Quote:
Originally Posted by russdog
Oh, all of that is perfectly fine and makes sense. The problem arises when some folks who choose to do what you have described then go on to state or imply that people who do something different are sure to be getting inferior sound quality. That is simply not the case, but people assert it nonetheless. That's what causes many arguments about this: people asserting things that are not true. Everything you said is true.
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I'm 17 and have perfect pitch and am a classically trained pianist. I can 100% of the time blind test 128k, 192k, 256k and tell them from lossless (10 tries each) and I got 8 out of 10 320k, the exceptions being a Linkin Park track and a DMB track. The Linkin Park can be chalked up to crappy recording anyway, but the DMB one I got wrong. As I said earlier, it was a true blind test with my sister choosing the tracks and I was facing away from the computer.
FWIW my sister could also tell the difference between them all but it took her multiple listens where as I could tell instantly (within 2 seconds of the song starting). She is 15 and has never listened to high end headphones for more than a few seconds. I just told her to focus on the high frequencies such as symbols and she could tell almost as well as I could.
That's why I use losless for everything. A terrabyte of hard drive space, thats a thousand gigabytes, is less than $400 nowadays. My ipod 60GB has plenty of room. I can deal with the battery tradeoff for better sound quality, which I have proven I can hear.
Another thing I notice: the people who claim it doesn't make a difference are usually running something like an Audigy 2 or sub top tier headphones. That's an entire other factor to consider. Sure, maybe you could hear it, perhaps the gear just isn't good enough to tell. With ibuds, theres no point in lossless, for example.