Hey, I need one more, so don't go taking mine.

:)

90-400 kbps for me.

I usually listen to music with the volume so high I tend to not notice any changes.

Ignoring for a moment how bad that is for your ears, I find that differences in quality (of equipment at least, haven't done extended testing of this with source files) is much more evident at moderately loud volumes.

I doubt I can even do that, the how to order section doesn't give much information on the pricing at all. It asks for a reservation and payment. :doh:

http://www.meier-audio.homepage.t-online.de/index.htm

The Corda Aria costs
€375,- / $470,- outside EC
€425,- / $530,- inside EC
In other words, way too expensive for a a guy like me, so don't worry about me taking one. :p

You can check for the lastest updates in their prices for their amplifiers here:
http://www.meier-audio.homepage.t-online.de/index.htm

as long as a song doesn't have any static in it I honestly can't tell the difference . In all honestly I don't even fully understand the whole bitrate thing.

Bitrate is the amount of memory that system takes to "copy" the sound wave. If we talk of 320 kbps, system will take 320 kilobits per second to take points wich represents the sound wave. 'Cos of this, audio files with 320 Kbps will have a more accurate sound wave than 128 kbps, theorically. Other wthing is if we talk about if human ear can difference between these sound qualities.


Correct me if I'm wrong.

250-320 MP3s or FLAC. Anything less is OUT OF THE QUESTION

I don't think it's that hard to tell the difference from a 128kbps and a 256kbps, although I heard we normally can't hear the difference between 256kbps and lossless/cd.

It varies person to person. I think alot of music is already compressed dynamically (the other kind) so much, it already sounds bit-i-fied. But depending on the source, and your encoder, you can get stuff that sounds good at VBR 112-224 or ABR 160. Maybe not transparent, but not horribly bad to the ear (on average).

Not only does it vary from person to person, it also depends a lot on the equipment that you use to play your music. No one is going to be able to tell the difference between a 128 MP3 and lossless out of an iPod with stock earbuds. If you don't have top of the line equipment, or at least very good equipment, it is very likely that most of the precieved differences you hear between 128 MP3s and lossless are imagined (ABX testing can be a very humbeling experience :(). That being said, I prefer my music lossless anyways :D

I know I prefer VBR on my MP3-player at least :)
Too bad it doesn't play FLAC. I could rip WAV's, but they take as much space as an Xbox.

192kbps or better is good for me. I can handle 128kbps, but only for a while...

I honestly can't tell the difference, but that may be because I do not have the pricey and nessessary equipment that is needed to hear the difference. If I did have such equipment though, I would probably be an audiophile, because I'm somewhat obssessive like that.

Human ear can't difference between 128 kbps and higher bitrates. So don't be foolish, you just could hear the song louder, but not with a richer sound (we talk always about tracks on 44010 Hz and stereo sound).

Umm.

Yes, it can.

wut~
there is an obvious lack of richness and blooming in 128kbps, something I can certainly tell the difference from side by side with a 256kbps+/VBR.

Humans can't hear the difference between a 128kbps mp3 file and a higher bitrate file? I'm afraid you are mistakened Takeru.
Maybe I should help elaborate more on the why.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...bitspersec.gif

To put it simply, the more complex the audio/waveform is the more resolution you'll need in each frame in a mp3 to retain the overall sound quality. Kinda like a movie frame being shown in 640x480 pixels as compared to a higher resolution movie frame like 1024x768 pixels. Of course you'll see the difference, the same would go for audio resolution in a mp3 file.

Sampling rates are a different story but is still one of the major factors in the filesize. Sampling rates set the frequency range at which the file will encode at. If the mp3 file had a sampling rate of 96kHz it will be able to capture more sounds (ie stuff outside of your hearing threshold) for you but at the cost of larger frames per second. Not that you're not increasing the resolution rather you're adding more details at that resolution... did that make sense? Umm its like adding more colors to each frame in a movie, thereby requiring more space.
Keep in mind encoding a 44kHz music CD into a 96kHz mp3 file will not make it sound better! True, the file will be bigger but that's because you're stuffing redundant data in the same frame. At best music files can only sound as good as its source.

All I'm really saying is a average person listening to their favorite song in mp3 at 128kbps will hear some differences (if not alot) compared to a 192kbps+ mp3 file. If they don't they either don't care or have poor hearing to begin with :(.

Replace 'resolution' by bits. The problem is entropy : you need a certain amount of bits to represent a block of information. This is a result of information theory, which always applies if you want to represent information.
That's also the reason why you can't compress data (lossless) to arbitrary sizes.

Now take away the lossless component. That introduces an error vector measuring the error between the original data and the data reconstructed from the compressed data. If you lower the amount of bits below the minimum-value given by the entropy you get a non-zero error vector. And error obviously increases if you reduce the bit amount more and more.

But we're talking about bitrate here, not resolution. The effect of low bitrate in a movie keeping the resolution constant are pixel errors, like macro block artifacts, ringing, etc. - also sharpness reduces and the image looks blurrier then the original. But the blur is a specific effect of MPEG encoding, more specific: the cosinus transformation.

Uhm, not directly. Maximum frequency range is determined by the sampling rate, but the sampling rate alone only tells you how times per second the analogue signal was sampled. Obviously the digital data is more exact (compared to the analogue source signal) if sampling rate is increased.
Now you can take the next step and ask yourself what maximum frequency you can reconstruct from such a digital stream with sampling frequency X. And the Nyquist-Shannon theorem tells you that the frequency is X/2. So for reconstruction of a signal from 0 to 21kHz you need 2*21kHz sampling frequency.

The enlarged frequency range is a nice sideeffect but you also get more precise signal reconstruction in the lower frequency range. So it's not only a waste of bits but does have its purpose.


cu
liquid

No, I'm not an audiophile either, that would be too cumbersome, since I'd have to delete many of my existing albums. And I don't think you really need to be an audiophile, since all music 128 kbps or higher are all acceptable, except for those who have bad 128 quality.

That's minus 10 points from my exam ;_;

Well technically I'm at least half correct in saying higher audio resolution requires more bits.

It was a example. I know I was comparing apples to rocks but the theory was similar enough ;).

Hah, exactly my point. I'm not sure what the benefit is when a person sets a higher 'maximum' frequency than the source's maximum frequency.

I rip at the highest quality possible, end of story. Who honestly gives a shit about "I can tell the difference at ___ Kbps", or whether you can or can't, if you're an audiophile, YOU WILL RECORD AT THE HIGHEST QUALITY POSSIBLE because you know that even if you can't tell the difference in one file compared to another, the difference still exists, and that difference is unacceptable to you, whether it's noticable or not.

At least, that's the kind of audiophile I am. And honestly, it's pretty much a waste of space, all this 320 Kbps and variable bitrate crap, 160 is really a great bitrate (go ahead and say "I can hear differences all the way up to.... !" I don't care). But if you want to be sure in your heart that quality is maximized, go for the best quality.

Just reading the posts here could make someone acquire obsessive/compulsive behaviour.

I started out thinking 128kbps was a gift from God when I heard my very first MP3 ever, about three years ago (I think it was Liberi Fatali, good start :-D)

Then I switched over to 192kbps because I had some bad experience with poorly encoded 128kbps files. Then I started to feel the itch...

I did my own encoding from music cd's I checked out of my local library, I did so at 256kbps, because, hey, if I have the power to make it happen I'll go for a bit more quality. :-D

Then came along iTunes, it offered a new kind of MP3, MP4 :-D I was excited to find that 128kbps sounded incredibly good encoded in AAC.

But THEN came along the EXTREMELY CHEAP www.allofmp3.com that allowed me to buy my songs in whatever format imaginable! It was like music heaven to me :-D So now I buy my songs in 320kbps AAC m4a iPod format.

Even with high end equipment that would sound sweet :-)

I won't go further than this though, my iPod is 60gigs and after three years I've only collected 17 gigs of music. So the 320kbps isn't going to be that detrimental to my iPod's HD space. I'm happy knowing I have AAC in the highest possible quality and that I have some breathing room for future high end equipment purchases.

I'd defiantly say that I'm an audiophile. As of more recently I've been trying to obtain all the video game music in lossless quality as I can. Its been going well actually. My codec of choice is FLAC, mostly because it's easy to use and it has a nice decoder so that if I decide to encode in something like m4a I could easily do that.

I guess that I'm one of those people that have "golden ears" as it's called, I can actually tell the difference between audio encoded with 320cbr and lossless.

Well anyway it seems that I've resurrected an old thread; let the debate continue.

By the way I think this forum is awesome for its having lossless video game music so readily available. Thanks for that.

Wow, what a corpse!

At any rate, I sincerely doubt you could pass a double-blind test comparing 320kbps mp3s and FLAC files. Nobody's perception is that acute.

What kind of audio system do you have?