[LizardKing1]

I used to think that way, and the truth is I don't have statistical evidence to state it isn't true. But nowadays we can have more quality for less. The common low-fi recording nowadays (128Kb/s MP3) is much better than that of 30 years ago. I don't want that to become the norm either! That idea scares me - think of all the money we spend on good rigs wasted on crappy MP3! But I doubt very much that will happen. Music will always be easier to get in bad quality, that's just a fact: there might be 20 blogs offering download links for a 4Mb song file, but only 1 blog with a link to the FLAC file, simply because the FLAC file is huge. But not only will there always be purists out there wanting that FLAC and making it available to others, but also we need to understand that music will never be recorded in crappy sound files. Ever. No studio will ever use MP3 (or anything less than WAV for that matter), unless it's that one obscure cousing who sings hip hop in his parents' basement. So even though all you see are MP3s, the FLAC are still out there. Also consider that as communications worldwide improve, our internet bandwidth becomes larger and so we can share larger files in the same time it takes us today to share a smaller one, so maybe one day the norm will be 700Mb albums and not 40Mb.
 
As for Apple I don't have much of an opinion, but I don't think they're evil when it comes to music. Unlike Monster and Beats by Dre they don't say the iPod is the best music player ever, they actually focus more on being the most user-friendly and  portable. It's not the best, but it's definitely not the worst - look at the ammount of audiophile iDevices like portable amps and LODs we have just for iPod.
 
I'm sorry for the wall of text, I got carried away =)

 

[grokit]

Someday we won't even be able to have onsite storage of our own, it will all be "in the cloud" 

 

[XxATOLxX]

Good riddance, I've stopped caring about CDs for years now. They get scratched, lost, etc. Digital can be made bit perfect and can be easily backed up/copied and is just flat out easier to manage.
 
Personally, I can't even tell the difference between a MP3 VBR and a FLAC.

 

[H4WKES]

spotify premium 320 kbps sounds pretty decent 

 

[LizardKing1]

Quote:

Good riddance, I've stopped caring about CDs for years now. They get scratched, lost, etc. Digital can be made bit perfect and can be easily backed up/copied and is just flat out easier to manage.
 
Personally, I can't even tell the difference between a MP3 VBR and a FLAC.

Most people can't, they just won't admit it. Of course it also depends heavily on a) your gear, and b) the kind of music. In a House track you probably can't tell the difference unless it has very deep bass and very fast decay of beats. On a well-recorded acoustic guitar it might be very obvious. I have everything I can in FLAC and I justify it by telling myself one day I'll own a pair of STAX through which MP3 will sound awful, and that day I'll appreciate my effort (although I very much doubt I'll listen to half the stuff I listen to today).

 

[deadlylover]

Quote:

Most people can't, they just won't admit it. Of course it also depends heavily on a) your gear, and b) the kind of music. In a House track you probably can't tell the difference unless it has very deep bass and very fast decay of beats. On a well-recorded acoustic guitar it might be very obvious. I have everything I can in FLAC and I justify it by telling myself one day I'll own a pair of STAX through which MP3 will sound awful, and that day I'll appreciate my effort (although I very much doubt I'll listen to half the stuff I listen to today).

 
Most of my day to day listening library is in ~96kbps mp3, it does not sound awful through my Stax.

 
In my limited testing, I couldn't really find anything definitive in terms of the genre depicting whether or not I could ABX the tracks. But I don't have anything well-recorded so bleh.

 

[LizardKing1]

About the genre differences I just meant, from what I've heard, some genres are more obvious in quality upgrade than others. I doubt a Drum N' Bass track will upgrade much when going up on bitrate and even when you reach lossless (unless there's a very deep bass that the MP3 cuts out). In acoustic guitar like Alice In Chains' Unplugged album the strings become much clearer when going from MP3 to FLAC.
 
Please tell me your STAX pick up some difference or else I'm giving up on this hobby

 but in all seriousness that's what we need: someone with high-end gear to just say if there really is much of a difference or not. People seem to care more about how much they pay for something than how well it plays.

 

[Byakushiki]

Quote:

About the genre differences I just meant, from what I've heard, some genres are more obvious in quality upgrade than others. I doubt a Drum N' Bass track will upgrade much when going up on bitrate and even when you reach lossless (unless there's a very deep bass that the MP3 cuts out). In acoustic guitar like Alice In Chains' Unplugged album the strings become much clearer when going from MP3 to FLAC.
 
Please tell me your STAX pick up some difference or else I'm giving up on this hobby

 but in all seriousness that's what we need: someone with high-end gear to just say if there really is much of a difference or not. People seem to care more about how much they pay for something than how well it plays.

The biggest difference is probably cymbals. Even between flac and 320kbps mp3, I actually managed to find a slight difference. Not without a slightly absurd and very fatiguing EQ though. I imagine a sharper and brighter sounding can like the K701 can easily do this though, since what I used was more of a DJ can. Laser sharp highs, or so I hear.
 
Oh and I mean by slight I mean VERY slight. Blind test, almost no one can tell-unless run through a multi-K rig.

 

[deadlylover]

Quote:

About the genre differences I just meant, from what I've heard, some genres are more obvious in quality upgrade than others. I doubt a Drum N' Bass track will upgrade much when going up on bitrate and even when you reach lossless (unless there's a very deep bass that the MP3 cuts out). In acoustic guitar like Alice In Chains' Unplugged album the strings become much clearer when going from MP3 to FLAC.
 
Please tell me your STAX pick up some difference or else I'm giving up on this hobby

 but in all seriousness that's what we need: someone with high-end gear to just say if there really is much of a difference or not. People seem to care more about how much they pay for something than how well it plays.

Well, I can hear the differences with my Stax, sometimes, and on some tracks only. This is under ABX testing conditions of course.
 
Does the jump from lossy to lossless give me any more enjoyment? Not one bit.
 
Would I notice if somebody changed all my flacs to mp3? Nope, it's only under direct comparison that I can hear the differences, unless it's one of those killer tracks I guess.
 
I don't understand the shame that some people feel for not being able to ABX lossy and lossless, because, that's the whole point of lossy compression! I do think the differences are HUGELY overblown by the folks here, but I guess audiophiles are really picky or something eh?

Hell, it's difficult to even find any proper ABX comparisons around here.

 

[grokit]

It depends on how revealing your gear is, and by that I mean the whole signal chain. I am currently streaming the lossy version of the new Cowboy Junkie's new album from their website, and it was interesting enough from my PC speaker to make me fire up my WA22/HD800 rig and give it a real listen. I couldn't even get through the first song without experiencing actual pain. So then I switched to using my HD600 straight out of the same DAC and it is much more bearable. They typically have very good recording quality but tend to push the FR and SNR limits in their tracks.
 
At least they have a variety of downloadable formats to choose from when making a purchase, two lossy and two lossless plus CD and even vinyl so it's all good 

 

[pigmode]

I don't see CDs going away soon. It would make sense to scale down production, moving about 50%+ to online lossy files. The rest could follow the pattern of vinyl production, on an appropriately larger scale.

 

[J W]

I'm buying more CDs than ever.
 
And I use Apple products. 

 

[steyrshrek]

I remember the same thing when CD's came out and vinyl was on the way out. CDs were destroying music and vinyl was found to disappear. Well there is still some vinyl 30 years later and music survived. For the vast public mp3's are adequate. For those that require more there are many codecs which are adequate for the audiophile. What I see is another sales opportunity $.99 songs for the masses and $2.00 songs for audiophiles.

 

[cantsleep]

i thought led pencil was going to replace pencil
but led pencil is led pencil and pencil is pencil

 

[grokit]

Quote:

I'm buying more CDs than ever.
 
And I use Apple products. 

X2, I just bought four used like new CD's from Amazon for less than $25 including shipping, cheaper than downloading the compressed AAC/MP3 equivalent. I have lossless rips on my HDD and a zero-effort permanent archive if I want to keep them.