Quote:

nanaholic said:

Do us all a favor and slap the guy over the head who told you this.

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I have a feeling I've heard this stupidity here on Head-Fi before. Is this some sort of old "rumor" that people new to audio develop?

There is no relation between recording bit rate and playback bitrate!
For example, an album studio is recorded in world class studio with amazing gear, even back in the day, the analogue for recording was amazin!
Then after everything is mixed and mastered, the resulting downmix is printed on CD.
 
Then this CD is downgrade even to 128kps MP3 and will sound better than a home made mix with FLAC bitrate!
 
In audio all the chain is important and a single crappy link will be your uplifting limit.
 
Better to listen to MP3 from a pro world class studio, than a FLAC lossless file from a crappy home studio!

 
Quote:

telecaster said:

 
Better to listen to MP3 from a pro world class studio, than a FLAC lossless file from a crappy home studio!

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Can't be truer. I can't tell the difference between 320kps MP3 and FLAC with my HD800, but I can hear the noises and imperfections of cheap tracks recorded in a lackluster studio! I've heard many pieces of music that are 192kps on my HD800 that sound better than FLACs recorded in a bad studio!

Quote:

flight567 said:

the way it was explained to me, is that a lossy file will open the file, when it opens it decompresses, and in that decompress, there is a "loss" then it saves the file again after the loss.so each time you open thefile, you lose some of the quality, they may be the same "out the box" but overtime the lossy will degrade. from what i understand atleast.

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Troll harder please.

 
Quote:

nanaholic said:

Pro tip: the file doesn't get saved over, EVER, during playback.

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It does if you edit metadata while listening. 'Course, doing that has no effect on quality.
 
Tried running the test on my PC with onboard Realtek soundcard and Sennheiser HD 202 (yeah, not a good set-up at all). Can't hear the difference so after 5 tries with foobar ABX testing, I stopped.
 
I still rip to FLAC, though. While I may not be able to hear the difference, I do conversions to OGG, AAC and MP3 so it's better to have a lossless source to convert from. Hard drive space is cheap. Well not as cheap as before the flood in Thailand but they're still inexpensive enough given you can store ~3,000 albums losslessly on a 1TB drive (~$110).

 
Quote:

rui-no-onna said:

I still rip to FLAC, though. While I may not be able to hear the difference, I do conversions to OGG, AAC and MP3 so it's better to have a lossless source to convert from. Hard drive space is cheap. Well not as cheap as before the flood in Thailand but they're still inexpensive enough given you can store ~3,000 albums losslessly on a 1TB drive (~$110).

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Agree. Also, while there are music players around that have large storage (160 GB), I think lossless is viable. Once apple stops making the iPod Classic, we'll have to think of something else.

 
Quote:

flight567 said:

the way it was explained to me, is that a lossy file will open the file, when it opens it decompresses, and in that decompress, there is a "loss" then it saves the file again after the loss.so each time you open thefile, you lose some of the quality, they may be the same "out the box" but overtime the lossy will degrade. from what i understand atleast.

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C'mon guys, don't you all know about digital dust and Rotational velocidensity? Of couse the files degrade over time! 

 
Quote:

youngngray said:

Of couse the files degrade over time! 

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To be strictly technical, this can happen. A lot of times, it can go undetected. That's why RAID controllers periodically scrub arrays to check for errors. There's actually a lot of error correction going on in hard drives.

Actually more than the hard-drive I consider the possibility of this happening in the RAM, since that's where a digital file is buffered.
File systems maintain a CRC check for each file in order to check integrity at every write/cut/copy operation, so chances of this going undetected on a HDD are small.
RAMs can suffer from bit flipping. ECC RAMs that have error checking are available but cost more and are used mostly in servers/databases.
 
Coming back to point. Sometimes I feel the mainstream music is being made with the objective of being used as MP3/AAC files, since thats how its sold digitally. So everything is recorded in bits and pieces and then joined together. Its hard to tell how many takes have been fused together to create a song, and how much of it is autotuned.
IMO this defeats the purpose of lossless audio entirely. If a sound is created digitally, as opposed to digitizing live sound, it does not matter even if its compressed by MP3.

so is the size between flac and 320 still worth?
knowing that slightly little difference between them...

You can probably get the exact % online, but roughly from my own collection, per album:
-> Actual CD (~600-700MB)
-> lossless about 1/2 of that (~250-300MB) (all in the same ballpark (ALAC, FLAC etc.))
-> MP3 highest quality under 1/2 of that (~90-120MB) (CB 320 takes a bit more space than VBR 0)
 
Of course it varies based on the length of the album and the complexity of the music... I have some lossless compressed album that are still over 420MB for example.
 
Personally, if I use lossy compression at all, I prefer VBR 0 since it delivers the same quality as CB 320 but cuts out the filler so to speak. Which is not an exact definition, but the real-world benefit is for portable use: I can fit a larger selection of albums. And without wanting to go down another codec debate, if CB320 vs. lossless can be tough depending on the music, I think an honest ABX of CB320 vs. VBR0 for the same track would be close to impossible to discern in any genre, at least when encoded with the most up-to-date version of LAME. I have certainly tried my hardest on a pretty decent setup, and really couldn't for the life of me even with tracks I'm very familiar with, so it does the trick for me at least.

Quote:

youngngray said:

 
 
C'mon guys, don't you all know about digital dust and Rotational velocidensity? Of couse the files degrade over time! 

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Wait...is this real? even the term "velocidensity" seems like a BS unit of measure.

Quote:

Originally Posted by telecaster /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
Then this CD is downgrade even to 128kps MP3 and will sound better than a home made mix with FLAC bitrate!
In audio all the chain is important and a single crappy link will be your uplifting limit.
Better to listen to MP3 from a pro world class studio, than a FLAC lossless file from a crappy home studio!

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Unfortunately, at least for more popular music styles, mixes made in world class pro studios can easily sound worse than something that was created in a crappy home studio, but without trying to squeeze out the last dB of loudness at any cost in distortion.

Quote:

stv014 said:

 
Unfortunately, at least for more popular music styles, mixes made in world class pro studios can easily sound worse than something that was created in a crappy home studio, but without trying to squeeze out the last dB of loudness at any cost in distortion.

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Yes.
 
It's a shame really, and it gets on my nerves if I think about it. Such a waste of resources and music.

Quote:

flight567 said:

the way it was explained to me, is that a lossy file will open the file, when it opens it decompresses, and in that decompress, there is a "loss" then it saves the file again after the loss.so each time you open thefile, you lose some of the quality, they may be the same "out the box" but overtime the lossy will degrade. from what i understand atleast.

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You may be getting confused with image formats. I believe .JPG's behave like this if you keep editing, that's why other picture formats exists such as tiff.