Quote:   Well:   1. Human hearing stops at 20khz at best - 10 or 15kHz are more likely as you age   2. 44.1khz is the standard sampling frequency for digital audio.   ..So if that is an fr graph, it is a pretty strange one - unless Creative is planning to sell soundcards to...

Quote:   If you keep on guessing at random until you get a set of answers right by sheer chance, and count only that last set, then it is impossible to fail! What you did was meaningless. If you wanted practice at training you ear before taking the test then you should have used a...

Quote:   Otoh, the ipod will have stupidly high impedance unless it is a Touch - or maybe a Nano?

Quote:   That's easy: send me the 80K and I'll send you two fiio compatible players!

Quote:   I think they vary according to some algorithm no one has ever decoded. But those she3580/3590 are $15 or less on ebay, and I preferred mind to my $150 Ety HF5s. Until my cat predated upon. Oh well...  ...

Quote:   Manufacturer history is pretty much irrelevant to the quality of these products: their core intellectual property usually comes on either one or two key chips that neither Sony nor Sansa will have designed or manufactured. The Sansa Clip is one of the best sounding players at any...

Quote:   Ok.. just about everything you wrote is wrong. Starting with the belief that no onboard or protable device will sound like your card - seriously, have you heard every motherboard audio system and DAP? And 44.1khz is the standard sampling frequency for digital audio, not a...

Quote:     It's amusing that all the people laughing at the OP know less than he does.   The problem is not the HD800's impedance level; there's a version of the HD25 with the same impedance and it drives perfectly well from a DAP. The HD800 does not because it is much less...

Quote:   I'm sure that I could recognize Aardbeg in a blind tasting against standard Scotches. But pick out one variety of it from another? I'm doubtful. Those metaphorical descriptions are very imprecise, and I suspect they can be made to fit every bottle Aardbeg has ever made. I think...

  Yes, that was my point. If only because what the rest of proper miking is beyond getting the levels right I have no idea. Probably a good idea not to have the cables immersed in water - or is that the wrong way around and the cables should be immersed? Whatever.

Quote:   It's really simple: the extra cost of recoding in 24 bits is peanuts is compared to the alternatives of more careful miking and more repeat performances. 24 bit recordings mean that you spend less technician time miking, and need fewer repeat performances, saving on musician...

Quote:   You seem to think having a source over each ear is all that is required for realistic duplication of real world input, as is the case for the eye - but this is incorrect. The ear is extremely good at telling whether a sound is in front or behind due to a range of special sensors...

Quote:   Out of any reasonably well-known band, the Pixies are probably the dynamic range champions with a 14db range on boutique pressings: http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/details.php?id=23683

Quote:   I think the "soooo" is supposed to indicate that you think you have a clever point; this was a mistake....   Studio files are inputs for mixing and EQing, which is why 24 bits are useful - not because as you seem to think that more bits equal more quality (they don't) but...

  Sometimes so far inside those limits that they couldn't see daylight: I am talking to *you*, Mr Smooth Jazz Rock Fusion...

Quote:   Kurt Kobain: "I was just trying to ripoff the Pixies".   Most of the music you named was actually not at all innovative let alone demolishingly so; they stayed waaaay within the parameters that had been set before 1970 by Velvet Underground et al. This was an "Elvis" period...

Quote:   Yes, but you have to wonder at their sanity... Checking the codecs page http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SoundCodecs there's all sorts of crazy stuff. A plug-in for playing midi is semi-sane - this means playing real midi using a software synth inside of rockbox rather than recordings...

Quote:   ..That's an interesting option; the last time I checked ALAC support on Rockbox it was flakey, but looking at the codecs page it seems to be mature now.

Quote: That would be a question for an Apple forum - it isn't really a question about sound science, although you may get lucky and get an answer here. But basically, iTunes will do everything it can to lock you in to the Apple eco-system. There will probaly always be something you can do...

Quote: There is WMA Lossless, but no one uses it - flac is much more common on Windows.   And any iThing that can download and run apps can play flac: http://www.macworld.com/article/1157310/flac_on_ios.html. On a Mac you can just use VLC.

For the OP: you might want to try a player with Meir Crossfeed - anything with Rockbox will do.   http://www.meier-audio.homepage.t-online.de/crossfeed.htm  

Quote:   ..This isn't convincing. Because there is no discussion of what this information might be or of the large difference between a 320 lame and 64 old-skool mp3. Even worse, there's no discussion of the fact that no one can tell (i.e. in a blind test rather than in their imagination)...

Quote:   See, my problem here is that I'm not sure that the hi-res one is less loudness compressed... Or have I missed something? Are some companies offering less loudness compressed versions as downloads???

  But the Clip is still going to sound worse than the $6000 dinosaur set-up if the dinosaur gets to play competently mastered vinyl that has been treated well, while the Clip is fed with a modern over-loud re-master. And this is what really irritates me: it wouldn't cost record companies a...

Quote:   Microscope Man has a collection of 5000 records. He does not mention this as a possibility in a 4 page article on the micro-detail of vinyl albums, so I think if it happens at all it must be very rare. He does mention the burr folding over and throwing off the needle, so I think...