[dazzerfong]

 
Your headphones make the difference more than anything.

I'd having argued that the mastering of the song is the top.

 

[Duncan]

I'd having argued that the mastering of the song is the top.

Whilst I would agree that if mastered terribly it'll sound bad on whatever you listen with, that is different to the bitrate discussion, I assume where bigshot was going with the point is that it would be better to spend (throwing random numbers out here) $1000 on a pair of headphones to listen to 320kbps files, rather than $200, listening to FLAC (deliberately ignoring the hi-res point here)...

 

[dazzerfong]

Whilst I would agree that if mastered terribly it'll sound bad on whatever you listen with, that is different to the bitrate discussion, I assume where bigshot was going with the point is that it would be better to spend (throwing random numbers out here) $1000 on a pair of headphones to listen to 320kbps files, rather than $200, listening to FLAC (deliberately ignoring the hi-res point here)...

Oh, of course. Transducers + song makes by far the biggest differences: everything else is just absolute nitpicking.

 

[bigshot]

  I'd having argued that the mastering of the song is the top.

I'm assuming they listen to well mastered music, but yes, you are correct in that.

 

[interpolate]

320K MP3 is pretty good although I started ripping my CD's as FLAC at 16-bit with no compression. In reality my brain and ears won't be able to differentiate between the CD or mid-quality rendered MP3 however you don't know unless you try.

 

[kraken2109]

  320K MP3 is pretty good although I started ripping my CD's as FLAC at 16-bit with no compression. In reality my brain and ears won't be able to differentiate between the CD or mid-quality rendered MP3 however you don't know unless you try.

FLAC is compressed. Just lossless compression, like a zip or rar file.

 

[interpolate]

Yes I am aware. Or was that just for clarification?

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I think it's bad in the sense that anything over 48k gets progressively harder to process (other than just decode and spit out), especially on portable hardware. And DSD is impossible to process without interpolating / decimating it first, which leads many audiophiles to cry foul (but then many audiophiles cry foul over any processing on general principle :rolleyes: )

If it isn't obvious to most here already, processing at the end of the digital chain before amplification and transduction is essential for high fidelity--it's physically impossible for loudspeakers to attain optimal phase and frequency response, in a real room, without equalization and more advanced digital room correction processing. I'll leave the equivalent elaboration on headphone audio to somebody else... :rolleyes:

 

[kraken2109]

  Yes I am aware. Or was that just for clarification?

Your post said 'I started ripping my CD's as FLAC at 16-bit with no compression'

 

[bigshot]

He meant lossy compression

 

[interpolate]

Yes sorry, I should have been more exact between dictionary and lossy frequency rejection. To be honest, I think the naming convention for these do get lost in translation.
 
I was referring to Compression Size 0 which essentially means the codec does not try to reduce the file in size by rejecting only minimum of repeat detail AFAIK (around 50%). To do this I used Mediamonkey which I licensed. 
 
You have to be sharp and on your toe with this forum. 

 
How MP3 encoders work is a little bit harder to explain....
 
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may00/articles/mp3.htm
 
So I'll let someone else do it on my behalf.

 

[caml]

  I was referring to Compression Size 0 which essentially means the codec does not try to reduce the file in size by rejecting only minimum of repeat detail AFAIK (around 50%).

 
Why don't you use maximum compression while encoding to FLAC ? It is a lossless format, you won't lose anything in terms of sound quality. Flac compression 0 or compression 8 both produce the exact same result once decoded and only differ in encoding time, cpu usage and of course resulting file size. The only reason not to use max compression ratio with flac or other lossless encoders is when you want to minimize cpu usage while playing, which is no concern on a full size computer but might be relevant on a portable player.

 

[limpidglitch]

   
Why don't you use maximum compression while encoding to FLAC ? It is a lossless format, you won't lose anything in terms of sound quality. Flac compression 0 or compression 8 both produce the exact same result once decoded and only differ in encoding time, cpu usage and of course resulting file size. The only reason not to use max compression ratio with flac or other lossless encoders is when you want to minimize cpu usage while playing, which is no concern on a full size computer but might be relevant on a portable player.

 
And the reduction in cpu usage on playback is pretty insignificant.
 
Decoding speed vs. compression ratio:

 
Source: lvqcl at HA

 

[interpolate]

It is going to be on a media player and the less computation used the better.

 

[bigshot]

Not necessarily. If you have enough oomph to just be able to do the job, that's all that matters. Extra oomph ain't gonna make it any better.