[Proglover]

Skarecrow, could you please post the link to that topic? Would be a nice read

 

[rockthesky]

I came here to learn. 
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I can tell the diff between 128-160 vs 320-FLAC-WAV. I'd say the bare minimum for making it real hard to discern for most people would be 192kbps mp3s. I myself can't tell the difference between 320 and FLAC except on a very FEW songs. And that's with nitpicking. In normal use, no one would tell, but I'll leave that for the anal audiophiles to argue.

Thank you, but I mainly use mp3s for music

 
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Yes, bitrate.
Euh, wav is cd format, that's lossless. mp3 is with loss, so much less in quality then wav or other types of lossless format (like FLAC, ALAC f.e.).
 
The bitrate of an mp3 file is pretty crucial to it's sound quality. If the bitrate is 128, it's very noticably less in quality then the actual recording. Not worthy of headphones like your AD700.
 
192 is a little bit better, but if you want to enjoy sound on cans like AD700 or higher, I'd say you need 256/320 bitrate or simply lossless.
 
Get into this if you want to enjoy music with good headphones, otherwise it's pretty useless, to be honest with you. 

Thank you, you were helpful.

 
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You've got that backwards. A 16-bit, 44.1kHz WAV file is identical in quality (with a different file wrapper and bit arrangement) to a CDDA (Compact Disc Digital Audio) track. Its bitrate is 1411kbps, though this is usually considered meaningless because, bit-for-bit, there is absolutely no difference from the same track on a CD (incidentally WAV is just a format, and as such can support higher or lower bitrates and bit depths if needed).
 
Conversely, the typical low quality MP3 you're likely to find floating around the Internet is 128kbps at either 44.1kHz or 48kHz. MP3s offered by Amazon and other online music stores are typically 256kbps. All of these are lossy, meaning that parts of the musical information have been removed in order to make the file sizes smaller. Clever programming ensures that the parts we're least likely to miss are removed first, but as the bitrate gets lower, the loss becomes more noticeable. Good headphones will magnify this deficit. This is why a lot of Head-Fi'ers insist on lossless formats like FLAC because they don't actually involve any loss of information.
 
EDIT: Geez. Everything I just said is redundant. I've got to learn to type faster!

Thank you, you were extremely helpful. When I referred to wavs I was thinking of the sound effects from CS 1.6 ...and trying to record my voice with Sound Recorder when I was a kid. Haha not really good comparisons but those were the last times I used wav.


 
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we had like a 12 page thread on this subject about 2 weeks ago. Only one single person in the thread who claimed to be able to easily tell the difference between mp3 and lossless was able to do so when pushed to ABX (bless him he actually posted logs to prove it), but he was also fair enough to admit that he wasn't able to ABX better than 50% on the very next song he tried.
 
Me personally, I can't ABX LAME -v6 (~130kbps) most of the time. I guess I have "bad ears", although music certainly sounds pretty damn sweet to them. *shrug*
 
That said, that's a LAME rip directly from lossless or the original CD. It is quite possible to find complete and utter crap rips on the web that have a bitrate of 256kbps or 320kbps.
 
Also, I agree that we've been trolled.

You are not helpful.
 
 
Now, my next important question is, Where can I find lossless stuff that will actually sound good on my AD700s?!
 
Oh yeah, I really don't know how to put flac on my ipod...anyone show me how to do that?

 

[Skarecrow77]

 
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You are not helpful.
 
 
Now, my next important question is, Where can I find lossless stuff that will actually sound good on my AD700s?!
 
Oh yeah, I really don't know how to put flac on my ipod...anyone show me how to do that?

 
Why am I not helpful?
 
So far as I know, there's really only one good way to put FLAC on ipod, and that's via Rockbox (which is a pretty damn big change). I use rockbox and love it, but it requires you to be a bit beyond casual with your ipod.
http://www.rockbox.org
 
if you are not a fan of the idea of custom firmware (or you have an ipod that rockbox doesn't support yet), your best bet is probably apple lossless, which so far as I know all modern ipods support and decodes to be bit-for-bit identical to FLAC (and WAV and the original CD audio)
 
 
Proglover, I believe this is the thread in question:
http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/531639/after-listening-to-flac-alac-i-can-t-go-back
 
Edit: something I should probably mention... there isn't much need for lossless on a portable. generally the DACs aren't good enough to warrant it, nor are you listening in locations or with a significant enough rig where you can really appreciate the difference between lossless audio files and a quality lossy setting. As I said earlier, I can't reliably ABX (that is, I can't pass a blind listening test) most songs with an encoding setting of LAME -v 6 (which is equivalent to ~130kbps) on my home setup which has good dacs, a quality amp, and respectable headphones, let alone my portable setup with consumer dac, no amp, and modest heapdhone. Generally the idea for something with limited storage space is to find the point at which you can't tell the difference on the vast majority of your music (and can barely notice when you do), and encode everything at that. For most people that seems to be somewhere between -v 5 to -v 2 on portables. I know that some of the newer ipod classics have a huge amount of storage space, but encoding a few hundred albums in lossless will eat that up easily.