Not noticing a difference between 128 kbit/s Ogg and Flac - Page 2

Some music just doesn't sound good enough to do tests with. Music often sounds like it's compressed even with lossless.

It must have exceptionally clear and non compressed highs such as cymbals. Dire Straits, Donald Fagen or Steely Dan come to mind. Their stuff sounds incredible.

You mean the computer's built in headphone jack? It's highly likely that the Cowon is more resolving than your computer, which really isn't saying much. It could be all your gear, but the SR60 drivers should be decent enough.

for the record: i love vorbis!

now, i did a test run recently. maybe this helps you too.

 

grab a cd and rip a song you like and know. create several 5 to 10 second fragments with some dynamics and vocals or whatever you like to examine and save it as wave.

now to the strenuous part: do a little encoding and damn, NAME YOUR FILES WELL! this always takes me down.

personally, i only tried mp3 and ogg, didn't bother with ape, wavepack or flac, just because of file size.

 

i found, that everything below ogg -q 5 (~160 kb/s) is rubbish to my ears. sound is melting and nothing is really distinguishable. -q 6 (~192) serves me well and from -q 7 (~224) i can not hear (or imagine) any difference, so i go with "oggenc -q 7 *"

 

mp3 is something different. in the past, i encoded my library in 192 kb/s mp3s, which i would not do again. doesn't sound that wrong, but it feels kind of!. and i found a comparison between 192 kb/s mp3 and ogg (source):

 

 

 

kept me wondering, how much i missed.

but just do that test for yourself. maybe with your current gear, you don't feel the necessity for ultra-high bitrate files, than go with mid-range! whenever you change your hardware, listen to these test-samples again. you may want to upgrade. or maybe not, who cares? ;)

For a long time I didn't even know there was a difference. I couldnt tell, I had some FLAC files that I had by accident and mostly MP3s in 128-to 320. Perhaps it was my equipment though, I had generic speakers and an onboard soundcard. Right now I have a Asus essence STX, Onkyo HTS5300, and ATH-M50s and all FLACs, I actually havent gone back to test out my old 128s, maybe I should just to see the dramatic difference that's probably there.