mp3 and i cant even tell the difference. Im not an audiophile but im damn fussy about quality
what about those with Flash based devices where storage is cheap. I dont care about desktop storage, ill filled 1.5TB so im hardly worried about that but portable storage aint so cheap
It completely depends on your speaker and amplifier set up. I know a lot of people who have nice equipment, but make mistakes with their set up, ruining sound quality. Having too much equipment too close can cause interference if not properly insulated, or having excess speaker wire can all affect sound quality, I am not insinuating that you did this, however it is something to consider.
@Pwned
Can you show any evidence of this? I have heard people on this website (sadly enough always apple fanboys) insinuate that AAC is much better than MP3, but can you link me to a reputable source (it is subjective, but I want a decent test at least). I am not saying you are wrong or calling you an Apple Fanboy, I am just interested where that comes from.
Check out roberto amorim's public listening tests. It's been a few years, but his tests pit the best LAME MP3 encoder versus AAC versus WMA and some others.
The executive summary is as follows : "There's a big tie at first place, with MPC only a little above AAC, WMA and Vorbis. Lame is at second place and Blade is far behind at third."
LAME performs well, but is outclassed by the modern AAC, WMA, Vorbis, and MPC codecs.
Cameron : You're absolutely right that storage on a flash device like a music player or a cell phone or an SD card even isn't as cheap as on a spinning platter hard disk.
The larger size of lossless music files also presents another serious challenge on mobile devices as well : power consumption.
Larger files means more time the device needs to spend reading the uncompressed file from the storage device and into RAM. Almost unintuitively, a compressed file that can be completely buffered into RAM and then decompressed using the CPU takes up fewer system resources. This is because the bottleneck in the system is typically slower storage, not the faster memory and CPU.
On a Desktop PC or a notebook computer, the efficiency advantage is negligible because of how much power the PC consumes swamps any gain... but on a mobile phone or a music player, where the entire device might only consume 30 to 40mA while playing back audio, extra NAND usage to read back a much larger uncompressed file might make a huge difference.
@LaughingMan: Actually if you look in the context of the whole power budget. the duty cycle increase for the additional read time is negligible (concurrent DMA scheduling) when compared to the efficiency of the decoder implementation on the DSPs or ARM processors. MP3 has been around for a while and Apple's tuned the heck out of their AAC decoders ... I don't know if they've tuned their lossless to the same extent so I would expect more power "loss" in the decoding. I haven't seen the Apple implementation (how could I!?) nor have I measured the current consumption waveform in different situations - but I've implemented low level DSP decoders for mobile platforms - the largest source of power drain on new codecs has always been inefficient early implementations ...
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people just want lossless for the sake of it, they probably listen to it through a set of $10 bargain bin speakers.
I have a pretty good setup (wharfedale diamond 9 series speakers) and to be honest theres no noticible difference between flac and 320kbps mp3. This is running through the optical line in my macbook too. To me, the size difference isnt worth it, lossless is about 6x the size of a 320kbps mp3 and i cant even tell the difference. Im not an audiophile but im damn fussy about quality
Right, but these are 256kbps...
256kbps ACC. Theres a big difference between mp3 vs AAC and WMA
... 256Kbps AAC, which is arguably better than 320Kbps MP3.
with hard drive prices at < 10cents/gigabyte, why not?
what about those with Flash based devices where storage is cheap. I dont care about desktop storage, ill filled 1.5TB so im hardly worried about that but portable storage aint so cheap
i mean to say storage isnt cheap. typo there. Wish there was an edit button!
"... 256Kbps AAC, which is arguably better than 320Kbps MP3."
Arguably, in the sense that an Apple apologist will argue it because they can't come up with a better rebuttal?
Use LAME and MP3s can sound really really good. This is irrelevant though, because you still don't get the convenience and flexibility of lossless.
@Cameron
It completely depends on your speaker and amplifier set up. I know a lot of people who have nice equipment, but make mistakes with their set up, ruining sound quality. Having too much equipment too close can cause interference if not properly insulated, or having excess speaker wire can all affect sound quality, I am not insinuating that you did this, however it is something to consider.
@Pwned
Can you show any evidence of this? I have heard people on this website (sadly enough always apple fanboys) insinuate that AAC is much better than MP3, but can you link me to a reputable source (it is subjective, but I want a decent test at least). I am not saying you are wrong or calling you an Apple Fanboy, I am just interested where that comes from.
PS I know that Apple did not create AAC
@Blind Boy Grunt
Check out roberto amorim's public listening tests. It's been a few years, but his tests pit the best LAME MP3 encoder versus AAC versus WMA and some others.
Here is the presentation :
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/presentation.html
Here are the results :
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html
The executive summary is as follows :
"There's a big tie at first place, with MPC only a little above AAC, WMA and Vorbis.
Lame is at second place and Blade is far behind at third."
LAME performs well, but is outclassed by the modern AAC, WMA, Vorbis, and MPC codecs.
Cameron : You're absolutely right that storage on a flash device like a music player or a cell phone or an SD card even isn't as cheap as on a spinning platter hard disk.
The larger size of lossless music files also presents another serious challenge on mobile devices as well : power consumption.
Larger files means more time the device needs to spend reading the uncompressed file from the storage device and into RAM. Almost unintuitively, a compressed file that can be completely buffered into RAM and then decompressed using the CPU takes up fewer system resources. This is because the bottleneck in the system is typically slower storage, not the faster memory and CPU.
On a Desktop PC or a notebook computer, the efficiency advantage is negligible because of how much power the PC consumes swamps any gain... but on a mobile phone or a music player, where the entire device might only consume 30 to 40mA while playing back audio, extra NAND usage to read back a much larger uncompressed file might make a huge difference.
@LaughingMan: Actually if you look in the context of the whole power budget. the duty cycle increase for the additional read time is negligible (concurrent DMA scheduling) when compared to the efficiency of the decoder implementation on the DSPs or ARM processors. MP3 has been around for a while and Apple's tuned the heck out of their AAC decoders ... I don't know if they've tuned their lossless to the same extent so I would expect more power "loss" in the decoding. I haven't seen the Apple implementation (how could I!?) nor have I measured the current consumption waveform in different situations - but I've implemented low level DSP decoders for mobile platforms - the largest source of power drain on new codecs has always been inefficient early implementations ...