[65535]

You sound like a candidate for buying Dre. Beat.s

 
Anyways, yeah, I have quite a few OLD OLD OLD 128kbps tracks in my music library, it makes my eyes water to hear them on my UM2's. It's that bad. 256kbps is a good baseline IMO. I will be buying CD's from now on and using high bit rates, and possibly lossless soon. I need to weed out my library anyways. Keep in mind, once you start worrying a ton about your files, make sure the DAC you're using be it on-board a computer or media player is what's taking those precious digital files and turning them into an analog signal.

 

[ROBSCIX]

Well that is the point right?  -The weak link?
What is the point of going with a high end DAC and headphones etc if you are using poor quality source materials? Also, the better quality your gear is the worse many of the badly encoded, low bit rate junk will sound. 
This conversation is of course dealing with home systems...for portables, amount of files is usually on peoples mind over quality. 
If your source material is perfect, this allows you to worry about other aspects of your system.

 

[anomalouscode]

Quote:

Really? I wouldn't. A great song is a piece of art, and I want to hear it the way the artist intended it to be heard, not with everything above 16kHz and much of the deep bass thrown away. Great songs can only be ruined by poor equipment. Sometimes a meh song provides a surprising amount of enjoyment when played over great equipment.

while you do have a very valid point,...for me,....
 
yes, a great song will sound super on a superduper setup and will move you more emotionally.
 
a mehh song will still be a mehh song, as in the song itself and its ability to emotionally move you, regardless of how well it was recorded or how well it is being reproduced. 
 
for example, take claptons tears in heaven,... it'll move you whether you hear it through a superduper system or on am radio while driving down the highway.
 

 

[giedrys]

Why do you need to be real audiophile and which authority decides when you become one?

 

[Hero Kid]

^ My mum says I'm a real audiophile!!!

 
No, in all seriousness I think the term is largely misused.

 

[ford2]

 
 
 
A CD is lossy compared with the original tracks.

 

[DaveBSC]

Quote:

 
 
 
A CD is lossy compared with the original tracks.

Very good point! That's why as far as I'm concerned, the sooner the CD is dead and gone, the better. If an artist wants to release a single, 95 minute long track, he or she should be able to do so without having to deal with the limitations of a 25 year old recording technology. Want it at 24/96? Maybe encoded for 5.1 surround? No problem, FLAC does all of that stuff.

 

[leeperry]

 

 
the sooner the CD is dead and gone, the better.

 
yeah, vinyl is teh coolest.

 

[giedrys]

Quote:

 
No, in all seriousness I think the term is largely misused.

 
Fo sure, especially in this forum

 

[dmort]

Whoa!! so much information! I recently got ESW9s, and the have made it possible for me to discern the difference between well recorded tracks and poorly recorded tracks. I guess even how well the track is mixed is really evident.
 
When I buy music from itunes, I get 256kbps AAC files. Where do these stack up in the hierarchy of lossy formats?
 
I agree with previous posters about apple and such - but itunes is so easy and convenient, it is hard to use. And I'm a mac guy - imo its the best os, so its a pain to use a non apple music player.

 

[falis]

You can use fluke (free) to import lossless flac files into iTunes on your MAC: http://blowintopieces.com/fluke/.  I'm sure there's other software around that can then convert the flac files to another format for DAPs that don't support it.
 
- Ed

 

[khaos974]

All things considered, I'd rather have a well-mastered 256 kbps AAC track than a semi-ok lossless track (whether from a CD or a hi-def download).
The difference is way more audible. Unfortunately, except for and very famous musicians and amateur bands whom you know the musicians of, it quite difficult to get a different mastering of an album.
 
An example where the mastering really matters, I'd rather have 256 kbps AAC files of the 2009 remaster of the Beatles playing than the actual CDs that were released 20 years ago.

 

[krmathis]

No way to fix them. So you either have to live with them or re-rip.
At least you should from now on rip to a lossless audio format.

 

[ROBSCIX]

Quote:

 
 
 
A CD is lossy compared with the original tracks.

You mean studio masters or 24/96 based files? 
Actually most studio files are recorded at 24/96 anyway.
You can fill up your system with 24/96 but if you do the research 16/44.1 is more then enough.
ANY digial audio based of an analog waveform is always a sampling of the original material.  At what point is good enough
is the question.  Most consider 16/44.1 audio to be that point... Some look for 24/96....choice is yours.. 

 

[kirtar]

I can't claim to be able to tell the difference between lossy formats and lossless for the most part (my training is more of making sure I'm personally in tune), and I probably couldn't tell the difference between 256 or even maybe 192 and lossless (apart from file size).  That being said, I still rip many things into lossless for archival purposes (I can later put them into whatever lossy format I want without compounding which I might notice).  However, because a large portion of my library is already some combination of LAME v0/c320 as well as a bunch of (wait for it)  192 WMA.  While at this point I'm not inclined to start replacing my entire library with lossless or higher quality encodes, I'm at least slowly replacing the songs that I like the most with FLAC as a safeguard (e.g. I had an mp3 encode of Brahms' Hungarian Dance No.4 mess up, but since I had it in FLAC it was no biggie).  As for storage space, while I have the space for lossless, it's not in the right places, so I usually listen to LAME c320 for newer encodes.