Hm, tried to structure the text by replacing commas with full stops and separating 2 thoughts with a paragraph. After a few sentences I realize, the thoughts are unstructured and a new one begins before the preceding thought has been finished - or at least before it has been completely...

Dude, I once posted a text like that and got a reply which asked me to give a little more structure to that "wall of text" . I forward that message to you. No offense, just make it a bit easier for everyone to read as you seem to have an interesting point.

I browsed the web yesterday, because a friend asked me about them. Looks like they suck, indeed. Below is the only review I found that reads like the authors knows a bit what he's writing about.   verdict: looks cool, sounds average, comfort sucks.  ...

Perhaps what you saw was a chinese fake of an ie80?

Ziggy Stardust. No Gold or special version. My pedestrian pressing from 1990 sounds great. And yes, has been mentioned, Fah'n, Fah'n, Fah'n, auf der Autobahn: Supercool! And of course excellent sound.

Didn't we just a few pages higher discucss, that many of us have trouble to distingiush anything better than 192 Kbits from lossless?  It is as if that discussion has evaporated - even in the same thread. Ahhhhhhh....

  Can't chime in to that. Our daughter recently dropped her iPhone 4s. There is no hard drive to break, that is true. But the rest, the large screen first, but also the power button and the whole case is destroyed, as if a truck had run over it. Wouldn't have made any difference, if also a hd...

  Not for me as streaming makes me depend on the current fashion, how music should sound for the majority of the customers. Network connection is also bad for the battery runtime. I still prefer to buy the best mastering I can find and then export to the format that my current player plays...

No, you cannot prove audibility. You can only make statistical tests. And that is the raison d'etre of gigabytes of discussion in this database.

  Well, equality is the point. If the waveforms are different, you start the subjective thing that will lead to nothing.  Then take lossless 320 and 4000. If that is not equal, you have to admit that someone may hear differences.     I took bishots test. Please read the thread.

  If you care to prove that 320 kbit mp3 is the same as 4000 kbit (lossless, mp3?), overplot both waveforms and show it. End of discussion. That the same waveform will drive speakers in an identical way should be easily acceptable. If you cannot plot, a correlation function that shows 100%...

  This is the freedom of the internet. It shows that there is more than one interest in audio: for some it is to tinker, for others it is to understand sound and sound reception, for some it is buying dreams and trying to find buddies to share them. All is fine! You also get answers on all...

Yes agreed, but that has been done now and we start to repeat ourselves. In fact, putting together other threads, this has been done numerous times.

Don't waste your time trying to teach someone who is completely resistant to learn.    We have to admit that sound science and digital compression is a complex and highly mathematical topic. It even has a subjective component and this can lead to these endless discussions. Everybody can...

Nothing there to take offline. Please go on everybody to report about the fair and your highlights.

Wrong? What a plain statement. You certainly did the right thing as an experienced visitor. Please note, that I was not answering one of YOUR posts and thus I am puzzled that you care to write that "YOU DID NOT" - even in capital letters. No one accused you of anything. I register your...

  Don't want to be a spoil-sport, but don't get fooled by the impressions from the fair. If you take your own music to a shop and listen to the stuff, it already sounds different.   It is important to always check, what music is played at the fair and through which systems. For my headphone...

I was there this morning. At 11 there was already a 50m queue in front of the ticket counter. Crazy how full it is. My main point was to listen to the Sennheiser Orpheus again. Eternal Arts had one last year to demonstrate how good their own amp sounds with a HD800 (failed to come close to the...

  Agreed, don't torture. It takes already a lot of effort to do it with 10. Since you have to build a sequence and not only pick right or wrong with every guess, this is already a good test. There are more than 3.5 million ways to build a sequence out of 10 items. If the result has a correct...

Thanks for the laurels, Bigshot.   Personally, I am a bit disappointed, because I was pretty sure about the best sounding piece, which turned out to be aac256, not aiff. But on the other hand, I am happy that I came close to nailing at least the lowest bitrate.  Lesson learned: aac256 is very...

  I took the challenge. Bigshot has send a different flac to me and I listened first through my Cowon i10, but then through my 17 inch Macbook (last gen) , because there it was easier to set markers and compare subsections. To listen, I used Sennheiser ie7. They are famous for rolled off...

my player doesn't play Apple stuff. Do you have flac?

If the lowest quality is 192 kBit mp3 it is close to hopeless to identify differences. No to speak about associating the correct bitrate to the pieces. But I'll listen to it when I am at home tonight.

Now many will be disappointed that you don't even need a high-end system to identify compression effects. Honestly, can you describe what to listen for? How does it sound with lossy compression? I never identified more that just a little flatness in the sound, or less nice decay. Is it that?

That is different. You are in Norway where it is dark all the time  . You have my full sympathy. Better than drinking for sure . Or - wait….