[bigshot]

I'll be interested to see the results of the lossy vs lossless listening test.

 

[castleofargh]

  Welcome to "sound science" --- 
 
Where smartphones are considered high quality music devices.
 
And MP3 is the best thing since sliced bread. Good thing I shrunk that 200mb album down to 20mb, now I can fit plenty on my 250mb hard drive. And it streams so nicely over my 56k dialup modem. Wait -- that was 20 years ago.
 
Wow. Wake up folks, "lossless" 16/44 is easy now. 24bit is easy too, and it's the masters.  A 64gb card costs $30 and will hold 150+ lossless albums.
 
No more "consumer" format needed for us idiots to listen to.

as I just said in the pono topic, the good thing with digital audio is that it's up to us to pick the size.
for on the go music where I'll hear my footsteps into my IEM, or the noise of a train/plane, having more albums still seem more interesting to me than having the ultimate sound I don't really hear.
with 64giga I have almost all of my music in mp3(not counting all the classical stuff that does amount to a good lot more, but I find classical difficult to listen on the go because of the important changes in dynamic and loudness). to get the same in flac I would need what? about 4times the space, so 256giga of space. it's coming but not the norm just yet and 128giga card are still very expensive in µSD (I would love SD cards instead for audio).
and for some 24/96 in flac I would need about ... what? 10times the space of a mp3. that's 600giga!!!!!!!!!
so let's not pretend that highres is so convenient just yet, because even thanks to flac, it's not. of course I don't need almost all of my music albums on the go, but let's be practical, once it's done it's done. not that it's so much fun to synchronize my library all the time, even less so because I usually don't charge my DAP on the computer(too slow).
I don't go for mp3 just to piss you off, I have better stuff to do with my life. I do it because to this day it's still what makes more sense to me and still let most of my DAPs play for a longer time. when any DAP will have 500giga of storage and a real long battery life, I obviously will stop using mp3 and go for flac. because flac is what I archive so it will be easier to only use one format.
 
 
 
but nobody is forcing others to use mp3. [troll ON] in fact big shot usually suggest AAC [troll OFF].

 

[headwhacker]

MP3 (320k) and AAC 256K bumped down from high-res copy just makes iPods (old and new) very competitive with newer boutique DAPs. In fact I have less pain and restrictions going with the iPod while on the go than with an audiophile DAP (Bigger, clunky interface and faulty basic music player function like gapless playback).
 
On the go scenario even with uber isolating iems still not conducive to critical/audiophile listening.
 
Don't just take too much of what people say about needing a better player than an iPod or anything similar. Sonic differences may well be attributed to headphone pairing and individual's taste. Don't expect night and day differences unless you are comparing DAPs with your eyes wide open. Blind testing just makes any differences subtle if non-existing. 

 

[krismusic]

Welcome to "sound science" --- 

Where smartphones are considered high quality music devices.

And MP3 is the best thing since sliced bread. Good thing I shrunk that 200mb album down to 20mb, now I can fit plenty on my 250mb hard drive. And it streams so nicely over my 56k dialup modem. Wait -- that was 20 years ago.

Wow. Wake up folks, "lossless" 16/44 is easy now. 24bit is easy too, and it's the masters.  A 64gb card costs $30 and will hold 150+ lossless albums.

No more "consumer" format needed for us idiots to listen to.

You may well have some valid points. God knows why you are so aggressive about it.
I would be much more impressed if you took Bigshot's challenge and nailed it.

 

[Ruben123]

A 200mb album (small one?) And then compressed to 20mb... Well most of my 320kbps mp3s are 12 mb each for a average of 5 minutes. Do you listen to single albums or are you listening/comparing to 64kbps mp3 because they do sound horrible. 128 too, higher than that is quite acceptable.

 

[dprimary]

Even the first 5gig iPod with a mechanical scroll wheel did uncompressed audio. You would only get 9-10 albums on it. At the time most common players would have been lucky to hold two uncompressed songs.

 

[RRod]

It's just the typical hi-res-apologist goal shift: when they talk about audibility, switch over to the wealth of hard drive space. Yes, when one can sit around next to several TB in disk space, you can have all your audio in 7.1 DSD512 if that's what you want. But some of us want to have our music on-the-go, and that means space becomes an issue (maybe not for people who have been listening to and re-buying the same 12 albums for the last 30 years in every new format).
 
My iPod Classic is 120GB. Much to my chagrin, this still seems to be on the high end of mobile capacity, even though it's 7 years old now. I have on the order of 1e3 CDs. That's 635GB as WAV files, assuming 60min stereo discs. FLAC gets me down to 270GB or so. Still over twice the capacity of my relatively high-capacity DAP. 256kbps AAC gets me down to 115GB. Voila! I can carry my entire collection on a 7-year-old DAP in a format that is audibly transparent to my ears in blind testing. That's worth something. Streaming is a tempting beast, but without access at work and without a smartphone, I'll be sticking with what I own myself for now.

 

[Tuco1965]

I use my Note 4 for my portable player. It handles all the formats that I use. I'm sure everyone has different needs, so a best player would boil down to whatever is required by the end user.

 

[Shaffer]

I had a girlfriend who was an accomplished pianist and quite a talented singer. Oh, wait, did you mean a different sort of portable music player?

 

[kr1st]

  I'll be interested to see the results of the lossy vs lossless listening test.

 
hey am interested in these test. how do i get access to it? if you could share. thanks!
 
re the Apple appreciation, here's a few old reads: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/1200 and https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/apple

 

[mironathetin]

I had a girlfriend who was an accomplished pianist and quite a talented singer. Oh, wait, did you mean a different sort of portable music player?

 
Did you have to carry her?
How was it, walking around with a woman and a piano on the shoulder?

 

[castleofargh]

I gave up on that, you pretty much have to recharge your musician 3 times a day and while a charge can go fast, it costs a lot more than electricity. also at night they enter sleep mode. who would want to use something with such a battery life!

 

[Shaffer]

I gave up on that, you pretty much have to recharge your musician 3 times a day and while a charge can go fast, it costs a lot more than electricity. also at night they enter sleep mode. who would want to use something with such a battery life!

I recharged her with no monetary cost.

 

[dprimary]

   
Did you have to carry her?
How was it, walking around with a woman and a piano on the shoulder?

Anything is portable with enough trucks.

 

[FFBookman]

You may well have some valid points. God knows why you are so aggressive about it.
I would be much more impressed if you took Bigshot's challenge and nailed it.

I walked into that trap. I'm the guy that says all those A/B tests are garbage unless it's your material, your masters, or your listening environment. If the test is specificallt set up to trick you it will. It's very easy to trick ears in a serial unit test because they do not operate natively like this.
 
But "bigshot" and "casteofarggg" are so convinced that their 1998 quicktime videos look better than my bluray player.
 
 
I honestly wonder about people who even want that to be true.
 Why do you want 300k bitrate to sound the same as 1000k or even 4000k?
 
How depressing is it to live in a world where you do believe that 400k = 4000k, and that your human senses are so horrible that they can't even tell  (nor can your basic math concept).
 
?  I just don't get it.
 
You people should be studied. What else does this concept apply to?  Does your 1 megapixel look better than a 5mp camera?  Does your $30 behringer mic sound better than a $4000 audio technica?  Does your 3000 pound car hold the road better than a 5000 pound car?