[Skylab]

Halcyon, thanks for your interesting reply. I love getting others' opinions, that's why I read these pages!

FWIW, I agree with you about the effects of lossy compression, I just also feel that it negatively impacts imaging.

Wanderman, I have tried AAC/320 and Lame MP3 VBR with 224 as the MIN bit rate, and I find them to be pretty similar. Both are fairly transparent, altho I still prefer lossless to both. But YMMV.

 

[dvdonly]

Quote:

I guess this is something I'll have to determine on my own, but with the gear I'm going to be using, will I REALLY notice such differences?

It's real easy to determine if you'll notice the difference. Just do what I did: burn a few songs you're very familiar with in the various formats you're interested in: ALAC, 320/256/224/192AAC, etc. Then in your iTunes and iPod create a separate playlist for each song in its five iterations (so each playlist has the song 5 times in 5 formats). Then set it to random and listen, without looking at the filenames. If you can tell a difference, there's your answer. If not (I personally could not over my Grados direct from the iPod) then there you go.

Since you're thinking off using this for your home rig as well, I'd do the same listening test on your home setup.

 

[Jahn]

I must have tin ears - I have a pretty resolving home setup, and I can't even tell the diff tween ALAC and 256 VBR AAC. So that saves plenty of space on my iPod for tunes, and my hard drive at home too, since I don't have to keep ALAC files and more compressed AAC files both on the comp.

 

[richard]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jahn I must have tin ears - I have a pretty resolving home setup, and I can't even tell the diff tween ALAC and 256 VBR AAC. So that saves plenty of space on my iPod for tunes, and my hard drive at home too, since I don't have to keep ALAC files and more compressed AAC files both on the comp.

Based on all I've read, it's a rare person who can tell the difference between LAME -aps (which is usually around 190k) and the original CD in a blind test. Based on many posts on http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php, most people can't tell the difference between 160k AAC and the orginal CD. 128k VBR AAC may well be transparent to most, especially an ipod. As always, note that it's easy to hear major differences unless you're listening in a well designed blind test.

 

[unkoman]

Double post

 

[unkoman]

AAC or ALAC- It just all depends on your personal preference. If you want the best sound possible from your rig, then go for the ALAC, but ONLY if you can hear the difference between lossy codecs. ALAC kills the battery reaaaallly fast and fills up the hard drive quickly.(I only have about 150 files and have already filled 5.2gb) If you can't hear the difference and go AAC. Also the internal ipod amp really sucks so if you're not going to use an amp through line out, then I wouldnt recommend ALAC.

 

[Oliver :)]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jahn I must have tin ears - I have a pretty resolving home setup, and I can't even tell the diff tween ALAC and 256 VBR AA

Lucky you. I'd rather assume you have "regular perfect hearing" though, and none of the common hearing "defects" or rather anomalies that make others able to spot the compression, since all the codecs are produced for regular hearing.