4 ms·

I feel sorry for people who can tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav because they then have to spend extra on headphones and pono players and am

I feel sorry for people who can tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav because they then have to spend extra on headphones and pono players and amps and whatnot just to elimate the perceived difference that the rest of us are happily oblivious of.

Shivatron 11y ago
While I can tell the difference (6/6 in this test), in practice, it doesn't actually matter to me personally. I'm usually listening to music while there are a cacophony of other noises going on (talking/cooking/driving), so the slight difference in the way cymbals are rendered or the loss of nuance in a large bass hit are far from the primary degradations to my listening experience...
hzhou321 11y ago
It is not really about people IMHO but about their headphone and amplifier. Better equipment require more expensive up-keeping, that is usual.
- scosman 11y ago
  Exactly. Most people could hear it with pro equipment. It's a dangerous cycle. Buy better gear, hear more, repeat.
72deluxe 11y ago
It's all about ear training! I couldn't tune a guitar by ear at one point but now know how out of tune a guitar is by ear, and know if their string is sharp or flat (it helps to remember a song in that key and replay that note in your head compared to what you're hearing). The same is true of audio quality. I thought 128kbps MP3s were fine for years (I even had some MP2s somewhere) but now they sound like sludge.
Jack000 11y ago
yes, but this is like saying you'd prefer poorer eyesight just so you can wear glasses as a fashion statement. I have the same problem with beer - people seem to love it, but all I ever taste is sour and bitter. Sure I save money on beer, but it's an experience I miss out on.
paulmd 11y ago
The people I'm jealous of are the people who can listen to 128kbps and below - at that point I can't enjoy the music because I fixate on all the compression artifacts. I prefer to keep FLACs (lossless compression, so just like a WAV except smaller) myself, just so I can re-encode to my lossy format/bitrate of choice without incurring generational loss. 320kbps is probably clean enough but who cares, disk space is cheap. But for listening, 320kbps MP3 is A-OK, I don't know whether or not I could ABX it but I don't hear enough artifacts to trigger me. For more situations where size matters, I use V0 or V1 (depending on what I'm playing it on and the type of music). At V1 I start hearing a few artifacts in tough passages, but it takes an enormous chunk out of the filesize relative to FLAC. I used to have an iRiver H320 - with replacement firmware (RockBox) I could even play FLAC on it. I eventually replaced the 20GB HDD with a 16GB CompactFlash as a ghetto SSD, used to get like 20 hours of battery life on it. It could also do optical out, recorded in MP3 or WAV, and was super easy to change parts on. Great player for a hacker. I used it daily and hard for probably 7 years before the screws would no longer grab, I need to get it back out and see if I can get it going again.

Shivatron 11y ago

While I can tell the difference (6/6 in this test), in practice, it doesn't actually matter to me personally. I'm usually listening to music while there are a cacophony of other noises going on (talking/cooking/driving), so the slight difference in the way cymbals are rendered or the loss of nuance in a large bass hit are far from the primary degradations to my listening experience...

hzhou321 11y ago

It is not really about people IMHO but about their headphone and amplifier. Better equipment require more expensive up-keeping, that is usual.

scosman 11y ago
Exactly. Most people could hear it with pro equipment. It's a dangerous cycle. Buy better gear, hear more, repeat.

72deluxe 11y ago

It's all about ear training! I couldn't tune a guitar by ear at one point but now know how out of tune a guitar is by ear, and know if their string is sharp or flat (it helps to remember a song in that key and replay that note in your head compared to what you're hearing). The same is true of audio quality. I thought 128kbps MP3s were fine for years (I even had some MP2s somewhere) but now they sound like sludge.

Jack000 11y ago

yes, but this is like saying you'd prefer poorer eyesight just so you can wear glasses as a fashion statement. I have the same problem with beer - people seem to love it, but all I ever taste is sour and bitter. Sure I save money on beer, but it's an experience I miss out on.

paulmd 11y ago

The people I'm jealous of are the people who can listen to 128kbps and below - at that point I can't enjoy the music because I fixate on all the compression artifacts. I prefer to keep FLACs (lossless compression, so just like a WAV except smaller) myself, just so I can re-encode to my lossy format/bitrate of choice without incurring generational loss. 320kbps is probably clean enough but who cares, disk space is cheap. But for listening, 320kbps MP3 is A-OK, I don't know whether or not I could ABX it but I don't hear enough artifacts to trigger me. For more situations where size matters, I use V0 or V1 (depending on what I'm playing it on and the type of music). At V1 I start hearing a few artifacts in tough passages, but it takes an enormous chunk out of the filesize relative to FLAC. I used to have an iRiver H320 - with replacement firmware (RockBox) I could even play FLAC on it. I eventually replaced the 20GB HDD with a 16GB CompactFlash as a ghetto SSD, used to get like 20 hours of battery life on it. It could also do optical out, recorded in MP3 or WAV, and was super easy to change parts on. Great player for a hacker. I used it daily and hard for probably 7 years before the screws would no longer grab, I need to get it back out and see if I can get it going again.