[streetdragon]

Quote:

It's official!!!....I placed my order for 598's. Cannot wait to get them!

nice! hope you enjoy them when you get them

 

[Wasatch]

Quote:

It's official!!!....I placed my order for 598's. Cannot wait to get them!

You made a good choice, enjoy.

 

[Arsic]

Just got mine today. They're burning in by going through my iTunes collection right now.

 

[lildshadow2]

Hello everyone! I am new here and I'm looking for some insight about my soon to be headphone upgrade.

I currently own a pair of Sennheiser HD555s that I've had for close to 8 years and they still work and I love them!
I recently bought the Audio Technica ATH-M50s for the portability and great sound. However I wear plastic glasses with thick arms and it makes these headphones very uncomfortable. 
 
I'm looking to make my HD555s my portable pair since they're old and beat but effective, and put the HD598s in their place as my home headphones. Gotta sell the M50s, is this a good place to sell? 

And it seems like I shouldn't even ask if the 598s are a good choice huh? I'm pretty much sold.

 

[Enigma29]

The only propblem with these headphones is when you switch from a low-end pair to these; youll realise how sucky the .mp3 format is, regardless of whether its 320kpbs or not. 
All hail .flac

 

[Dawzy11]

Yeah and the problem I see myself getting into is my entire music library not being .flac quality
 
I wish the iTunes store had .flac 

 

[Enigma29]

Quote:

Yeah and the problem I see myself getting into is my entire music library not being .flac quality
 
I wish the iTunes store had .flac 

I've wasted entire days trying to find .flac files for my music, thing is that unless you REALLY want to spend money on a crazy amount of cd's and rip them yourself, you'll most likely have to torrent the entire albums, thats assuming you can find it in .flac quality at all, out of my original 85 songs i managed to find 50 so i guess that is pretty good.
Also i think that generally said Foobar2000 is good for .flac's + you can get WASAPI which (kinda) improves the sound quality.

 

[palmfish]

I ripped a bunch of my albums at 320 kbps years ago for listening on the road. Two years ago, I transitioned to in-home wireless streaming and archived my entire CD collection to FLAC.
 
There is absolutely no audible difference between 320 kbps and FLAC. I did it for consistency and peace of mind only, not for audio quality.

 

[Enigma29]

Quote:

I ripped a bunch of my albums at 320 kbps years ago for listening on the road. Two years ago, I transitioned to in-home wireless streaming and archived my entire CD collection to FLAC.
 
There is absolutely no audible difference between 320 kbps and FLAC. I did it for consistency and peace of mind only, not for audio quality.

Assuming it was a CD rip to .mp3 then yes, you can just change it to .flac probably.
 
But the problem comes when its an .mp3 that was not ripped properly(?) and/or downloaded from bizzare sites, and of course; how many kbps it has isnt indicative of the record quality at all, badly sounding songs exist in all formats.
 
Getting a hold of really good quality songs is easy as long as you share tastes with a lot of people or if the album is easy to get for a decent price. For people that listen to outsider-ish things its a whole different story unfortunately, i was glad to even find the songs i had before, albums would have cost me nearly a fortune probably if i had wanted to order them from somewhere, theyre not on itunes and some of them were hard to get as crappy .mp3's, let alone a good .mp3 or .flac.
 
Supporting artists is good and all as long as you (the consumer) dont get dragged along the pavement for it...(money-wise)

 

[palmfish]

Yes, I agree with all of your observations. I dont download music - I always rip from CD (or DVD-A).
 
My only point is that, all other things being equal, 320 kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from FLAC.

 

[walden]

Quote:

Assuming it was a CD rip to .mp3 then yes, you can just change it to .flac probably.
 
But the problem comes when its an .mp3 that was not ripped properly(?) and/or downloaded from bizzare sites, and of course; how many kbps it has isnt indicative of the record quality at all, badly sounding songs exist in all formats.
 
Getting a hold of really good quality songs is easy as long as you share tastes with a lot of people or if the album is easy to get for a decent price. For people that listen to outsider-ish things its a whole different story unfortunately, i was glad to even find the songs i had before, albums would have cost me nearly a fortune probably if i had wanted to order them from somewhere, theyre not on itunes and some of them were hard to get as crappy .mp3's, let alone a good .mp3 or .flac.
 
Supporting artists is good and all as long as you (the consumer) dont get dragged along the pavement for it...(money-wise)

I'm not sure if you meant this but if you did, I need to dispel the myth. Once lossless audio (CD, WAC, FLAC, ALAC) is transcoded to a lossy file (mp3, AAC, Ogg) then is can no longer be purposefully changed back. Lossy formats cut out information for the purpose of downsizing your collection, and once that information is gone it cannot be retrieved from those lossy files. You can change an .mp3 to a .flac file but the quality will be the same and the file will be much larger. 
 
If you want to have a collection of .flac files I recommend buying CDs and ripping them with http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ or somehow getting a membership to a trustworthy private torrent site where you can re-download your collection.

 

[Enigma29]

Quote:

I'm not sure if you meant this but if you did, I need to dispel the myth. Once lossless audio (CD, WAC, FLAC, ALAC) is transcoded to a lossy file (mp3, AAC, Ogg) then is can no longer be purposefully changed back. Lossy formats cut out information for the purpose of downsizing your collection, and once that information is gone it cannot be retrieved from those lossy files. You can change an .mp3 to a .flac file but the quality will be the same and the file will be much larger. 
 
If you want to have a collection of .flac files I recommend buying CDs and ripping them with http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ or somehow getting a membership to a trustworthy private torrent site where you can re-download your collection.

Of course i know that a lossless format is better and that .mp3 is made to be smaller AND that once its .mp3 changing it to lossless is pretty much pointless.
I was just agreeing with the sound aspect.
And i explained that what it is to obtain lossless formats for some people in my post that you quoted.

 

[palmfish]

Let me clarify my original post. i had a collection of MP3 files. When I decided to archive my entire collection, i re-ripped every CD to FLAC.

BTW, I use dBpoweramp personally. Its a great utility.

 

[Headstar]

I for one, i'm not too bothered by file formats. As palmfish, I don't see any noticable difference between mp3 and FLAC as log as they came from an original source, or even mp3s made from the same FLAC. They're pretty much identical. And that's because most music does not contain that much resolution/frequency range.
 
Am I saying that you don't need good files to enjoy music at the highest level??? Absolutely not!
 
The real deciding factor in how a song will sing, modest or fabulous, is more likely influenced by: microphone quality > microphone placement > production & mastering. I don't like computer generated instruments and voice recordings made in studios smaller than my bathroom. On the HD 598 you can feel what sounds natural and what doesn't.

 

[palmfish]

I for one, i'm not too bothered by file formats. As palmfish, I don't see any noticable difference between mp3 and FLAC as log as they came from an original source, or even mp3s made from the same FLAC. They're pretty much identical. And that's because most music does not contain that much resolution/frequency range.

Am I saying that you don't need good files to enjoy music at the highest level??? Absolutely not!

The real deciding factor in how a song will sing, modest or fabulous, is more likely influenced by: microphone quality > microphone placement > production & mastering. I don't like computer generated instruments and voice recordings made in studios smaller than my bathroom. On the HD 598 you can feel what sounds natural and what doesn't.

I wish more people around here thought like you do.

Folks get so wrapped up in this amp or that DAC. And dont get me started on cables and balanced vs. Unbalanced.

There is such a huge margin in recording quality that everything else is moot. Find music that moves you and headphones that sing, and you're set. Oh, and EQ is your friend!