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Bullshit from the audiophile gossip forums / strawman to justify irrational no true purist audiophile religious dogma. MP3's can be encoded crappily as that art

Bullshit from the audiophile gossip forums / strawman to justify irrational no true purist audiophile religious dogma. MP3's can be encoded crappily as that article gleefully compares apples and oranges, or over-encoded resulting in huge file sizes given an original source encoding. Nyquist bandwidth is an incontrovertible fact of physics: depending on the audio stream rate of frequency changes, humans simply can't distinguish rapid changes following each other. Proper lossy encoding is a balance of file size vs. psychoacoustic artifacts. It's also likely compounded by an "expensive wine" / "sunk costs" placebo effect where people experience less pleasure due to perceived "cheapness" of not spending millions of dollars on scratchy, finnicky gear and not having to contend with dust. A blind test of an original playback from a record compared to a 320 kHz MP3 encoding human-indistinguishable from a raw PCM 48 kHz 16 bit recording of said analog playback is such that a $10 million bounty for anyone able to distinguish the two that would be safe from ever being collected. Physics wins, in-group zealotry fails. Can't wait for the Thunderf00t debunks vinyl Patreon video.

dTal 10y ago
Am I allowed to play the record through a surround matrix decoder? Because I'd claim your $10 million in a flash. This is true of basically any lossy audio encoding because phase information, which is used to reconstruct a surround field, is usually lost. Your statement would be correct for a lossless digital recording (which "audiophiles" often claim is still inferior to vinyl) but I think it's overstating the case for such a crime against fidelity as mp3. >Nyquist bandwidth is an incontrovertible fact of physics: depending on the audio stream rate of frequency changes, humans simply can't distinguish rapid changes following each other Can't make sense of this but it sounds super muddled. What humans can distinguish has nothing to do with Nyquist. Not sure what a "audio stream rate of frequency changes" is either. 320 kbps (not "kHz") mp3 is a waste of time if you ask me - no added value over lower-bitrate mp3. If you're willing to throw that kind of bandwidth at your audio, just spend a little extra and use FLAC.

dTal 10y ago

Am I allowed to play the record through a surround matrix decoder? Because I'd claim your $10 million in a flash. This is true of basically any lossy audio encoding because phase information, which is used to reconstruct a surround field, is usually lost. Your statement would be correct for a lossless digital recording (which "audiophiles" often claim is still inferior to vinyl) but I think it's overstating the case for such a crime against fidelity as mp3. >Nyquist bandwidth is an incontrovertible fact of physics: depending on the audio stream rate of frequency changes, humans simply can't distinguish rapid changes following each other Can't make sense of this but it sounds super muddled. What humans can distinguish has nothing to do with Nyquist. Not sure what a "audio stream rate of frequency changes" is either. 320 kbps (not "kHz") mp3 is a waste of time if you ask me - no added value over lower-bitrate mp3. If you're willing to throw that kind of bandwidth at your audio, just spend a little extra and use FLAC.