@sumgoodman I used to think that when they were selling 128kb/s songs but now that they are selling 256kb/s it's very hard to tell the difference. Hell most people couldn't tell the difference between 128 and a CD, I'm very happy with 256 even though I still encode my CDs at 320kb/s VBR.
If you play someone a snippet of a song in mp3 and then immediately play the same bit back in flac, I'm pretty confident they would hear the difference. Even if they have no musical inclinations.
Perfectly understandable. I just think a true music enthusiast is better off storing their collection in a lossless format on a external drive. That's what I do.
It's not just about the bitrate and sound quality, tho.
Lossy formats introduce tiny gaps of silence on each track. That's mostly not a problem, especially if you're just listening to them on your PC. But if the music fades continuously from one track to another and you burn the tracks to a CD without proper care or you listen to them on a player that can't compensate for gaps you're in trouble. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback#Compression_scheme_artifacts
FLAC is 1:1 perfect copy and doesn't have any such problems.
A respectable sized album collection stored completely uncompressed will still fit on one of the disk based media players. The difference isn't that bit. You're still going to end up consuming loads more space with video than audio (of any sort).
I use AIFF and there's a less harsh sound compared to AACs and the bass can freely extend, without those frequencies being butchered by compression. I can't abide those who claim because they can't hear a difference, then there can't be one.
The whole line-up consists of the $60 Amps in-ears and $100 Tracks on-ear headphones, which both also come in slightly souped-up and pricier HD variations at $100 and $130, respectively.
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I almost feel bad for all these goons paying full price for a lossy compressed format. But not really.
@sumgoodman
And that's the thing..m4a is only negligibly different than .mp3, that it only begins to matter when you drop below 160 kbps.
@sumgoodman
I used to think that when they were selling 128kb/s songs but now that they are selling 256kb/s it's very hard to tell the difference. Hell most people couldn't tell the difference between 128 and a CD, I'm very happy with 256 even though I still encode my CDs at 320kb/s VBR.
If you play someone a snippet of a song in mp3 and then immediately play the same bit back in flac, I'm pretty confident they would hear the difference. Even if they have no musical inclinations.
@sumgoodman For those who don't have terabytes to store just music with, iTunes is just fine thankyouvermuch.
Perfectly understandable. I just think a true music enthusiast is better off storing their collection in a lossless format on a external drive. That's what I do.
@sumgoodman Your argument is flawed without specifying bitrates for the mp3
@kikkerland
It's not just about the bitrate and sound quality, tho.
Lossy formats introduce tiny gaps of silence on each track. That's mostly not a problem, especially if you're just listening to them on your PC.
But if the music fades continuously from one track to another and you burn the tracks to a CD without proper care or you listen to them on a player that can't compensate for gaps you're in trouble. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gapless_playback#Compression_scheme_artifacts
FLAC is 1:1 perfect copy and doesn't have any such problems.
@AckbarsFist
A respectable sized album collection stored completely uncompressed will still fit on one of the disk based media players. The difference isn't that bit. You're still going to end up consuming loads more space with video than audio (of any sort).
@sumgoodman
I use AIFF and there's a less harsh sound compared to AACs and the bass can freely extend, without those frequencies being butchered by compression. I can't abide those who claim because they can't hear a difference, then there can't be one.