does the music format really matter?????? - Page 4

 

Don't sweat it dude, it ain't your ears.

 

 

See? Even a tin eared fool like me spot the difference with 128k, but only because I've got some decent gear helping me out. OK I've got some _very_ good gear helping me out =P. And to be honest, the differences are so small, that if you secretly changed all my music to 128K, I'd never know

 

FLAC vs V0 on the other hand.....makes me cry.

 

 

I found my Stax headphones the most unforgiving I've used so far, and I was pretty scared when a catholic high school girl was interested in me.

Are you guys getting the same three tracks over and over? I'm getting an instrumental flamenco, female vocal rock, and female vocal jazz.

Yes

there is no difference if the recording itself is good in the first place. you do not need golden ears to hear recording artifacts or compressing. with today codecs and software it will be near to impossible to tell an absolute difference. most of the difference comes from psychoacoustics and if you ''believe'' you will hear a difference then in fact you will hear a difference if you are expecting it.

also the difference can be caused by certain equipment that upscales or use any type of DSP in the chain. upscaling can give an impression of better sound but that's usually cause of ''coloration''.

vadfan, jag for alla ratt tills pa slutet ................ ARG

 

This is an interesting discussion, and one that interests me.  I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between ALAC (that's what my music files are in) and 320kbps C0 MP3 files using a portable device and headphones.  But when I listen on my home stereo, which I do often, I can tell the difference between the two, mostly due to the quality of my components (Focal speakers, Emotiva DAC etc.)  I use AppleTV2 to stream from my laptop to the stereo, and I can tell a difference.

 

My question though is for those that have both, how do you keep track of them?  If I were to compress my music collection for portability, wouldn't iTunes see both files and I'd have doubles of every song in my system?  Is there a way for iTunes to keep ALAC files for the home stereo and 320AAC files for the iPod?

Edited by ZMan2k2 - 7/9/11 at 9:10am

I had the same problem initially. What I do now is use JRiver Media Center for home listening and  keeping my FLAC library. It's much better than iTunes. For transferring 320kbps CBR files to my iPhone, I just keep a separate folder with only 320 mp3 and only allow iTunes to use that, and then sync normally.
 

 

Not that much. I try to avoid lossy digital files. Storage is so cheap that there's no good reason to rip lossy any longer.

As for all the rest, I love 'em. I run vinyl, Red Book, SACD, DVD-A, AM/FM/SW/HD radios. I want to try reel-to-reel, 78s and cylinders, too.

It's all good.

Im using the HD 800 on this test and I have to admit that its kinda hard to hear the difference. I have to concentrate pretty hard to hear the difference but that might because my setup is not that great. Im planning to upgrade my amp and DAC though :). Anyways, I think that theres only a slight difference between lossy and lossless but I still try to avoid lossy music as much as possible. lol.

 

 

i seriously don't like the hassle of lossless. mp3 is convenient. it works with everything. sorry people but i am content with 320kbps for as long as i can be.

 

Lol that's perfectly fine. Like I said I could never hear the difference between 320 kbps and lossless on my old setup no matter how hard I tried. It just didn't make sense to sacrifice the space. However, in the end there DOES exist a significant difference (for Metal especially) if you have the gear to reveal it, so just don't assume it doesn't exist at all.