If you are trying to judge the "quality" of the original recording by thinking that a higher bitrate flac file means more quality in the original, that's bogus. If the original has a high noise floor (poor recording) a lot of bits go into exactly representing the noise, which doesn't compress...

How big? Depends on how long the song is. 320 kilobits is 40 kilobytes. Multiply that by the number of seconds, add a little for overhead and tags.

I've never touched one, but all the company hype about "adding back what compression takes out" suggests they are emphasizing whizzy special effects over real hi-fi.

VBR is variable bit rate. The encoder will use more or less bits depending on the nature of the music at that particular second, but generally target the rate you specified on average. This option gives the encoder the most flexibility to put bits where they are needed, so should give the best...

Quote: Originally Posted by ClieOS Consider you'll still throw away multiple 'replaceable' rechargeable batteries (which by far are the largest contaminant part in DAP) in the years, there is nothing really 'green' about those alternative you are seeking now. . NiCads are pretty...

Quote: Originally Posted by Tomikans I would think lossless is lossless and it doesn't matter what kind of codec you use in terms of SQ. It just depends on which device you're playing on which codec to use. There are differences. Some don't do random seeks well or recover if...

I find it makes the mouthpiece stick to my lips, and with the frostbite the sound really sucks.

Quote: Originally Posted by FallenAngel 2 things #1 : Stop listening to EE's, they're set in their ways and have likely NEVER bothered to question what they were taught. . That's why we never invent anything. Like sound recording (analog or digital), TV, PC's, DAPs, the...

No added hardware here, but one of the firmwares on the player:

Quote: Originally Posted by Hanafuda I guess I'm just stating the obvious. I'm probably also missing the obvious. For example, as someone who's over 40, I really can't understand why people want to put a music playback device together with a phone, but a lot of people want this, and it...

There used to be a good explanation with pictures of their dummy head microphone on the zbs.org site. That seems to be gone, but they still have some good binaural radio drama on their list.

Lead is still used inside most large IC's to connect the chip to its packaging (Ball Grid Array).

Quote: Originally Posted by Jolida302 Silver doesn't work for power cord. It only works for interconnect and speakers cables. Surely not cost effective, but doesn't work? Care to explain why you CAN'T make a power cord out of silver?

Most/all of the Sansas that use their own plug (e200, fuze, view). I haven't used any dock accessory, but I've read the level is done digitally, and retains a setting independent of the earphone setting.

Quote: Originally Posted by onurrus Can we use Sd card to make the storage bigger? If yes I will buy one too.I am really wondering how it is sounding.. No card slot on the clip. How is shipping from woot? Might end up more than the $13.99 w/free ship that buy.com had (got 2...

PRobably some of them actually believe. I'm waiting for a company to come out with 2 lines of cables, and you have to switch them when Mercury is in retrograde.

Quote: Originally Posted by royalcrown As a reply to the OP: A better question to ask would be: why not just rewire the entire house with fancy cable? Surely if 6 feet of 10k cable makes a difference, over 100 feet of even 100 dollar cable should make exponential differences by...

There's already a forum dedicated to non-logical discussion of cables and such, and it doesn't have "science" in the name.

Unless you are mostly interested in relative loudness, the big thing is level matching. 0.1 dB is the usual standard.

Quote: Originally Posted by powertoold In the end, I think the Audio Critic's main conclusion is that if it measures the same, then it should sound the same, which is why they keep measuring stuff like it's going out of style The matching handbag to that is figuring out if...

Quote: Originally Posted by chadbang 128kbs? Eeek. Do yourself a favor, downsize collection, upgrade sample rate. . AFAIK, mp3 doesn't support sample rates over 48 kHz, and I doubt there's any advantage to upsampling source material (CD) from 44 to 48 just so you can say the...

Quote: Originally Posted by TheMarchingMule . I don't know of any portable player that can take 96, only 44.1. Some, I have one, can do 48 kHz because that's used for digital tape.

I use FF with flashblocker on sites with a lot of flash. The image zoom plugin is nice too. I'm mostly using Chrome now. Some cool stuff like it has it's own task manager so you tell if 1 tab is being a real cpu/memory hog and kill it. One problem if you're loaded with tabs and want to "X"...

First day of winter here. We went out for a couple of hours.. did some rolls.

Quote: Originally Posted by dj_mocok Just for fun shots: By the way, Olympus was once very formidable in prosumer P&S (especially their C8080 Wide zoom - I am still excited by that one even now) market, but I am not sure which direction they are going now... They are sort of lost and...