[JohnnyLightOn]

^ With respect to motorcycle riding, your sense of hearing is unnecessary. It can sometimes be helpful, but proper riding technique requires you to visually scan all directions for any potential threats. If you need your hearing, you aren't doing it right. This assumes the music is not otherwise distracting. But earplugs/earphones themselves are not dangerous when riding properly.

 

[k2snowboards88]

I use lossless files on my ipod and iphone. I can't tell difference in detail of the instruments, but i can reliably hear a difference in the slight echoes of the studio and reverberations. It just doesn't give quite the same presence. that said, i was using both 320 aac and lossless. so i could choose which to load onto my devices and listen to on my stereo, but i recently got lazy and deleted all the 320 aac to simplify things. I'm happier for it. Of course now i need an ipod classic because my 30gb ipod no longer holds all of my music

 

[Inks]

To answer the earlier question, flac and wav are both lossless so there's no difference there.

 

[logiatype]

Deleted*

 

[Brighten]

If lossless sounds better (even if it by a fairly small margin), why would you spend money on other high-end audio equipment (especially on things like portable amplifiers and 100+ headphones) and use lesser quality files?

I mean, your not going to be listening to thousands of songs per day. Just put what you like on your portable and jam out to it that day.

What I like best about using lossless on my 16gb iPod Touch is that I am forced to listen to music that I put on it.

Sometimes, I tend to over listen to a lot of new albums I get and music that I haven't listened to that much becomes drowned in the new. When I put music on my iPod that I haven't come to terms with (but I enjoy their overall sound), I ultimately come to love the albums I would have otherwise liked down the road (or not at all if I had just stuck with my favorites

).

Stuff like The Smiths, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Boston are bands like this that I have fallen in love with due to "forced" listening.

 

[DJGeorgeT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by yawdapaah /img/forum/go_quote.gif I found that the higher frequencies sound "better" with wav vs lossy files. There's also a lot more "energy" in the music. I know those are poor choices of words but there's a difference. Is it worth the hassle and space, nope.

mp3s are specially bad because they cut off a lot of the high frequencies; therefore, the highs can either sound harsh or veiled. Vorbis-ogg is a much better alternative.

 

[Fireescape]

I have a Creative 30g Vision M with a customer line out to a LDM+ amp (soon to be a Meier Move) and a pair of ATH-AD900's and I can defiantly hear the difference between 320bit mp3's and Wav files. I use Foobar2000 to convert flac files to Wav and they are crisper and cleaner sounding. I would rather have 1000 great sounding tracks then 3000 good sounding ones.

 

[justaguy93]

Quote:

I would rather have 1000 great sounding tracks then 3000 good sounding ones.

Agreed. The one drawback of the ipod revolution has been the lessening of quality of music, when technology should be taking us in the other direction. I understand why we use lossy, but I don't understand why it isn't everyone's end goal to do away with it as soon as it's practical. The constant arguments I see from both music lovers and audio equipment companies is that lossy is good enough rather than lossy is a necessary evil at this point, which tends to worry me.

 

[baneat]

I think the loud parts and the soft parts of music are less contrasted on lossy formats.

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by yawdapaah /img/forum/go_quote.gif I found that the higher frequencies sound "better" with wav vs lossy files. There's also a lot more "energy" in the music. I know those are poor choices of words but there's a difference. Is it worth the hassle and space, nope.

No wonder! Especially not if you refer to MP3 as the lossy files.
Cause ex. LAME run the stream through a low-pass filter as part of encoding. Removing the highest frequencies... Bad, bad!

 

[paaj]

interesting as this discussion may be, Apple just made this discussion obsolete, the new Ipod Touches don't really support Lossless files (officially they do but with lots of hickups so it's unlistenable) now I had to convert to AAC... it just doesn't feel right, spending all this money and then having to skimp on the file-quality

 

[Samjones]

Quote:

Originally Posted by paaj /img/forum/go_quote.gif interesting as this discussion may be, Apple just made this discussion obsolete, the new Ipod Touches don't really support Lossless files (officially they do but with lots of hickups so it's unlistenable) now I had to convert to AAC... it just doesn't feel right, spending all this money and then having to skimp on the file-quality

Thats sucks!
What type of hickups are we talking about. Since we're talking about Apple here I'm guessing a few.

 

[DJGeorgeT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by krmathis /img/forum/go_quote.gif No wonder! Especially not if you refer to MP3 as the lossy files. Cause ex. LAME run the stream through a low-pass filter as part of encoding. Removing the highest frequencies... Bad, bad!

People still listen to mp3s?

OGG is amazing although I think it adds sounds of its own and may sound at times unfaithful to the original, it is still much better than the mp3 format.

I converted 200 wav files to 500kbit ogg last night and I have been enjoying them all day.

 

[NajoBB]

I use mostly Apple lossless.

 

[Wiggy Fuzz]

i use only apple lossless and wav (wav was for my creative zen 8GB plain zen nothing).

apple lossless, simply because i can, on a 120GB classic i have just under 2000 tracks, and have about 60GB free, just leaves room to grow and expand.