[eggontoast]

 
Quote:

I don't necessarily doubt (well, I do actually) that some people can hear a difference between 320 and lossless, but I just wonder what effect the supposed difference would have on listening pleasure. If you have to listen that hard, are you really listening to the music or the sound? I have many classical MP3 tracks in lower bitrates than 320 and am often amazed at how good they sound on my 650 phones---if the original recording was good. That's where the real differences lie, in the original recordings. Some are so good their virtues are hardly smudged by reduction to MP3; others so bad MP3 can hardly hurt them further.

Sorry you've lost me, you can't understand how a better quality recording would improve ones listening pleasure ?
 
There does seem to be one constant through out this thread, if it is encoded like this with this and not that blah de blah de blah. If you have FLAC files this becomes irrelevant so you will never have to re-rip your library when a new encoder version is released.

 

[Kibble Fat]

Let's see some screenshots!!! Until you post screenshots, you are all liars!
 
I will try to test myself either today or tomorrow.  I'm working on a reinstallation of Windows 7 at the moment...
 
...and thanks for the link Satellite!  
Quote:

Quote:

Is there an ABX or blind test add-on to foobar or are people just poking fun?   I think most of the time I can't tell the difference between 320 and FLAC, but for some songs and certainly live performances, I can.  Or at least I think I can.  If foobar doesn't have an add-on, could someone link me to something similar?

http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx

 

[Adda]

My headphone setup is ruthless when it comes to exposing poor production quality, some bands have so poor sound that it's almost offensive.
In spite of this I almost only listen to music on my DF's, and have been doing so for 2-3 years, they have shaped my taste in music and made me go for bands with exceptional production quality.
With all the bands I know to have good sound, it's easy to tell the difference between lossy and lossless files.
Lossy files have shimmery highs, lack a sense of space and background, vocals loose focus and sound "fake".

 

[Skylab]

I couldn't care less whether I could pass an ABX test, or whether I could hear a difference without one.  What's the point in listening to music with a huge amount of the information missing if you don't have to?  For truly portable use, I get it.  But in the era of $99 1 TB hard drives, I can't see an excuse for using MP3 other than for use with a small portable.  Ripping CD's in MP3 makes zero sense.  Rip in lossless, use that on the PC, and transcode to something lossy for portable use if needed.
 
I see people buy $200 LOD cables and then play MP3 files in that rig - that makes zero sense to me at all. 

 

[Vikingatheart]

I have no problem hearing the difference between 128 or 192kbps and Lossless, but 256 or 320kbps sounds identical. There is no doubt in my mind that I don't have golden ears, but what do I care? If I can be satisfied with 256 or 320, that just means more music on my iPhone.
 
I do have a fair amount of ALAC files on them, but thats for those "just in case" moments. \
 
Also, when you guys can hear the differences, in what frequency range is it most noticible to you?

 

[AnotherN00b]

I have 100,000 plus digital music files so it makes a BIG difference to me. 1TB drives are cheap, yes, but 5-10 TB storage arrays are not so cheap. So if I'm going to rip CDs to listen to on my PC and I can't tell the difference, why use up 4 times the space? Especially when I have the original source that I can listen to anyway if I need to? For people with more reasonable music libraries, it might make sense to rip to flac and transcode to mp3/ogg for portable use but for me, storage is a concern and I'm hoping that if I can't tell the difference now I'm not going to be able to tell the difference later (so no need to re-encode). Of course my fear is that someday better equipment will allow me to clearly discern the difference in source material which is why I want to see if anyone can actually produce ABX logs that prove they can tell the difference .  

 

[Pacha]

100 000 * 30MB (average FLAC file size) and that makes 3TB of storage.
 
2TB cost 100 bucks. Use 2 2TB drives and for 200 bucks you have enough FLAC ripped music on your drive to play for your entire life to listen to. Well ok, 100 000 files of 3 min only makes 208 days of non-stop playing music, that's a bit low LOL!

 

[Pacha]

Quote:

I couldn't care less whether I could pass an ABX test, or whether I could hear a difference without one.  What's the point in listening to music with a huge amount of the information missing if you don't have to?  For truly portable use, I get it.  But in the era of $99 1 TB hard drives, I can't see an excuse for using MP3 other than for use with a small portable.  Ripping CD's in MP3 makes zero sense.  Rip in lossless, use that on the PC, and transcode to something lossy for portable use if needed.
 
I see people buy $200 LOD cables and then play MP3 files in that rig - that makes zero sense to me at all. 

 QFT, same opinion.

 

[Kibble Fat]

Quote:

100 000 * 30MB (average FLAC file size) and that makes 3TB of storage.
 
2TB cost 100 bucks. Use 2 2TB drives and for 200 bucks you have enough FLAC ripped music on your drive to play for your entire life to listen to. Well ok, 100 000 files of 3 min only makes 208 days of non-stop playing music, that's a bit low LOL!

If it's classical or even jazz, those numbers go out the window

 

[disastermouse]

Quote:

I couldn't care less whether I could pass an ABX test, or whether I could hear a difference without one.  What's the point in listening to music with a huge amount of the information missing if you don't have to?  For truly portable use, I get it.  But in the era of $99 1 TB hard drives, I can't see an excuse for using MP3 other than for use with a small portable.  Ripping CD's in MP3 makes zero sense.  Rip in lossless, use that on the PC, and transcode to something lossy for portable use if needed.
 
I see people buy $200 LOD cables and then play MP3 files in that rig - that makes zero sense to me at all. 

This.
 
Although, being an iMac/iTunes/iPod/iPhone user, the inability to easily play FLAC on iTunes is frustrating.  I do have 'Play' which I plan to use with HD Tracks, as soon as I have a DAC that can do anything with them.
 
 

 

[Kibble Fat]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt7GyFW4hOI
 
BTW, for those of you with conversion frustration, the more cores your computer cpu has, the faster your library conversion will be 

  i7 works well for this, but it still takes 30 seconds or so per album

 

[Skylab]

I do get spoiled that way - I have a 2.8 GHz i7 with 8GB RAM - using dBPoweramp to do conversions, which will use all 4 cores, conversions fly.

 

[Satellite_6]

 
Quote:

I have no problem hearing the difference between 128 or 192kbps and Lossless, but 256 or 320kbps sounds identical. There is no doubt in my mind that I don't have golden ears, but what do I care? If I can be satisfied with 256 or 320, that just means more music on my iPhone.
 
I do have a fair amount of ALAC files on them, but thats for those "just in case" moments. \
 
Also, when you guys can hear the differences, in what frequency range is it most noticible to you?

For portable use I use lossy, but I don't think there is a place for lossless in HiFi. . . I think the most noticeable differences are in the highs and lows.
 
 
I might try to do an ABX later but don't hold your breath. ABXing isn't fun lol. . .
 
 
 

 

[Skarecrow77]

The ipod can play FLAC (and about 20 other formats) if you put rockbox firmware on it. I know most people don't feel like doing that. I did, and it's the only reason I own an ipod. it plays my vorbis files quite well.
 
I agree skylab, no reason not to store locally as FLAC, even if you have 100,000 files. If you are THAT into music (I must admit my personal collection is only about 250gb, which I thought was decent), and if you're on this site, I don't see buying a few 2tb drives to store your music as a big deal. Hell, I used to keep a RAID 1 array to keep the music safe, now I just back it up to a removeable HD every now and then.
 
FLAC renders all "but what's missing? and can I REALLY hear it?" debates moot, and enables future transcoding. The idea is though that for the most part portables still benefit from using lossy files, and those files aren't nearly as bad as people seem to think they are. I can fit my entire collection on my 32gb ipod with about a gb to spare using -q3 vorbis, and the quality is superb compared to what we got from that filesize just 5 or 6 years ago.
 
I personally cannot ABX -q3 vorbis (at least the aoTuV 5.7b tuning. I haven't tried the newest standard release) with a successrate high enough to convince me that it's worth going any higher for portable.
 
I have -q6 vorbis rips I did years ago of CDs I no longer have, and I never feel that I'm missing much listening to them. My only rips of the original release of Pink Floyd's Wall albums (which I believe are generally way preferred over the current remasters) are good lossy rips, and I never think "oh man, if only these were flacs" when listening. I'm sure if I went hunting, I could find FLAC rips eventually of the original albums, but I just don't feel the need. I can happily listen to those albums and get lost in the music, not in "where'd the other 3/4 of the data go?" The only real reason I'd go looking for FLACs of those small handful of albums is if I needed to transcode to mp3 for listening on a car stereo or the like (if my next car has an mp3 capable deck), because I firmly believe that transcoding lossy to lossy is asking for trouble.

 

[ramicio]

I never get the point of people saying FLAC or any lossless is not for playback but only archiving.  That makes no sense.  It plays back, and losslessly.  If you go to the trouble of having a lossless copy then why even bother to have a lossy copy just to listen to.  I have lossy copies of all my music, 192 AAC, but that is to stream with AudioGalaxy to my phone, and then I have a hard drive dedicated to lossless, and for listening to on my computer.  If I ever gain hard drive space I will probably delete the whole lossy library and encode it to an even higher bitrate.  Psychoacoustic stuff is made to fool the brain, not the ears.  Since everyone's brain and everyone's ears are different it is ignorant to say that they are lying if they can actually tell the difference, and it's stupid to ask for results of a test to back it up.  Oh, and the argument always turn into whether or not they can ABX a difference that is worthwhile for quality versus space, not that there is a difference whatsoever.  Some people do care about quality all of the time.