[ROBSCIX]

Well that is a personal choice. 
Personally, I keep my music in lossless format because I don't want to be bothered knowing my media is possibly my weak link.
What you can and cannot hear is alos based on your gear and your media.  Some components are very revealing and will actually make lower grade media sound bad in comparison to lossless files.

 

[ford2]

 
Quote:

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.. 

And if there is no audible difference with 320 mp3 then I can see no problems with them.
 
Most peoples hearing is not good enough to hear the full frequency on the CD anyway.
 
Far to much time is spent analyzing instead of listening.
 
20 years ago I had a pair of Nova phones and cassettes as a source,it did not sound as good as it is now but I enjoyed it more.

 

[aspenx]

After going through the extent of setting up a "audiophile system" (somewhat?), I've managed to listen to more nuances in the music I've own/had in both mp3 and lossless and both in some cases. Some songs made me feel like I've wasted my time sourcing the FLACs and some songs got me pulling my hair out because of how bad they sound in mp3.
 
I don't think you should be going around trying to migrate your entire mp3 collection to lossless. The benefits of (well-ripped) lossless over the current mp3s you have are uncertain. You may or may not like the lossless versions more, especially if they reveal more flaws in the recording to you. What I do is that I bought the CDs for my favourite songs and rip them to lossless myself. I don't bother if the mp3 sounds "good enough" or whatever. I just change to lossless for the music and artistes that I really appreciate and listen often (if I don't already have the lossless copies).
 
I feel that the bottom line should be about supporting the artistes that you like. Buy your favourite music in the best format available if you can. With the abundance of lossless and mp3 encodes of music floating all around the net, you can sample them before you make your decision anyways. Of course, it can be kinda sad as some of the music I like are out of print and I'm left me with no choice but to......

 

[khaos974]

I suppose that if the OP has mp3s from ten years back, some must have been made from "lesser" encoders, such as the infamous xing encoder.
Anyway, I would re-rip everything I that was well mastered to begin with and of which I can easily fond the CD and leave the rest in mp3, after all, if you are still young, I doubt that you musical tatstes have remained the same the past 10 years, so much of the collection is not so important anymore, less work for you.

 

[resonantLux]

[quote = ROBSQIX]
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..
[/quote]
For playback, I found that I was able to distinguish between high quality lossy (eg 320 kbps MP3 or AAC) and Lossless with some effort. Telling the difference between 96/24 and 44.1/16 required perfect listening conditions (eg, turning off all fans/noise sources in my apartment -- including moving my computer well outside of the listening room and listening with a USB dac with a long USB cable...). Even then, I could only just barely tell the difference in ABX (about 70% of the time) If I focused completely on artifacts -- rather than the music itself.
 
However, I still find I like to have the highest quality source possible in my archive -- either 24/96, or lossless CD rips. That way if I want to, I can make lossy rips for my car (reads MP3 CDs), or to put on my phone (I'll be listening on poorer quality headphones in noisy environments -- negating any advantage of the higher quality source), without suffering "double losses" from say converting an MP3 to an AAC. Having a higher quality source is also more important if doing any DSP operations -- such as eq or phase to compensate for the acoustic of the listening room. (For example, I actually compensated for the not-very-flat frequency response of my car stereo by burning specially eq'd CD's specifically for the car) While the difference between lossless and lossy may not be easily audible by itself for straight playback (because the lossy codecs are based on psychoacoustics), the "losses" can be exaggerated greatly by digital filtering etc.
 
NOTE: I did some online hearing tests and found that my hearing sensitivity drops off pretty rapidly above 18.5kHz, and I was only able to distinguish between 0.2 dB sound intensity difference for pink noise in a double-blind test -- this means I likely won't be able ot hear much benefit of higher frequency response and/or lower noise floor of 96/24, anyway.

 

[ninjikiran]

Its not the equipment that makes the audiophile, but his love for music that makes it.  An audiophile will often go through extreme lengths to obtain perfection but that perfection is different between everyone, you don't have to be crazy for that last .000001%, and if you can't tell the difference between MP3 and lossless than why would you even bother wasting the time or money going crazy over it.
 
In my opinion though hard drive space is cheap, if possible going lossless for peace of mind whether a difference is heard or not is a good thing.  Evading any form of compression not present in the master copy.  I have heard differences in quality personally~ but some sound just as good in FLAC as they do in MP3.  I find good older recordings to sound better lossless, since they lack the same kind of canned compressed effects of todays music.
 
In which case I am not an audiophile as I merely enjoy my music, but I don't live it.

 

[Skylab]

What impacts sound quality more than anything else is the quality of the recording itself.  None of us have any control of that.
 
Good Audio equipment, and the pursuit of getting the most out of your playback chain, has the goal of getting as close to the sound of the original recording as possible.
 
The use of a lossy codec like MP3 is a step AWAY from the sound of the original recording, period.  It may be very slight, or perhaps even undetectable, but it is nonetheless a step away from full fidelity of the original recording.  Lossy codeds should be avoided wherever possible.
 
However, lossy codecs should NOT be avoided at the expense of letting you listen to music you love!  If you have the original CD's of music you have now in MP3, I very strongly recommend re-ripping to lossless.  That is time well spent on a sonic upgrade.  But if you have music only in the MP3 format, don't let the fact that it's lossy prevent you from listening to it and enjoying it.  If you find that there are specific albums you really wish you had better copies of, they might be worth buying the CD's of so that you can import them losslessly.
 

 

[khaos974]

In today's language, the meaning of audiophile has evolved, it now mostly means someone who cares about the quality of the reproduction and does not really have a link with music.
Music lovers and audiophiles are 2 distinct notions, even if a lot of audiophiles love music and it was their reason to get into audiophilia in the first place.

 

[ROBSCIX]

Quote:

What impacts sound quality more than anything else is the quality of the recording itself.  None of us have any control of that.
 
Good Audio equipment, and the pursuit of getting the most out of your playback chain, has the goal of getting as close to the sound of the original recording as possible.
 
The use of a lossy codec like MP3 is a step AWAY from the sound of the original recording, period.  It may be very slight, or perhaps even undetectable, but it is nonetheless a step away from full fidelity of the original recording.  Lossy codeds should be avoided wherever possible.
 
However, lossy codecs should NOT be avoided at the expense of letting you listen to music you love!  If you have the original CD's of music you have now in MP3, I very strongly recommend re-ripping to lossless.  That is time well spent on a sonic upgrade.  But if you have music only in the MP3 format, don't let the fact that it's lossy prevent you from listening to it and enjoying it.  If you find that there are specific albums you really wish you had better copies of, they might be worth buying the CD's of so that you can import them losslessly.
 

Well said.  That is how I veiw it also is many around here spend alot of time getting this component or that set of cans to get the most out of their systems then turn around and use lossy media files. 
If you really want the best your system has to offer then why even mess with lossy encoding at all. 
I also agree with your second statement about the enjoyment being first and foremost so if all you have is your favorites in lossy, enjoy them but consider getting higher quality source files.

 

[nexegn]

lossless FTW!!! of course the best tracks to have are the origional masters of the songs but trying to find them is more luck then anything else. if your really going to go crazy you can do what i used to do and get the origional individual tracks and run them through protools that way u can remaster the song the way u want to hear it. i guess working in a recording studio has its perks lol. the only problem is that its almost impossible to find the individual tracks unless you happen to know someone who already has them or just get lucky. with that being said the difference between lossy and lossless is night and day even on my crappy laptop speakers. you can make a crappy rip sound ok with great gear but a good rip will sound good no matter what u play it on.  besides ive got a terrabite that fits in my pocket so even with the largest files i can find i can still carry around more music then i could ever hope to listen to in a year.

 

[kirtar]

This pretty much sums up my opinion.  While I can appreciate some improvements in equipment (e.g. I love my new AV-40s) and encode quality, what matters most to me in the end is the music itself (as long as it is reasonably close).  In the realm of classical music, I'll take a lossy encode (depending on how lossy... I'd say no to anything below 128) of an interpretation that I like over a lossless encode of an interpretation that I don't like as much (e.g. I have 2 copies of The Planets, but I like the interpretation of the lossy one more).  However, in this particular case I'm going to be looking at getting a CD of the one I like (at some point... I am on a college student budget after all).
 
Also, I think my source equipment doesn't warrant lossless at this point (iPod Touch and Dell Precision m4400), but I'll be building a desktop system later with a decent soundcard (or USB DAC/Amp)
 
Quote:

However, lossy codecs should NOT be avoided at the expense of letting you listen to music you love!  If you have the original CD's of music you have now in MP3, I very strongly recommend re-ripping to lossless.  That is time well spent on a sonic upgrade.  But if you have music only in the MP3 format, don't let the fact that it's lossy prevent you from listening to it and enjoying it.  If you find that there are specific albums you really wish you had better copies of, they might be worth buying the CD's of so that you can import them losslessly.

 

[AlfBaxter]

To the OP: check out the ABX plugin for foobar2000. I have a pretty good ear, and pretty good equipment, and used to think I could easily tell the difference (as in night and day difference) between lossless and mp3. After trying to do it blind I no longer think this. I have tried with many different files, ripping to wav and encoding the wav to mp3 using LAME. I can easily (by which I mean reliably, i.e. 18-20/20 correct) ABX LAME V4 from the original wav, but at V2 or above I can no longer tell the difference. You shouldn't underestimate the placebo effect associated with knowing that you are listening to lossless.
 
Even the differences between V4 and lossless are subtle, and take a lot of concentration to hear. I listen in particular to the way hi-hats sound, bass guitar transients, snare drums, etc. It's true that it is possible to ABX even V0 or 320kbs files from lossless, but that (in my experience) is almost always because the encoder introduces an artifact at some specific point in the file. So while almost all the mp3 is indistinguishable from lossless, you can hear a click or a pop on the mp3 that shouldn't be there.
 
As others have said, relax and enjoy the music - there's almost no discernible difference betweeen a LAME encoded, high bitrate mp3 and the original file. Check out foobar's ABX. What really matters is whether you can tell the difference between mp3 and flac/wav/CD. If you can't then why worry about it?

 

[anetode]

I feel the OP's pain. I've been collecting mp3s since '97 and by now have amassed over 260 gigs. Converting over to lossless would be a major undertaking, probably a few years investment. I now rip in both V0 (btw, LAME doesn't automatically cut off above 16khz) and FLAC, but that's only for about fifty albums. At the end, selection beats the mp3 compromise. Above 256, I can't tell the difference 99% of the time. But boy, is that 1% ever annoying!

 

[dmort]

So, I recently encoded a cd in .mp3, aac, and apple lossless. I feel like I can hear a difference between the .mp3 and the aac, but I can't hear a difference between aac and lossless. I guess the easiest way to be good audiophile is just to muck up your ears.