[71 dB]

I never use bit rates of 160kbps.

G

Yeah, same here. 192 kbps is my lower limit. Its not the year 2000 anymore when you had to suffer badly encoded 128 kbps lossy crap because portable players had so little memory.

 

[hakunamakaka]

Yeah, same here. 192 kbps is my lower limit. Its not the year 2000 anymore when you had to suffer badly encoded 128 kbps lossy crap because portable players had so little memory.

Properly done 128kbps is fine, majority wouldn't be able to tell the difference either way. Record quality and mastering is far more important. I have plenty of vintage records ripped from Vinyl and hosted on Youtube which walks in circles around most of lossless music

 

[71 dB]

Properly done 128kbps is fine, majority wouldn't be able to tell the difference either way. Record quality and mastering is far more important. I have plenty of vintage records ripped from Vinyl and hosted on Youtube which walks in circles around most of lossless music

Vinyl rips are probably fine with 128 kbps, but in 2023 we don't HAVE TO minimaze music file size at every turn. I said MY minimum is 192 kbps. Big deal.

 

[hakunamakaka]

Vinyl rips are probably fine with 128 kbps, but in 2023 we don't HAVE TO minimaze music file size at every turn. I said MY minimum is 192 kbps. Big deal.

Well done digital is fine with 128kbps as well. No one forces you to minimize on 128kbps, I was pointing that lot's of streaming services runs on 128kbps (youtube, soundcloud, mix-cloud....) Folks that scream low fidelity where youtube hurts their ears miss on so much good music, that's all

 

[71 dB]

Well done digital is fine with 128kbps as well. No one forces you to minimize on 128kbps, I was pointing that lot's of streaming services runs on 128kbps (youtube, soundcloud, mix-cloud....) Folks that scream low fidelity where youtube hurts their ears miss on so much good music, that's all

I don't say you can't ENJOY music at low bitrates. Heck, if it is great music 96 kbps is enough! I explore new music to me all the time using whatever lower quality sources (Youtube, Spotify free etc.). I don't know pristine sound to tell if I like something or not.

The number one reason why I am missing out on great music is because it is difficult to discover the music I like the most. A lot of times I have discovered awesome music in unexpected places almost accidentally while tedious work going through say prog. rock bands in alphabetical order rarely means discovering much interesting music. I don't have a clue what genre my next big discovery will represent. Jazz? Techno? Classical Music? Pop? Funk? World Music? Who knows what it is and when I will do the discovery. That's because my music taste is not so much about particular genres, but how the musicians "operate" within the genres.

 

[bigshot]

Vinyl rips are probably fine with 128 kbps

Not if there is surface noise. I find that 78rpm recordings with lots of surface crackle are quite hard to encode. Data rate settings don't directly correspond with frequency response or distortion or wow/flutter. It's more affected by randomness.

And the problems with low data rate lossy is more a matter of artifacting than it is fidelity. Most of the time 128 AAC is fine. But there are certain difficult to encode kinds of tracks that might pop up once in a while and those will create small artifacts. That might not bother some people, but I prefer not to have artifacts in my music library because I don't maintain an easily accessed lossless master.