[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilkoolaidman /img/forum/go_quote.gif Sooo...There would be no difference between two lossless files of different bitrates?

As long as they were encoded from the exact same source file, using different codecs/versions/settings, then that is true.
With different source files then the quality of the source file matters.

 

[iriverdude]

No, that bitrate is just the lossless comression algorhythm in effect.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilkoolaidman /img/forum/go_quote.gif Ok but what I'm saying is, if you had a CD and ripped in lossless at 320kbps and again at 1,000kbps the same song off the same CD. would there be a difference between the two? Sorry if I'm being difficult.

How would you go about doing so?
You have little control of bitrate for lossless codecs, as it all comes down to the complexity of the audio data and the efficiency of the encoder.

With some luck you may find a track that encode to 320kbps, but then you certainly will not able to encode it at 1000kbps. Or the other way around for that matter...

/me think you have a bit of trouble understanding lossless compression.

 

[John64]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilkoolaidman /img/forum/go_quote.gif Ok but what I'm saying is, if you had a CD and ripped in lossless at 320kbps and again at 1,000kbps the same song off the same CD. would there be a difference between the two? Sorry if I'm being difficult.

yes. a huge difference, providing you used the same codec, settings and code binary.

in one case it is representing 320KB of real audio data in one second, in the other it is representing 1000KB of real audio data in one second.

Is this a real situation or is this hypothetical?

EDIT: you don't set a bitrate with lossless!!!!!! bitrate is a property of the encoding not a setting of the encoder!!!!!!!! you can set compression level (e.g. flac -1 vs flac -8) but that doesn't change the decoded data. See my file 'proof.txt' as proof. If you are setting a target bitrate or anything you ARE NOT USING LOSSLESS

 

[John64]

are you familar with how zip files work? lossless works the same with audio. Technically you could use a general purpose compressor like bzip or gzip to be a music compression algorithm, it just wouldn't be as good as flac, et al.

Lossless compressors work by figuring out what the information to recreate any given sample. For simplicity's sake, say a sample is one second. A lossless codec will say "what do i need to recreate this second exactly" then it stores that whether it is 3KB or 10000KB. A lossy codec says "how can i represent this second using 256KB of data and make it sound similar"

 

[lilkoolaidman]

No, I don't really know what I'm talking about but I hoped someone would read between the lines. So, let me ask this (what I ultimately wanted to find out by posting this thread). If you had a Practical Devices XM5 amp with some ATH-A700s. And you had a Zune and a Cowon S9 both loaded with the same lossless songs but the Cowon supported higher bitrates, would there be a staggering difference in SQ between the two?

 

[lilkoolaidman]

So this is really specifically hypothetical.

 

[iriverdude]

Quote:

would there be a staggering difference in SQ between the two?

If you can that's because of the quality of the DAC and headphone stage of each player, not between different lossless formats.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilkoolaidman /img/forum/go_quote.gif No, I don't really know what I'm talking about but I hoped someone would read between the lines. So, let me ask this (what I ultimately wanted to find out by posting this thread). If you had a Practical Devices XM5 amp with some ATH-A700s. And you had a Zune and a Cowon S9 both loaded with the same lossless songs but the Cowon supported higher bitrates, would there be a staggering difference in SQ between the two?

Then you would either happen to find a track with a bitrate low enough to be supported by both players, or you would need to play different files from different source material.
For the former the playback quality would depend on the corresponding players (DAC, decoder implementation, hardware ...). Although the audio data played back is the same.
For the later the recording quality differences of the two tracks would matter since you play back different files, in addition to the points above.

I do not know those two players that well, but find it really strange that one or both of them just play lossless files up to a certain bitrate.
But lets say the Zune support WMA Lossless up 600kbps, while the Cowon support WMA Lossless up to 800kbps. Unless a certain track encode at below 600kbps it can not be played back on both players. Another track may encode at 750kbps and would only be playable on the Zune. You can not force the 750kbps file to play on the Zune, so the options are either to go lossy or pick a different track.

Edit:
I say it again -> Lossless is lossless
Regardless of bitrate, as long as the encoder is not broken.

 

[John64]

if it supports wma lossless, it will work with all wma lossless likely up to 16bit/44.1KHz. They can't support wma lossless but limited to 500K/s

If they did that, it'd be like limiting the highway to cars with only two wheels(and no motorbikes)!

 

[xnor]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ntropic /img/forum/go_quote.gif I think Head-Fi is making people paranoid. Cables, dusty jacks, high bit-rate music. It's just not good for you. Or your wallet.

+1

Quote:

Originally Posted by John64 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Converting to wav before playing seems overly paranoid. I don't know about all decoders, but flac can decode many times faster than real time even on the most modest hardware.

That's right, there is no point in "extracting" to wav before playing.
Audio decoders (that are built into every player) are doing the same thing on the fly. No bits are lost or modified in any other paranoid way.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilkoolaidman /img/forum/go_quote.gif Well this all hypothetical. I just want to know if you have two files (same song, same program, same everything) but one of them had a lower bitrate would there be an audible difference between the two?

This is not hypothetical. If you use a lossless codec, the music is stored lossless. If there is a difference in file size it might be due to different (lossless!) compression levels, improved compression algorithms ...

When using a lossy codec, files with lower bitrate usually result in a lower SQ, though not necessarily in every case.

 

[John64]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xnor /img/forum/go_quote.gif +1 This is not hypothetical.

what is hypothetical is that the OP was describing compressing the same song with the same codec twice and getting totally different bitrates (320 v 1000). They were describing a made up situation not a real one.