Can't Tell The Difference Between Lossy And Lossless

equip, they arent exactly high end either of those senns

It is both and something else. More revealing equipment and listening practice will help. But, even those with mega expensive kit and hours of listening rarely get 100% in any blind tests between the two formats. The something else is the type of music that you listen to. With compressed pop, engineered in mind of lossy formats and the loudness war where music is 'condensed' to make it sound louder (like adverts can appear louder on the TV). it is harder to differentiate.

Most of my listening is using a lossy format, streamed Ogg Vorbis at 320kbps. I am perfectly happy and really need to listen to be able, sometimes to differentiate between it and Apple Lossless.

Man no surprise there at all. But also, the songs you listen to are an important factor. I can tell the difference in some songs quite easily but can struggle a bit with some others. So its not exactly night and day, its more peace of mind and the best you can get philosophy. If you can rip lossless, why rip lossy, as simple as that.

It's a problem with the resolution of the human ear.

Lossy codecs like MP3 are designed to take information out that our ears won't miss. Read (and participate) here. People there who are probably more experienced than you are and with much better equipment are still having trouble differentiating a 128kbps and lossless. There are some who say they can, and probably can, but I have a hard time believing anyone can tell the difference between 320kbps and lossless without a very labored listening session and extensive experience in the fields of musicianship and/or production. If even then.

cos its a backup of the original source, its all there, its identical, you can rip a million times from it, store it in multiple places to back it up, and most of all, get peace of mind when listening to it that you are listening to the best digital version of that song.

i can't either.  which is why i rip all my music to 320kbps mp3.

lossless?  i have CDs for that. 

I rip in lossless so I can re-encode to lossy without an additional loss of quality. Lossy on my portables, lossless on my computer. Storage space isn't an issue on a PC anymore, not for music. I never have to rip a CD more than once, and ripping is much more time consuming than encoding.

It's about convenience more than sound quality, I think. If I wanted (I don't, but) I could box up all of my CDs and shove them in the basement, out of the way, but still have a bit-perfect replication of them all in a 3.5" rectangle stuck in my PC case, accessible in seconds.

point taken, head injury.

and when ipods hold a terrabyte, then you won't need two libraries. 

CDs, downloads, imports, that is sooooo old fashioned. Stream your music. It is the last ever format, there will be no more format changes anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheWuss 

point taken, head injury.

 

and when ipods hold a terrabyte, then you won't need two libraries. 

When your ears can't hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless, then you wont need two libraries. ;)

oh wait :D

Quote:

Originally Posted by Prog Rock Man 

CDs, downloads, imports, that is sooooo old fashioned. Stream your music. It is the last ever format, there will be no more format changes anymore.

I like owning my music, not borrowing it for 4-odd minutes.

I own access to the music. The internet has a whole new definition of ownership which is more to do with access and rights of use.