drgnfrc13
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2011
- Posts
- 105
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- 15
The difference in quality between $50 headphones and $800 headphones is faaaaaar greater than the difference made by switching from decent compression to lossless. I would much rather listen to 126kbps AAC with my Hifiman HE-560, than 24-bit/192kHz on my old Koss PRO DJ-100 (and those were excellent headphones, for $50).
That's getting to the gist of it. But I don't know that I agree with you. Let me think it out --
A:
128k MP4 on a nice DAP with expensive $800 headphones
vs
B:
24bit FLAC on a nice DAP with mainstream $50 headphones
Is the material using real instruments and real voices, or is it EDM and/or heavily processed? If it's natural I expect B to sound better because it will convey the true, accurate sound as recorded.
If the material is modern, fake, electro, or otherwise has it's humanity compromised, perhaps A would sound louder and fuller. Better? I doubt it. Lossy (perceptual) coding is a slippery slope of badness. It doesn't really matter if you think you can hear it, it's still far less than the artist intended.
I just don't understand how you don't hear lossy degradation, especially to the soundstage and the timbre of the instruments, not to mention how it absolutely demolishes any natural reverb and screws up delays, pulling them back together again. it's like pouring glue all over a nice apple pie.
Or perhaps to say - music before 2008 or so - better in hi-res. Stay native, own the masters if you can.
I'd be happy to test this on my PonoPlayer if i just had $800 headphones....
I've spent several hours ABX'ing a variety of music (especially various tracks from Dark Side of the Moon, since I own the full album in both ALAC and 128kbps MP3), and my best accuracy in identifying 5 "X" tracks was 80%, while my worst score was 60%. After comparing a track in each format, I could pick out subtle differences, but upon hearing both for the first time in a particular test, there was almost no appreciable difference.
We all like to feel as though we are getting the best quality possible, so we'll obsess over every detail in our setup, but at this point, I firmly believe that most of the things we obsess over actually have little to no affect on our general perception of music, beyond the placebo affect.
The factors that actually make a clearly perceptible difference in sound quality are: the speakers, the amp, the DAP, and the recording/mastering quality of the music. IMO, until you get into the $300+ range of headphones, the bottleneck is most commonly going to be either the headphones, the recording/mastering quality of your music, or the amplifier.