[ldtboyl]

I only use flac for classical music. especially on orchestras and symphonies. solo instruments, mp3's are good enough for them. I notice a very little difference in dynamics and imaging, only in classical music. and I feel theres so much details to be lost in this kind of music if I compress them.
 

 

[KevDo]

I don't use any portable devices but even then, with the amount of space available nowadays the only reason I woulnd't use FLAC for portable is if the player didn't play it.
 
I only use a PC for playing music and HDD space is so cheap it wouldn't make sense to use anything other than a lossless file.
 
So is FLAC worth it? yes. (even if it is just to sit nice in my head that I'm listening to lossless rather than MP3 or whatever).

 

[lee730]

Flac is definitely worth using for both archival purposes and for better sound quality. I do notice an appreciable difference between most flac and mp3 files. While high quality VBR mp3 files do sound really good and I can live with them; I find flac to just sound better. Lossless music is more easy on my ears and I don't get that fatigue I get when listening to mp3s for an extended period of time. Note: if you have crappy audio equipment then of course you  won't be able to hear much of a difference. But if you have decent audio equipment and a decent pair of ears you will notice the difference. It's not placebo effect like some posters have stated here. Just because your hearing may not be as good as some of the other headfier's hearing doesn't make them wrong.

 

[Alghazanth]

Have good headphones?
Have a good amount of HDD space?
 
If yes to both, then there is absolutely no reason not to use flac. For my iPhone listening, I just rip to 320kbps MP3 since its only 16gb and I have too many apps. Best way to go about it.

 

[bigshot]

Lossless is great as a master file that you can then compress into any size you want for listening. It isn't as necessary for ordinary listening though.

I've settled on a standard bitrate for my collection. I use 256/44.1 AAC and there is no audible difference whatsoever between the original and the compressed file. Compression artifacts are not subtle things. They don't cause listening fatigue or halitosis. They aren't veils or filters over the sound. Artifacting is distortion... Digital sounding, gurgly distortion. At higher bitrates the areas that are harder to compress without distortion become fewer and fewer until there are none at all. Find that point and you don't really need lossless. But I have all my CDs in a box in the closet if I should ever need to encode at any other setting.

 

[bigshot]

I only use flac for classical music. especially on orchestras and symphonies. solo instruments, mp3's are good enough for them. I notice a very little difference in dynamics and imaging, only in classical music. and I feel theres so much details to be lost in this kind of music if I compress them.

The most difficult thing to compress without artifacting is massed string sections. If it hits just the right texture, it can gurgle and get boxy sounding. I did various compression levels on a bunch of orchestral music and isolated the most difficult string texture to compress. I made compressed files at different levels to determine the audible threshold for the artifacting. That was 192 for AAC and 256 for MP3. I upped the bitrate one notch just to be safe and use that as my standard... 256 AAC and 320 MP3.

 

[roebeet]

Anything complex will suffer with lossy, even at higher bitrates.  I've found this out recently with vinyl rips, as there is still surface noise even after I remove the pops and clicks. Surface noise is fine, but try compressing that to a 160kps Vorbis file and there will definitely be some SQ problems.  So, for vinyl rips, I find FLAC to be even more relevant.  That's assuming that space is not a major concern, of course.

 

[Alghazanth]

I ripped/downloaded all of my music at 320 kbps mp3 for the longest time because I couldn't hear the difference and wanted to save the space. Now that I have some top of the line headphones and the difference is obvious, I had to spend the last week re-repping/re-downloading/re-tagging an enormous library of music in flac, and it was still worth it. Definitely start with flac and go from there.

 

[codeninja]

Do you hear difference in regular pop/rock music? 

 

[bigshot]

The track that I found that artifacted the most was a Decca Sammy Davis Jr song. Something about the way that the strings were recorded made it difficult to compress. At 192 AAC, gurgling was still barely audible. Bumping it up to 256 took care of the problem. Most rock music is fine at 192.

 

[Alghazanth]

Quote:

Do you hear difference in regular pop/rock music? 

 
Well, mainstream pop and rock is so simple I doubt lossless is worth the trouble.

 

[ChipnDalebowl]

FLAC is always worth it. Think about it...if you paid for the CD, why would you not want the whole thing there? Yeah, I know mp3, aac, and the world of lossy codecs has made it possible to go lower than 160kbps in most cases and not be able to hear a difference, but why do that? For portable use where the noise floor is high, yeah, that makes sense. But at home...why accept less than what you purchased? FLAC compresses well for a lot of genres (save for the metalheads) so why not use it?

 

[caracara08]

interesting, i actually deleted anything below 320 yesterday.  i find with my setup, it gets grainy at the highs.  whenever im listening i hear that graininess, i look and its always a file below 320.  it could have been ripped incorrectly, but thats my experience.  others will say that you cannot tell in a DBT. unless space is an issue, i will always have FLAC or other lossless.

 

[HenryParry]

Personally I tell no difference,playing the same songs alongside.

 

[hendrixfan]

I can't tell the difference between flac and high qaulity mp3 but I know that some people can.