a case for lossless
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr_Junesequa  Actually Its helping in ascertaining what encoded format a number of knowlegable audiophiles prefer. Encoding music to lossy format is a very hard decision for someone who is passionate about sound quality (like me). I know I dont want to lose any quality in my music...even if it is invisible to my ears, (my $400 headphones feel it dammit! :P)
I both value and am greatly thankful for all of your input regarding my query.
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I absolutely agree with you. I enjoy listening to music, and it sounds best and gives the best emotional reward when I can hear every bit of it. You know, that's why we buy high end equipment in the first place, and that's why early CD players tried oversampling, and that's why the best CD players today upsample and interpolate to SACD sampling rates (eg check out the latest EMM Labs CD player), and so on. I find it hard to listen to mp3 or any lossy encoding, even at 320kbps. I once made a direct comparison of music encoded at various lossy rates with the same music played from WAV files on a Kenwood HD30GA9. With simple classical piano music, and most definitely with vocals, I could hear the differences very clearly.
The difference in storage space needed for WAV files over 320 vbr encoded files is minimal - as I recall, varying between 10 and 50%. That means there's really very little impact on the number of files you are able to listen to during travel if you have a 60GB hard drive.
So, I recommend using lossless WAV files. And to be completely honest, I still prefer vintage pcdps to any DAP I've heard for SQ.
IMHO, of course.
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