Are you an audiophile?

I have been for quite a while. I fact the only person I truely trust to make perfect CD rips, is (surprise) myself. I think everyone else does something wrong to fudge up the rip. I only use mp3 because its so well supported. If I had a digital music player (with a large hard drive), I'd just rip everything to Monkey's Audio and never worry about having to hear mp3s anymore from my own rips.
Of course I'm too poor to get audio equipment good enough to hear the difference between -V 2 mp3s and lossless (best example of that: my headphones cost $12).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Arainach

Need. There's an interesting term. Do any of us NEED Headphones or Speakers or any sort? They're certainly not essential to my survival.

No, in fact if we all were all hardcore, we'd all use our PCs without a monitor.
I'd say just settle for what tests the limits of your soundcard and your ears. Anything that goes higher than that (for example if it can output sound above 22000Hz, beyond what any human can hear) is a waste of money.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

This poses an interesting question: what format do you use? I have heard that Ogg Vorbis can have the same quality as mp3s at bitrates 25-50% lower than the mp3.
I generally am more concerned about the original rip then what I do with the files afterwards. Getting a bad rip is worse than encoding lossless to 128kbps CBR for me, which is why I'm into things like offset correction and AccurateRip. I do still have many unperfect rips laying around, simply because I'm too lazy (and don't care enough about the albums) to care about ripping them perfectly.

Of course back in 2000, I was ignorant to good audio as hell. When I used Music Match and ripped to 96kbps CBR Xing mp3s, I thought that sounded great, of course that's when I also had my HDD crash on me (and didn't get it replaced for nearly a year).

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Terminus

I never quite got into Lossless music myself. Or that FLAC thing whatsoever.

I guess I'm a bit of an audiophile since I prefer anything better than 128. 320? Eh, will do.

Actually the big secret is real audiophiles use --preset extreme or -V 0 as of LAME 3.97, 320 CBR is for people who think it's the best, really all it does is fill up the mp3 with too many bits (like during silence, who needs 320kbps during that?).

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Mucknuggle

I thought that real audiophiles used FLAC for lossless music?

The probelm is most mp3 players don't play lossless formats. Unless you want to burn dozens of CDs to an old fashioned CD player, you'll have to use mp3 or some other lossless format to listen to your music on the go.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I would've ripped all my CDs (audio or not) to a lossless format, if my HDD was big enough. I'm ultra-anal about data integrity and almost always throw away files that are broken or corrupted.
With LAME 3.97 being the way it is, I don't any reason to ever encode any mp3s at 320kbps CBR. It would take some high end hardware to tell the difference between -V 2 and --preset insane anymore.
I still wonder why people use CBR as opposed to ABR/VBR now, CBR is a waste of quality and space and isn't even necesary for streaming anymore. They should change LAME's default encoding settings from CBR 128 to ABR 128 or -V 5, generally most Mp3s encoded using these settings sound better than CBR 128 and sometimes use a lower bitrate (especially true for Genesis VGM rips).

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Fjordor

I'm also an audiophile.
However, I can actually tell the difference between 160 and higher resolutions. This is mostly because of my personal training in listening to harmonics, though. If not for that, I am not sure if I could heard the difference.

It might also help that I listen to good music, where most instruments are actually heard, instead of staticy and distorted shit.

Anyways, I usually stick with a 320-ish or higher resolution if I can.

For anything 320 or higher, I'd just go with lossless, the extra space lossless would use would not be that much more than 320kbps mp3s (320kbps is only 1/4 the size of CD quality source material).

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by orion_mk3

I know that WAVs are technically lossless, so that's true. But I assumed that most of the "lossless" people were talking about was like FLAC or APE, in that it is lossless without being quite as large as WAVs.

My audio setup =
1 Mactontosh PowerBook with iTunes
1 iPod
1 Phillips 5-disc CD player
1 pair Sony purple earbuds

Tremble, ye mighty princes of speakery and headphonery! Thy master has arrived.

Yes PCM wav files are 'lossless' in quality, but lossless actually refers to the form of compression used (much like mp3s use lossy compression). A better term for wav, aiff and the like is uncompressed, like how PNGs are lossless and BMPs are uncompressed RGB pictures.
Of course even if lossless formats didn't compress at all, they'd still have a few advantages over wav files such as:
--Tag support (and Replaygain)
--Error detection/correction
--Streaming support (a few formats support this)
--More specific standards (WAV files can have Mp3, ADPCM, various speech codecs and even Sony's Atrac3 format contained in them, when most programs (outside of Windows at least) could only read standard PCM Waveforms)

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Arainach

Dojomaster, there are MUCH better choices for far less. Heck, at $90-100, look at the Sennheiser HD-280. Very, very flat, detailed, cans. Some people don't like them for music listening compared to other cans in the price range (although I find them very nice), but for mixing they're stunning. Once again I reccomend looking around http://www.head-fi.com

Oh, and the Koss KSC-35 and KSC-75 (as well as the dicontinued PortaPro) are strunning phones for the price. As others have said, they're not the most detailed, but they're very enjoyable to listen to.

The Koss phones took a while to adjust to. My Sony MDR-Q55SLs reached much better high notes, but they died recently.
Of course I'm once again able to tell the difference between lossless and 128kbps CBR (but not quite 192 or 256kbps, since they are cheap headphones).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by K_ Takahashi

I usually take whatever audio format 128k+ because anything below it sounds like shit.

Depends on the type of music. Ogg vorbis streams I've listened to at ~80kbps sound acceptable, almost as much as -V 5 mp3s, that's because newer lossy codecs such as AAC and Vorbis emphasize lower bitrates moreso than LAME development has so far. It seems rock lends itself well to higher bitrates more thn most other genres of music.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Kairyu

Please, at least tell me you listen to music on your laptop through earphones. Still, listening to music through a onboard soundcard (through a laptop no less) can't sound that good to any audiophile.
I only say this as my laptop's speakers sounds terrible compared to my desktop sound setup =/.

Haha, I regularly delete my entire collection off of my hdds (I format my music drives every now and then) and keep dvdr copies as backup. I'm crazy, I know.

But to permanently delete stuff from my collection.. I think I would shed a tear too .

The hell I would to, I've been hoarding mp3s since 2003. But I do plan to replace a much of my music as possible with a higher quality encode. Conicidentally my oldest VGM is actually burned to CD, which means it's easily replaceable (come to think of it, they are easy to find and download songs, maybe I should just replace them if the worst should happen).

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by GoldfishX

I recently got an Ipod and started ripping my CD's to 192 MP3. I did a test with 128 AAC files vs 192 and then 320 mp3 and they didn't sound any different to me (either through headphones or my PC). Now I just rip in 128 AAC for space purposes, since it doesn't sound any worse than larger files.

I figure if I ever need to archive "perfect" copies, I'll just buy the CD, like I usually do. Lossless files are too bulky to be worth the trouble (both in terms of downloading and storing).

I'm also pretty happy with a $50 GE speaker set-up and $20 Radioshack in-ear phones (which I use interchangably with the original Ipod earbuds). I'd probably invest in a more expensive pair of headphones if I could sample them to hear a noticable difference beforehand.

So I clicked on 'no'.

You'd say you'll just get the CD, let me spell it out for you:
Lossless audio: 350-550MB, or 8-13 CDs worth of perfect audio per 4.7GB 12cm DVD+-R

CD: 1 CDs worth of music per 12cm CD-R/ROM

DVD+-R is a great space saver, and if you keep it on an external hard drive, even better. I don't throw away my CDs, but it's always nice to have a perfect, tagged backup.
Regular CD

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?