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Kbps making a difference in music quality?

post #1 of 3
12/5/10 at 8:53pm
Thread Starter 

Hi. I have heard from some Headphone forums and reviews of headphones on Amazon that whatever range your Kbps is in will affect its quality. Like 180 Kbps or something like that is the magic number for music quality? Is this a myth or a secretive truth? 

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post #2 of 3
12/6/10 at 3:51am

Surely you are trolling. But in case you are not...

 

In lossy formats such as MP3 there is going to be some loss of sound quality. Basically the lower the bitrate the more information is lost meaning the file size is smaller and the sound is worse. There are lossless formats (FLAC for example) which do not compress the file to the degree that MP3 does and thus can be considered exact replica's of the source file where nothing is lost. The drawback is lossless has a much large file size than MP3. 

 

As for the "magic number" the best thing to do would be to trust your ears. If 128kbps sounds fine to you then good, you can save some space on your MP3 player. Some people claim that even 320kbps MP3 doesn't sound as good as lossless FLAC while others (such as myself) consider anything over 256kbps to be pretty much indistinguishable and 192kbps to be fine for portable usage. 

 

It is not a myth nor a secretive truth. It is common knowledge.

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post #3 of 3
12/6/10 at 7:33am
Quote:

Originally Posted by fraseyboy View Post
Some people claim that even 320kbps MP3 doesn't sound as good as lossless FLAC while others (such as myself) consider anything over 256kbps to be pretty much indistinguishable and 192kbps to be fine for portable usage. 


I wonder what this number is for high end listening? If you burn the same track at 256kbps and FLAC onto a CD and played it on a high-end source, could you hear the difference? Has anyone tried it? Of course, not that file size matters if you aren't storing it on a HD or an iPod (or whatever), but I'm just curious.

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