[purk]

To get audiophile sound quality, you will need to invest in a very high quality earphones or portable headphones like the shure E5c or Ety ER4P. I'm using my iRiver IHP-120 w/ my E5C and find the combo to sound great.

 

[Oga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twombly Very few people can actually tell the difference between 320kbps MP3 and lossless in a scientific test setup.

That's not what scares me. What scares me is that most people on the street think that a 128 kbps MP sounds "like CD"!

As for the thing about Audiophile earphones, it reallt doesn't override the basic principle of "garbage in, garbage out". Playing 192 kbps or even 320 kbps MP3 via expensive headphones is really not "audiophile sound".

Portables have lossless, but I don't think we can start to call any portable deveice "audiophile" until they commit to really supporting FLAC etc ina big way: gapless, high quality amp, etc.

 

[Jmmmmm]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Oga That's not what scares me. What scares me is that most people on the street think that a 128 kbps MP sounds "like CD"! As for the thing about Audiophile earphones, it reallt doesn't override the basic principle of "garbage in, garbage out". Playing 192 kbps or even 320 kbps MP3 via expensive headphones is really not "audiophile sound". Portables have lossless, but I don't think we can start to call any portable deveice "audiophile" until they commit to really supporting FLAC etc ina big way: gapless, high quality amp, etc.

I agree, but I don't really know if gapless is really important to be 'audiophile'. I know some people see it as a necessity for listening to their music properly, but for most music it isn't a factor. Also, you don't need a high quality amp if it has a real line out (which is what i really need!)

 

[Oga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jmmmmm I agree, but I don't really know if gapless is really important to be 'audiophile'. I know some people see it as a necessity for listening to their music properly, but for most music it isn't a factor. Also, you don't need a high quality amp if it has a real line out (which is what i really need!)

I don't get where you're going with the line out. Its a portable player - I need it to go into a pair of high quality headphones like Etys, not a separate amp. That's redundant IMO if its supposed to be an audiophile player.

Also gapless is important for many types of music. And many albums these days are concieved of with seamless transition between tracks. If you cannot reproduce the music experience as it was intended, even on a basic level, its surely not audiophile.

 

[t10]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jmmmmm I agree, but I don't really know if gapless is really important to be 'audiophile'.

Hahahaha, please tell me you are joking.

So going from PCM to 320kbps CBR LAME mp3 is so not audiophile since every perseon can easily tell the difference, between 320kbps cbr lame mp3, and PCM.

Yet having a 2 second gap in the middle of Beethoven's Second Symphony is totally audiophile.


I mean.. it's like impossible to notice... the lack of music.. for only 2-4 seconds...

 

[Jmmmmm]

Quote:

Originally Posted by t10 Hahahaha, please tell me you are joking. So going from PCM to 320kbps CBR LAME mp3 is so not audiophile since every perseon can easily tell the difference, between 320kbps cbr lame mp3, and PCM. Yet having a 2 second gap in the middle of Beethoven's Second Symphony is totally audiophile.

I'm not joking, and this is just stupid symantics.
I never said anything about 320kbps not being 'audiophile', please do not confuse me with bigshot; we are certainly not the same person.
As I said, gapless may be important for YOUR music. Pretty much nothing I listen to requires gapless playback. I have gapless on my karma, and it means almost nothing to me. It certainly plays no part in its audiophilic qualities to me.

I'm glad that, at least, by the end of this discussion the world will be enlightened as to what qualifies as audiophile and what does not. I know we will all be better off.

 

[bigshot]

Beethoven's second symphony has gaps between movements if I remember correctly.

See ya
Steve

 

[t10]

Fair enough Jmmmmm, but gapless capability is very important to a lot of people.


For example, I love going to sleep while listenning to some mellow chillout like "Global_Underground_Afterhours_2" for example, virtually all chillout is recorded seamlessly on the CD, because the genre requires the music to be somewhat uniform, and not all over the place.

And when you encounter the gap it is about as enjoyable as a cdplayer skip. Takes you out of the mood immidiatelly, and when you are about to fall asleep it wakes you up.

To this day I do not understand why this capability is not in all DAPs. How hard is it to preread the next track into mem, and cross-fade it with the previous?

 

[t10]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot Beethoven's second symphony has gaps between movements if I remember correctly. See ya Steve

/throws a shoe at you.

 

[fewtch]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hifiboom what is the best player today if you want the best headphone audioquality from a player device, no matter if it is a memory stick, MD Player, HD Player or PDCP..... Is there still one that has excellent audiophile quality headphone output.

Look for the most feature-free portable CD player you can find... no skip protection, no nothing except a line out (for use with an amp) -- quality of headphone-out jacks vary a lot, line-outs tend to be uniformly better. You can find good sounding vintage players, or try the line-out on a more recent model (they tend to be very cheap, because people pay for convenience features nobody wants them). See my thread titled "Cheap PCDP Update." These cheapo players can also be "modded" with better components, if you know how to solder.

Like someone said, they all have their failings. But they do have their benefits too: Primarily, staying as far away as possible from the dirty, ugly power coming out of the wall socket.

 

[zikarus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hifiboom quite starnge.... Sony seems to put more effort in high quality output on MD Players than on their CD-Player lines...... am I wrong? I hate formats like Mp3, they are a jump back to the past...... Thanks to the industry: we had cassette players - than we got high quality CD Players which sound extremly good. Then MD players appeared which have a quality thats nearly equaly to CD and now we end up with 128kbit MP3s which is the mainly used at on i-net. Mp3 at 128kbit is not very audiophile, you can easily hear the missing frequencys with good monitors..... that sucks!!! Why do the manufactors go back.... mp3 is just a i-net format: if you want to transfer sounds over i-net, it needs to be small. thats okay and its okay if they support it as format on the players, but SQ should be their main building_task and most mp3 soundquality is bad..... Why don`they just build up a PDDVD, where you can burn WAVs or ATRAC to a DVD and play it with the portable player. Or even blueRAY/HDDVD which has 20-40 GB. We live in a time where compression is not needed....!! And a DVD has a much more data density, that would physically save much battery!, because a DVD would have to rotate much slower than a CD does. Think of HD/BlueRAY These engineers are just stupid.... GO WITH MP3 - and have quality that equals the 90s century cassette player, which I found were more audiophile, only had the back ground noise and cassette lose quality over the time.

Confused?

Me too.

Can´t share your point of view. MP3 is a format which - mainly - aims at portable use. Therefore it is perfect. Using Lame aps/ape mp3-files you will experience a much more pleasurable listening experience than with any cassette player (Walkman). And - most important - you have the advantage of carrying around hundred of CD´s in a players case being as small as a pack of cigarettes. For me there is absolutely no need for a 80 GB lossless player. That is only about 100 CD. Ridicoulous! And who needs lossless for portable use: On the road you won´t hear the differences anyway. I prefer a 80 GB MP3 player. That gives me the total freedom of choice.

And by the way: The Redbook CD format is far from being audiophile too. If anything than it is the analogue vinyl (or tape) that does sound audiophile. Even the SACD only comes close to a vinyl but doesn´t beat it - soundwise.

 

[hawkfire]

hello,

Don't feed the trolls.

 

[paradio]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hifiboom do not cover full frequency bandwith....and resolution

Can I add one : and not all details. For example also use "shield": the weak signal/pulse ( X dB less) just comes after the strong signal/pulse will be cut.

And BTW, MD (ATRAC) is not so good as somebody said. In 90's, there were two competitors: DCC and MD. DCC ( PASCAL format) is created by PHILIPS and commercially supported by PHILIPS and PANASONIC. DCC is good at sound quality and fully compatible for cassette, but it is not friendly to portable player ( not easy to search than MD or other digital format), finally was defeated by Sony MD.

Whatever MD or MP3, doesn't have good sound performance.
But for portable purpose, it maybe a good choice even for audiophile.
One Remark: huge storage (like HardDisk) is going to commercial level, the people would not care too much about the compressed files.

 

[chicubs]

There is no perfect/best sounding audio player. It depends solely on your ear, HOWEVER, the most popular pick for audiophiles seems to be the Rio Karma with its flac, ogg support, great SQ, and gapless playback.

 

[Oga]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zikarus Can´t share your point of view. MP3 is a format which - mainly - aims at portable use. Therefore it is perfect. Using Lame aps/ape mp3-files you will experience a much more pleasurable listening experience than with any cassette player (Walkman). .

APS? Better sound that a well recorded cassette in a decent cassette player?You kidding me? APS is fine if you dont remember what real music sounds like and thin,digital files are all you know. Remember that lately even CD portable players have had such poor sound that they came quite far from achiving even the full potential of redbook!

So I think its a question of standards being so low that people don't realize how lacking MP3 sound is vs a proper cassette with richness.

I'd agree to convenience issues of digital files over analogue cassette etc. 100%. But at the moment were are purely sacrificing sound quality for that convenience. And that has been driven by the high cost of digital storage.

Unfortunately the music industry is quite unscrupulous and they will try to make the digital music market stabilize at bad quality compressed files to limit the advantage of copying. Otherwise, we are looking at a situation where in fact the market should be going back and stabilizing at lossless at this point, since portable memory is cheaper now.

If we were discussing lossless files on a decently amped DAP, that would be a different story and the case for digital makes sense but not APS. Sorry.