[acito616]

As the song goes, "whatever gets you through the night", if it's FLAC, MP3 etc.. "is alright".

 

[baka1969]

Wouldn't that make SACD and the new hi-rez music irrelevant? I think not. If there were truly no difference between 320 mp3 and anything of greater resolution shouldn't even be made. Then I suppose only mid-fi equpiment would be needed and no-one as would be able to distinguish mid-fi from high end.

I believe the better the entire system is, the better the ability to find the advantages of the better resolution music. There's too many anecdotal account that people prefer non compressed, lossless or hi-rez to say it's either placebo or they're outright wrong. I believe I can distinguish the differences and, to my ears, that's all that matters and supports my choice of equipment.

 

[Skarecrow77]

I'm with Eddie.
 
I rip to FLAC. I think just about every audiophile who uses the computer as source does. I don't think the number of people using 128kbps MP3s to feed $500 DACs and $1000 headphones is very high.
 
I have not been trying to argue this entire thread to use MP3 as your codec of choice for home listening. Not at all. The arguments for FLAC are too many, lead by ability to transcode in the future and relative inexpense of hard drive space (I just checked. I have a hair over 400 albums in FLAC, and it takes up about 150gb), and lack of need to ABX a few tracks again every time you get a large jump in equipment in order to determine if you need to re-rip in a higher quality setting.
 
That said, I've been argueing that lossy codecs today are not your father's oldsmobile, and they're getting an undeserved bad reuptation. Your experience with Mp3, Vorbis, AAC, etc in 2000, or even 2005, is not the experience you get with them today, especially if you use the most tuned settings. They really are completely transparent on most songs with decent enough bitrates. Yes the occasional artifact is apparent in a rare song here or there, but that is by far the exception, not the rule, and you need to A. be sensitive to looking for such things, and B. be actively looking for it, in order to find it. These codecs are specifically designed so that their artifacts are the least aural "jarring" as possible. Personally, I find far more "defects" in songs are there in the original recording than were added by mp3/vorbis/aac/etc. I hear some weird pop, hiss, smearing, weird background sound, etc, and I go to check the original and yep it's there too.
 
I've also been arguing that to argue that you certainly "can hear the difference" without a double blind test (aka "ABX") using encodings that you yourself have created to best represent the codec in question, is unfair to the codec at best, and disingenuous at worst. If you can pass an ABX test at greater than 99% accuracy on a half dozen different music tracks using something like -v2 LAME mp3 or -q 6 Vorbis (very standard ~192kbs VBR settings), then congratulations. You have hearing better than 99.9% of the population (or, are perhaps more sensitive to lossy encoding artifacts than 99.9% of the population). But be fair. What are the chances you're really truly in that 0.1%, and haven't just convinced yourself you are? That's like assuming that you're a lottery winner without buying a ticket. That's why those of us "in the mp3 camp" as egg keeps calling us think that the extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I say I can juggle, you'd probably believe me. It's not an uncommon talent. If I say I can juggle 3 chainsaws, a flaming torch, a red hot poker, 2 ABBA CDs, and a live chicken all simultaneously, well you'll probably want to see proof. Right?
 
If you don't feel like setting up an ABX test and doing it properly (It's stressful. It can really make you hate your music too), in order to provide results to skeptical forum dwellers like myself, I can certainly understand. But you've got to realize that just about everybody in here who has sat down to do ABX testing has been humbled by the results that show that what we though we could hear (just like you), we couldn't. Thus, in the face of actual evidence that we couldn't do what we thought we could, we're pretty justified in assuming that you're in the same boat as us and no more special than we are until shown evidence otherwise.
 
Basically, I'm going to assume you can't juggle those chainsaws and live chickens either until you show us that you can.

 

[eggontoast]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skarecrow77 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
You have hearing better than 99.9% of the population (or, are perhaps more sensitive to lossy encoding artifacts than 99.9% of the population). But be fair. What are the chances you're really truly in that 0.1%, and haven't just convinced yourself you are?
 

 
Where have you got this figure from because at least half the people who have posted in this thread say they can hear the difference.
 

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

[size=x-small]This demonstrates the distinction I am trying to make between the very real fact that was can train our selves to listen better and the completely evidence-free idea many "audiophiles" seem embrace that we can actually, by sheer will, improve our ears physical ability to detect vibrations other mere mortals ears cannot. Despite using the term training our ears we are actually training our minds to pay close attention to the same sense data our ears always provided. You might like the idea that you have superior senses to the average person but you really do not. Sorry.[/size]
 

Actually I agree 100% with this, and it's what I was saying, even if not very well.  Human hearing is not just the instrument, it's the post-processing, too.  You cannot change the instrument, but you CAN learn to interpret things that your ears might have technically picked up before but that your brain did not process.
 
And my point is, if you teach your BRAIN to pick up on coding artifacts, they become easier to discern.  Of course this has nothing to do with physical changes to your ears, and nothing I, for one, said should have been interpreted that way.

 

[Skarecrow77]

 
Quote:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skarecrow77 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
 
You have hearing better than 99.9% of the population (or, are perhaps more sensitive to lossy encoding artifacts than 99.9% of the population). But be fair. What are the chances you're really truly in that 0.1%, and haven't just convinced yourself you are?
 

 
Where have you got this figure from because at least half the people who have posted in this thread say they can hear the difference.
 

 
85% to 90% of the world believe very strongly in a deity of some sort. They just believe different things about him/her/it. They can't all be right. Some people are wrong. Belief doesn't equal truth. Never has. "Truth by consensus" only exists on Wikipedia, and even then it's usually flagged asking for references.
 
as for my 99.9% comment, perhaps it's a bit high, but if you've spent any time at hydrogenaudio.com looking at the organized tests and the ad-hoc individual test results that people post, you'll see that actual testing shows that it's quite rare to be able to ABX above 192kbps mp3 on actual music (as opposed to known problem samples). They won't even run listening tests above about 160kbps anymore because finding enough people who can reliably do in order to provide scientifically usable results is damn near impossible
 

 
Quote:

Quote:

/img/forum/go_quote.gif


[size=x-small]This demonstrates the distinction I am trying to make between the very real fact that was can train our selves to listen better and the completely evidence-free idea many "audiophiles" seem embrace that we can actually, by sheer will, improve our ears physical ability to detect vibrations other mere mortals ears cannot. Despite using the term training our ears we are actually training our minds to pay close attention to the same sense data our ears always provided. You might like the idea that you have superior senses to the average person but you really do not. Sorry.[/size]
 

Actually I agree 100% with this, and it's what I was saying, even if not very well.  Human hearing is not just the instrument, it's the post-processing, too.  You cannot change the instrument, but you CAN learn to interpret things that your ears might have technically picked up before but that your brain did not process.
 
And my point is, if you teach your BRAIN to pick up on coding artifacts, they become easier to discern.  Of course this has nothing to do with physical changes to your ears, and nothing I, for one, said should have been interpreted that way.

 
I'd like to point out here that teaching yourself to recognize and look for encoding artifacts is a bad idea if you ever want to enjoy music again. It's like teaching yourself to look for bad grammar, it'll make you hate using the internet forever more.

 

[Pacha]

I don't think using a RAID 1 for backup has a lot of sense performance and security wise.
 
You loose half the total size available, you don't benefit from a bump of performance, and your drives are spinning all the time and could fail even not likely both in the same time. I choosed another solution which to my opinion makes much more sense :
 
 
Going RAID 0 and using another drive which you only plug sometimes for backup and then let in a antistatic bag in a closet will offer a better security.
The RAID 1 drives will have much more spinning time count than the closet drive, and in case of power supply failure which would fry your drives, you don't have any backup elsewhere. Otherwise with drives in RAID 0 + closet drive you have your data in your computer processed faster than with a single drive or RAID 1, and offline data in a secure environment renewed only when needed).
Plus with E-SATA or USB3 there's no issue with backup transfers being slow as you'll have the same transfer speed than with internal SATA drive.

 

[Skarecrow77]

Quote:

I don't think using a RAID 1 for backup has a lot of sense performance and security wise.
 
You loose half the total size available, you don't benefit from a bump of performance, and your drives are spinning all the time and could fail even not likely both in the same time. I choosed another solution which to my opinion makes much more sense :
 
 
Going RAID 0 and using another drive which you only plug sometimes for backup and then let in a antistatic bag in a closet will offer a better security.
The RAID 1 drives will have much more spinning time count, and in case of power supply failure which would fry your drives, you don't have any backup elsewhere. Otherwise with drives in RAID 0 + closet drive you have your data in your computer processed faster than with a single drive or RAID 1, and offline data in a secure environment renewed only when needed).
Plus with E-SATA or USB3 there's no issue with backup transfers being slow as you'll have the same transfer speed than with internal SATA drive.

 
RAID 1 does have the same performance benefit as RAID 0 in read mode. It reads half the stripes from both drive simultaniously. It does have the expected write penalty. Also any time you do a read or write in RAID 0, you're accessing both drives just like you would in RAID 1. From a reliability standpoint, RAID 1 makes plenty of sense compared to a single drive or RAID 0, it just doesn't make -as much- sense as a regular backup to an external drive, as you point out.

 

[EddieE]

 
 
Quote:

Wouldn't that make SACD and the new hi-rez music irrelevant?
 

 

 
Yep.
 

 If there were truly no difference between 320 mp3 and anything of greater resolution shouldn't even be made.

 
[size=x-small]24bit audio is for studio application, it doesn't have any practical use as a listening audio medium and is indistinguishable from 16bit audio. It's a con.[/size]
[size=x-small]Quote: [/size]

[size=x-small]Then I suppose only mid-fi equpiment would be needed and no-one as would be able to distinguish mid-fi from high end.[/size]

[size=x-small] [/size]
[size=x-small]No one is claiming that here, this is a discussion about the audible difference between different quality rips, not the quality of speakers, amps, dacs or anything else.[/size]
 
Quote:

I believe the better the entire system is, the better the ability to find the advantages of the better resolution music. There's too many anecdotal account that people prefer non compressed, lossless or hi-rez to say it's either placebo or they're outright wrong. I believe I can distinguish the differences and, to my ears, that's all that matters and supports my choice of equipment. 

 
[size=x-small]All anecdoal accounts are subjective, and cannot be taken as evidence of anything.[/size]

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Quote:

I don't think using a RAID 1 for backup has a lot of sense performance and security wise.
 
You loose half the total size available, you don't benefit from a bump of performance, and your drives are spinning all the time and could fail even not likely both in the same time. I choosed another solution which to my opinion makes much more sense :
 
 
Going RAID 0 and using another drive which you only plug sometimes for backup and then let in a antistatic bag in a closet will offer a better security.
The RAID 1 drives will have much more spinning time count than the closet drive, and in case of power supply failure which would fry your drives, you don't have any backup elsewhere. Otherwise with drives in RAID 0 + closet drive you have your data in your computer processed faster than with a single drive or RAID 1, and offline data in a secure environment renewed only when needed).
Plus with E-SATA or USB3 there's no issue with backup transfers being slow as you'll have the same transfer speed than with internal SATA drive.

RAID 0 is much more prone to error's than RAID 1.  That being said, raid controllers have come a long way since they were first introduced.  I've been running 2 wd black 640gb's in a shortstroked 250gb RAID 0 OS drive for the last 3 year, and I have never had a problem.  I will be leaving HD's behind sometime this year as SSD's reach the magical and enticing $1.50 per gb price point.  I couldn't justify the cost for SSD's until they reach that price point, and from news coming out of CES they will be priced around $1.60 a gb at release this year.  Just have to wait for a sale now.  
 
Two sandforce 2000 ssd's in RAID 0 should be quite nice.  

 

[AnotherN00b]

Quote:

If I say I can juggle, you'd probably believe me. It's not an uncommon talent. If I say I can juggle 3 chainsaws, a flaming torch, a red hot poker, 2 ABBA CDs, and a live chicken all simultaneously, well you'll probably want to see proof. Right?

I for one would like to see this juggling act!! I would also like to see at least one person who is certain they can hear the difference between FLAC and a high quality MP3 of the same file try the ABX test. I agree with Eddie and Skarecrow that there's no reason not to encode in a lossless format if you have a choice but it's presumptuous to claim you can hear the difference without a double-blind comparison. It's easy to convince yourself that you can hear the difference (as many have said, we have all believed that beforehand) but why not try the test? I don't think anyone is arguing that mp3 is a better choice for encoding given a choice, just whether or not anyone who claims they can hear the difference actually can pass an ABX test. 

 

[afinch1992]

I wish my brain would let me think that mp3 is just as good, but I guess I'm one of those people who wonders what they're missing if it isn't lossless

 

[Dibster]

Oh, I am too. But I still won't claim to hear a difference when I don't.

 

[afinch1992]

Quote:

Oh, I am too. But I still won't claim to hear a difference when I don't.

I wouldn't say I can pass a blind test, but on certain songs its very clear to me. Anything with deep bass is usually pretty easy for me. I think it has to do with the sub 20Hz freqs

 

[EddieE]

Do a blind test on those certain songs and prove it to yourself for sure.