[vikingking]

i have a 320 bit-rate of a song and a 3339 bit-rate rip of the same song.
the 320 rip sounds generally better (clearer and louder vs even toned but not as clear and lower volume)... what am i missing why is the higher bit-rate better ?
P.S. yes i have listen to said tracks with HQ-ish headphones HD6XX and 700x so thats not the issue ..

 

[ADUHF]

This is just a wild guess, but maybe the 320 kbps recording has more dynamic range compression, which is generally not a good thing from an overall sound quality standpoint. Though it may make a recording louder, and possibly also "clearer" sounding to some less-experienced ears. More about this in the following Wiki article...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Another recent discussion here on a related topic that might also be worth a look...

https://www.head-fi.org/threads/one-reason-behind-recent-resurgence-of-vinyl-lps-popularity.902377/

 

[ADUHF]

Some other possible explanations...

Maybe your higher bitrate rip was captured from an inferior audio source.

Or perhaps the higher bitrate rip was sampled at a higher rate, but at a lower bit depth. (That seems a little unlikely to me. But I'm not an expert on the subject of audio encoding, so it might be possible.) The reverse could also be possible. IOW, your higher bitrate recording could've be captured at a greater bit depth than the 320 kbps file. But sampled at a lower rate. (This also seems unlikely to me. But again, I'm not an expert.)

Or maybe you're comparing apples to oranges, such as kilobits to bits, bits to bytes, constant to variable bitrates, etc... and the 3339 recording is actually a lower quality recording in terms of the data. Comparing the size of the two audio files in terms of data (ie megabytes) might shed some more light on this.

Maybe the encoding algorithms were better on the 320 kbps recording.

More info on audio bitrates...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_rate#Audio