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Same. It's crazy to me that people are saying that they can hear the difference between 24-bit 192khz recordings and something like 320Kbps MP3 or 192 VBR (whic

Same. It's crazy to me that people are saying that they can hear the difference between 24-bit 192khz recordings and something like 320Kbps MP3 or 192 VBR (which is what most of my personal collection is at). Back in the day on [huge;y famous private torrent tracker], FLAC and 192k VBR were the gold standards, with most opting for the VBR version. I personally have some VERY nice headphones, speakers, and sources (Senn HD800s, Westone ES60, KEF LS50, RME ADI-2 Pro, etc), and I can't hear the difference between this high-bitrate stuff and the lower encodes. I CAN hear a HUGE difference between bad recordings and good, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying my favorite albums. I have other headphones, speakers, IEMs, and sources for different needs, for example working out...I like my Jaybird Tarah Pros, and even though they're not "audiophile", I've still had tons of enjoyment with them doing things like skateboarding, mountain biking, and riding my motorcycle. Horses for courses. The HD800s is NOT great for bass-heavy music, so in that case, I'll switch to a Shure 1540 or Beyer DT1770, which even though they're more in the higher-end mid-fi range, have each brought me many hours of pleasure over the years. This is a fun hobby, but it's possible to make it less fun by arguing on the internet with people about it. If it sounds good TO YOU, and it's worth the price TO YOU, then never let someone make you feel bad about it. Some people buy $10k cables (or "worse" imo, cable elevators [e.g. https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/the-finest-cable-elevators-you-ever-auditioned https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/the-finest-cable-elev... ]. I think that those are ridiculous, but some people swear by them, and that's their choice. I'm the guy with the inner tube under the turntable playing with air pressure, because I love a good hack and have a penchant for DIY. I've built speakers that sound bad, but I've always learned something from every build. If you want TRUE REFERENCE sound, look up exactly what gear your favorite recording studio uses, and buy the same set-up. Otherwise, just have fun :)

leeoniya 8y ago
yeah, for biking/skiing i use a-JAYS Five. for traveling 1MORE Quad Driver, for at-home audio Sennheiser HD 6XX and for gaming Klipsch ProMedia 2.1. the PC has an Asus Essence STX II 7.1 and onboard Realtek ALC1220 (surprisingly great, btw). anyone who claims to hear a difference between 24-bit 192khz and a 320Kbps CBR MP3 is drinking some good kool-aid. there's a great quote by Alan Parsons: "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment."
- teknico 8y ago
  I once went to an audiophile's place. He had one wall covered with equipment, paid tens of thousand of euros (actually liras, back in the day). He had twenty records. Ten of them were test signals.
rorykoehler 8y ago
I can hear the difference between them but honestly I listen to Spotify on highest quality setting (320Kbps I think?) for my everyday because it's convenient and already sounds great. I'm listening in an imperfect environment anyways with environmental noise from outside and a non-treated room. My main benchmark is does the codec give me listening fatigue which, for example, Soundcloud and 128Kbps does but 320Kbps doesn't. As an aside people who swear by 24-bit audio don't even understand what bit rate does in context of audio. It's only useful in the studio context. Edit: Not sure why I'm getting down voted. I can explain the difference as added sparkle in the transient high end frequencies. My hypothesis is that the presence of frequencies outside of the range of our ears affect the frequencies within our hearing range. It's pretty common to have to re-EQ the whole track after EQing one instrument in a mix so this concept is just being applied outside our hearing frequency spectrum Also I would like to point out that higher bandwidth audio doesn't necessarily sound better to me, just different.
- atoav 8y ago
  I work in Film Postproduction and work as a soundesigner or re-recording mixer and also mix music from time to time. In audio production you can really feel the difference between 16 bit Audio and 24 bit. Just like in photography were RAW only really makes a difference when you start to manipulate the data you really start to hear the difference between 16 and 24 bit once you work with recordings. 24 Bit allows more “shades” of loudness between the loidest signal and absolute silence. This means the above statements depend on the dynamic range of the recording, which is arguably too low in these days. As an output format 16bit should be enough for most scenarios and except for a few edge cases hearing the difference of a well mastered 16bit recording to the same thing in 24 bit should be nearly impossible. This however refers all to uncompressed audio. Depending on your audio gear you can definitly can hear a difference between uncompressed/lossless and lossy mp3 compression even at 320kbps. The same is true for 330kbps vs 128kbps mp3. I must admit that I cannot differenciate between uncompressed and opus 256kbps. If you do anything that needs audio compression I strongly recommend looking at the Opus Codec
- cjhanks 8y ago
  I upvoted you, but you're wrong. 24bit audio depth matters, especially in jazz and classical recordings. You notice both subharmonics and superharmonics missing. Particularly when their phase is slow in time.
jdietrich 8y ago
>It's crazy to me that people are saying that they can hear the difference between 24-bit 192khz recordings and something like 320Kbps MP3 or 192 VBR With some decent headphones and a basic knowledge of compression artifacts, it's not particularly difficult to tell the difference in a blind test. You can diff a FLAC and MP3 recording using phase inversion, which allows you to train your ears to recognise compression artifacts. Modern perceptual encoders are very good, but they're not perfect. It's not a difference I particularly care about, but it is there.
- posterboy 8y ago
  > 24-bit 192khz Chances are my soundblaster soundcard does not support either of those. Similarly, you can't just diff two different recording of two different sample rates without conversion, so the conversion would either introduce artifacts if upsampling (and if it wouldn't, you wouldn't hear a difference) or render any advantage obsolete if downsampling the high sample rate. Obviously depends on the algorithm used, but you should target whatever your soundcard supports.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    The 24/192 part is irrelevant - there's no audible difference between properly-mastered 16/44.1 and 24/192 audio. No adult human can hear anything above 22kHz; 16 bits provides 96dB of undithered dynamic range and ~120dB of perceived dynamic range with shaped dither. You can hear the degradation from 16/44.1 bitstream to 320kbps or 192kbps VBR MP3, but you need good gear and good ears. I'm perfectly happy to listen to properly encoded MP3s because the difference is very slight, but I'd still use uncompressed or lossless formats for archival purposes.
cjhanks 8y ago
There are always a few tell tale signs that audiophiles can pick out. In an analog mix, you should never expect two instruments to share a quantization... But that's what you hear with compression. The cymbal quantization is dependent on the guitar line and the tom/kick bleeds into the bass drum. The attack of the bass bleeds into the guitar, etc. If compressors had access to the raw channels, this is not so much a problem - you can keep each band stable. But they don't, they operate on the frequency domain of the entire mix.
ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago
> If you want TRUE REFERENCE sound, look up exactly what gear your favorite recording studio uses, and buy the same set-up. Otherwise, just have fun :) It's interesting how much audiophiles focus and are ready to spend on gear when acoustic treatment (including planning and building) of the room brings undeniable and immediate impact, and in it's basic form can be orders of magnitude cheaper than all those insane RCA and power cables, supporters, pyramids and whatnot. Just buying the same gear without proper acoustics won't bring you the "TRUE REFERENCE".
- teknico 8y ago
  This. Just looking at a graph for resonances in a room, or moving around while playing a low-freq tone, is enough to give you an idea of the enormous difference a properly treated room would make.

leeoniya 8y ago

yeah, for biking/skiing i use a-JAYS Five. for traveling 1MORE Quad Driver, for at-home audio Sennheiser HD 6XX and for gaming Klipsch ProMedia 2.1. the PC has an Asus Essence STX II 7.1 and onboard Realtek ALC1220 (surprisingly great, btw). anyone who claims to hear a difference between 24-bit 192khz and a 320Kbps CBR MP3 is drinking some good kool-aid. there's a great quote by Alan Parsons: "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment."

teknico 8y ago
I once went to an audiophile's place. He had one wall covered with equipment, paid tens of thousand of euros (actually liras, back in the day). He had twenty records. Ten of them were test signals.

rorykoehler 8y ago

I can hear the difference between them but honestly I listen to Spotify on highest quality setting (320Kbps I think?) for my everyday because it's convenient and already sounds great. I'm listening in an imperfect environment anyways with environmental noise from outside and a non-treated room. My main benchmark is does the codec give me listening fatigue which, for example, Soundcloud and 128Kbps does but 320Kbps doesn't. As an aside people who swear by 24-bit audio don't even understand what bit rate does in context of audio. It's only useful in the studio context. Edit: Not sure why I'm getting down voted. I can explain the difference as added sparkle in the transient high end frequencies. My hypothesis is that the presence of frequencies outside of the range of our ears affect the frequencies within our hearing range. It's pretty common to have to re-EQ the whole track after EQing one instrument in a mix so this concept is just being applied outside our hearing frequency spectrum Also I would like to point out that higher bandwidth audio doesn't necessarily sound better to me, just different.

atoav 8y ago
I work in Film Postproduction and work as a soundesigner or re-recording mixer and also mix music from time to time. In audio production you can really feel the difference between 16 bit Audio and 24 bit. Just like in photography were RAW only really makes a difference when you start to manipulate the data you really start to hear the difference between 16 and 24 bit once you work with recordings. 24 Bit allows more “shades” of loudness between the loidest signal and absolute silence. This means the above statements depend on the dynamic range of the recording, which is arguably too low in these days. As an output format 16bit should be enough for most scenarios and except for a few edge cases hearing the difference of a well mastered 16bit recording to the same thing in 24 bit should be nearly impossible. This however refers all to uncompressed audio. Depending on your audio gear you can definitly can hear a difference between uncompressed/lossless and lossy mp3 compression even at 320kbps. The same is true for 330kbps vs 128kbps mp3. I must admit that I cannot differenciate between uncompressed and opus 256kbps. If you do anything that needs audio compression I strongly recommend looking at the Opus Codec
cjhanks 8y ago
I upvoted you, but you're wrong. 24bit audio depth matters, especially in jazz and classical recordings. You notice both subharmonics and superharmonics missing. Particularly when their phase is slow in time.

jdietrich 8y ago

>It's crazy to me that people are saying that they can hear the difference between 24-bit 192khz recordings and something like 320Kbps MP3 or 192 VBR With some decent headphones and a basic knowledge of compression artifacts, it's not particularly difficult to tell the difference in a blind test. You can diff a FLAC and MP3 recording using phase inversion, which allows you to train your ears to recognise compression artifacts. Modern perceptual encoders are very good, but they're not perfect. It's not a difference I particularly care about, but it is there.

posterboy 8y ago
> 24-bit 192khz Chances are my soundblaster soundcard does not support either of those. Similarly, you can't just diff two different recording of two different sample rates without conversion, so the conversion would either introduce artifacts if upsampling (and if it wouldn't, you wouldn't hear a difference) or render any advantage obsolete if downsampling the high sample rate. Obviously depends on the algorithm used, but you should target whatever your soundcard supports.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  The 24/192 part is irrelevant - there's no audible difference between properly-mastered 16/44.1 and 24/192 audio. No adult human can hear anything above 22kHz; 16 bits provides 96dB of undithered dynamic range and ~120dB of perceived dynamic range with shaped dither. You can hear the degradation from 16/44.1 bitstream to 320kbps or 192kbps VBR MP3, but you need good gear and good ears. I'm perfectly happy to listen to properly encoded MP3s because the difference is very slight, but I'd still use uncompressed or lossless formats for archival purposes.

cjhanks 8y ago

There are always a few tell tale signs that audiophiles can pick out. In an analog mix, you should never expect two instruments to share a quantization... But that's what you hear with compression. The cymbal quantization is dependent on the guitar line and the tom/kick bleeds into the bass drum. The attack of the bass bleeds into the guitar, etc. If compressors had access to the raw channels, this is not so much a problem - you can keep each band stable. But they don't, they operate on the frequency domain of the entire mix.

ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago

> If you want TRUE REFERENCE sound, look up exactly what gear your favorite recording studio uses, and buy the same set-up. Otherwise, just have fun :) It's interesting how much audiophiles focus and are ready to spend on gear when acoustic treatment (including planning and building) of the room brings undeniable and immediate impact, and in it's basic form can be orders of magnitude cheaper than all those insane RCA and power cables, supporters, pyramids and whatnot. Just buying the same gear without proper acoustics won't bring you the "TRUE REFERENCE".

teknico 8y ago
This. Just looking at a graph for resonances in a room, or moving around while playing a low-freq tone, is enough to give you an idea of the enormous difference a properly treated room would make.