PiSkyHiFi
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2009
- Posts
- 273
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- 153
OK then AAC 256 and other high bitrate lossy codecs are *audibly identical* to redbook and HD audio. Once it hits the point that it's audibly identical, the sound quality can't get any better. The file just gets bigger.
I would add a caveat that they are mostly audibly identical, because the variance as you have mentioned before in humans testing their own hearing abilities can be large.
Different humans have different hearing capabilities.
The same human can experience audio differently from one day to the next.
The function of memory and audio is not that well understood, even though there is much research, a lot of it conflicts because when we discuss what a human can and can't hear in an audio piece, we are also studying their consciousness, which is a really tricky one.
The dynamic range of human hearing shifts - ears adjust in a dynamic way to what they hear and humans can not hear everything at once.
All of that basically says that a study that finds that a bunch of people reported hearing no difference between lossless and lossy is actually going to have many uncertainties.
This is why I think it's important to have headroom by storing above your hearing capability to a fair degree, make those files a bit larger than just barely adequate to allow for potentially hearing things differently on different equipment at different times, even though it may not happen very often.
Also, as you said, there is no point compressing my collection if it's fine as it is as lossless and I can stream etc...