Are you an audiophile?

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Wow, what a corpse!

Thanks.

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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.

Why not? I've been comparing them for awhile now. But for the most part, like I've said before, it's not just the CD quality accurateness of lossless but also its ease of use when encoding/decoding and changing to different formats.

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What kind of audio system do you have?

Just a nice pair of headphones. I can hear more accurately with these anyway.

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

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Why not? I've been comparing them for awhile now. But for the most part, like I've said before, it's not just the CD quality accurateness of lossless but also its ease of use when encoding/decoding and changing to different formats.

Pass a double-blind test with all variables (such as volume level) accounted for, and I'll believe you.

As for your system, what kind of headphones? Amplifier? Source? Cables? (If any, personally, I am not a believer in cables.)

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

Pass a double-blind test with all variables (such as volume level) accounted for, and I'll believe you.

OK I'll try this, where is it? Who knows, you might prove me wrong, I'll still prefer lossless though.

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As for your system, what kind of headphones? Amplifier? Source? Cables? (If any, personally, I am not a believer in cables.)

Nothing fancy just a 15$ pair of COBY headphones. Although I am using some really nice third party drivers for my SB Audigy Z/S 2 sound card, they've made everything sound better.

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You call that a nice pair of headphones? My nice pair of headphones cost $300! They are an incredibly high-quality product, with a very smooth, even frequency response, very little harmonic distortion, and a very high build quality to boot. I find it even more suspect that you could tell apart high-quality mp3s and lossless files on a pair of low-end phones like that.

If you're a serious audiophile, you should at least upgrade to a pair of Grado SR-60s. You will not regret it.

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

Ha! Well I'm still an audiophile, just a broke audiophile.

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

I suppose I am sort of an audiophile. I take speakers and earphones quite seriously and have all my music encoded with the minimum at least being 192. Haven't gone into FLAC yet mainly due to lack of space and download quotas lol.

Used to be content with 192s but recently have stepped up my game to only be satisfied with at least V0 rips.

Honestly I am able to tell the difference between the qualities, but not significantly enough to declare with absolute confidence.

How ya doing, buddy?

I'm partialy, Because I can't stand quality below 192, and even 192 I bitch, If I can choose, it's always 256 or 320, But I don't care to the point of making a holy quest for better quality, If only find in 128, so be it.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I think I might have put my opinion in this thread before a loooong time ago. But for me, it comes down to perceptive quality, and for that I'm very picky. At the same time, I want small file sizes. So for me, I want the best of both worlds.

I took a few days of really analyzing 320CBR, WAV, and various VBR MP3 settings to find the maximum that I could compress without hearing a difference. Used RazorLame and Lame 3.97b2 with its highly adaptive VBR to come up with these settings

-m j -h -V4 --vbr-new

I swear to my ears these encodes are virtually lossless. I've tested on many various sources from orchestral to rock to very dynamic acoustic/folk and I've never been able to hear the "cooking bacon" of low quality MP3s.

The great thing about the VBR is, I get a file size comparable to 160CBR with a quality FAR superior.

FELIPE NO

I guess I'll keep it resurrected with my answer..

Audiophile? Not really, by most standards. I'm not really a fan of having randoms blips and crackles in my music, but it's gotta be pretty damn intrusive to make me find another version, re-name it to my IPod convention, connect my IPod, delete the old file off of it, etc...hassles have to be worth it.
As long as I can discern the melody,harmony, etc.., it's easy to filter out any technical shortcomings in your head anyway.

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

I converted to one sometime around last summer. A Sibelius recording finally did me in.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

In the past i was not really an audiophile because i would always listen to 192kbps stuff most of the time. Now that i have gotten into VGM msuic all my rips and CD rips that i download or do have been lossless or 320kbps.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Can someone hear the difference between ogg and mp3 (320 kb/s)?

How ya doing, buddy?

At high quality levels, almost certainly not.

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

I'll cringe at the sound of anything below 160kbps MP3s. Anything above that, I seriously do not hear the difference. I only have a crappy Soundblaster hooked to a 100 bucks Logitech sound system though, but I'm more than happy with it.

I download a lot of lossless music but convert everything to Lame APX MP3s.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by KeyLogic

Ha! Well I'm still an audiophile, just a broke audiophile.

+1

if i want to continue this hobby, i must move into a better room with better acoustics...

i can never go back to listening with "multimedia / computer speakers".... they make my ears bleed

How ya doing, buddy?

Being an audiophile is too much of a hassle. But I think there's nothing wrong with being one. I think I'm halfway being and audiophile but nowhere really close to being one. I have crappy speakers, but I usually have VBRs and 192-320kbps mp3s. I'm thinking of purchasing one of those Altecs but I don't have enough money.

FELIPE NO

I think it's safe to say this guy is an audiophile.

The World's Greatest Music Collection - eBay (item 140206309501 end time Feb-21-08 06:00:00 PST)

Originally Posted by katchum

Can someone hear the difference between ogg and mp3 (320 kb/s)?

OGG's feature better compression, imo. OGG tends not to cut out frequencies unnecessarily which leads to a better conversion standard.

How ya doing, buddy?

I have a decent set of speakers, a decent pair of headphones, and though I can detect a very slight difference between, say, 192 and 256/320 kbps, I don't hear it unless I'm intentionally looking for it. It doesn't bother me, so the majority of my music collection is in 192. I don't have the disk space, nor do I plan on spending the money to have the space, for anything else anytime soon.

One thing that DOES bother me? Bose. Bose is so ridiculously overrated and overpriced. All-digital sound is like crap to a musician's ears. Give me all analog, or mixed digital-analog audio, but never ever subject me to pure digital sound. I hate it.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

What the fuck are you even talking about, Ayos?

Bose do suck, but its because their stuff is incredibly overpriced. "all digital sound" ... Please start making sense. Either that or shut the fuck up.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Well, despite the name... I'm actually not as bad as some. There are some that have a fixation with the proper room design for heightened acoustics, and 24k gold plated connectors, and so on. At that point, though, it's really become more about the waveform and equipment than the emotional impact music has, which is of far greater value to me. However, if I can manage, I do like to have everything in at least preset standard, but if I can't get it except in something less, I'll still take it for the music.

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

Originally Posted by ramoth

What the fuck are you even talking about, Ayos?

Bose do suck, but its because their stuff is incredibly overpriced. "all digital sound" ... Please start making sense. Either that or shut the fuck up.

Are you the only one on this planet who has never heard, or heard of, the difference between digital and analog audio? Okay, here.
Analog sound vs. digital sound
That, especially the brief sections about "analog warmth" will give you an idea. Sure, most music these days is stored in a digital format. That's fine, but there's still a distinct difference between playing it through separate types of audio systems. Bose, for instance, has all sorts of digital "enhancements" that drain the sound even more of the "analog warmth" for the sake of making it "cleaner" and louder, even out of small speakers. Bose's initial point of pride, when I first saw their commercials, was "all-digital sound" for crying out loud. Hell even playing music, whether mixed with live aspects or not, through an analog sound board presented a huge difference. The guy who built the thing from the ground up sat and talked with me for hours about the difference between analog and digital sound. Six professional musicians I was working with commented on it the moment we set it up and started running CDs through it. Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me there's no such thing? Don't be daft.

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

I don't get it, looks like you are in favor of analog stuff, however (taking the same article you posted), we can find this:

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Analog warmth

Some audio enthusiasts prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of CD, this despite the apparent technical advantages of the digital format. Founder and editor Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound journal says that "LPs are decisively more musical. CDs drain the soul from music. The emotional involvement disappears" [5]. Dub producer Adrian Sherwood has similar feelings about the analog cassette tape, which he prefers because of its warm sound [6].

Those who favour the digital format point to the results of blind tests, which demonstrate the high performance possible with digital recorders [7], [8]. The assertion is that the 'analog sound' is more a product of analog format inaccuracies than anything else. One early supporter of digital audio was the classical conductor Herbert von Karajan, who said that digital recording was "definitely superior to any other form of recording we know".

I'm certainly not an audiophile (I still have more cell brains than money) but I have spend the last months researching about this crap, and I came to one conclusion: everything is entirely subjective, specially if you have spend a ridiculous amount of money in your stuff. (Naturally, a lot of stuff is worthy, but man... it's nearly impossible to separate the crap from the truth.)

Anyways, I have read several sounds engineers/musicians talking about this subject and they usually come the same conclusion, here for example: The Audio Critic

Btw, Didn't want to sound "meanie", but it came out that way.... sorry.

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Oh, I totally agree that it's all very subjective. Not surprising, considering what we're talking about. I'm not even saying that analog is better than digital. I just LIKE IT better. I don't think digital is vastly inferior to analog in any way. I just love the sound of analog, the "emotion" and "warmth" of it. Ergo, I hate Bose, because they've done even more to eliminate that. In the strictest sense, digital is "better" especially to audiophiles, which is part of why I voted no. I'm definitely not an audiophile. I love high-quality, clean, clear audio, but I'll take an old LP of Ray Charles over an iTunes digital release of the same music any day.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

From a technical perspective, digital is far superior to analog, (if "analog" in this context is refers to vinyl records). The available dynamic range is greater, there is no hiss, no rumble, and no crackle. The medium does not degrade with use. The so-called "warmth" of vinyl records is a form of distortion. It may sound good, yes, but it isn't realistic.

As for the redbook audio format itself, there is nothing wrong with it. There is no reason to believe a properly recorded, mixed, and mastered CD will sound worse or somehow contain less musical information than a record. 44,100 samples per second at 16 bits per sample is more than enough. Enough to reproduce frequencies up to 22kHz with nearly 100db of dynamic range. CDs today are often mastered poorly, which leads many to the conclusion that the problem is with the format itself, which is untrue. Records often receive much more gentle treatment in post processing.

"All-digital" sound is nothing more than a selling point that companies that sell audio equipment use to convince people to purchase their products. It has no real meaning. What is "all-digital" anyway? Such a thing is impossible! Eventually, the sampled digital waveform will have to be sent to a DAC in order to be converted into an analog electrical signal, otherwise there would be no way to play it through speakers or headphones.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

From a technical perspective, digital is far superior to analog, (if "analog" in this context is refers to vinyl records). The available dynamic range is greater,

This strikes me as intuitively wrong, but even if it's not, 99% of digital masterings/recordings have the dynamic range so compressed that it's horribly wrong in practice anyway.

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It may sound good, yes, but it isn't realistic.

And the reason I spend so much on audio isn't for a 'realistic' reproduction, it's for one that sounds good. And I don't even use vinyl. Imagine that.

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There is no reason to believe a properly recorded, mixed, and mastered CD will sound worse or somehow contain less musical information than a record.

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44,100 samples per second at 16 bits per sample is more than enough.

"More than enough"? Look, it's simple math: A continuous (i.e. analog) scale has an infintely greater amount of precision than even the most precise discrete (i.e. digital) scale. Period. If you want to claim that you can't hear a difference, that's an argument you could make. But to claim that there is no difference in information, or, worse, that there's no reason to believe that there's more information, is absolutely wrong.

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Eventually, the sampled digital waveform will have to be sent to a DAC in order to be converted into an analog electrical signal, otherwise there would be no way to play it through speakers or headphones.

Actually, there are now 100% digital amplifiers that literally amp the digital signal without a DAC. See the Panasonic XR-57 for one example.

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