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[dedidio]

A short and pointless story with a moral (I'm sure others have been here)


I was merrily living my life away in the 'subjective camp' for a good few years now. "LAME mp3 @ 128 High quality is good enough for me, I can't hear the difference" I said.
They were happy days.

One day came along and I said "I've worked hard for my money. I'm going to spend a butt-load of money on some speakers, an amp and a good sound card"
I trotted off to my local audio shop and booked a few "listening"
I returned to my local audio shop the following week and was not impressed by what I heard

I went to the next shop further afield and booked a few "listening"
I returned to the next shop the following week and was not impressed by what I heard

After a few more weeks going more and more afield I was growing despondent, "If I'm spending this much money I want it to sound good" I cried

I went even further afield and found a shop that said they had what I wanted for about my budget and so I booked a "listening"
I returned to the shop the following week and was most impressed with what I heard, a grin formed from ear to ear.  "This is the system for me", I said.
The shop assistant then told me the price and I said "but that's more than the budget I gave".
He said "You did not deal with me last week, I was on holiday. Who specified this system for your budget?"
I replied "That dumbass out front!"
He said "Oh. Yes. He is a dumbass"
I said "Can I go for a coffee to think things over?"
He said "Sure"

I walked around and I thought about what I had heard and finally I decided to take the plunge.  "I could pay off the extra next month" I said.

I returned to the shop, paid the money, and left with a bit of paper telling me I had paid them some money.

I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
Finally, 7 to 10 days later, my purchase arrived and I did smile a smile of a thousand men.

I spent 4 hours unpacking, running cables, configuring settings and finally traipsed off to bed waiting for daylight to come and the volume to rise!

The morning dawned not a moment too soon, I ran down the stairs (well actually .... I walked down, had a coffee and a smoke, then another coffee, a sit, another coffee and a smoke, and another coffee), turned on my amp, turned up the volume (realised it was still early and turned the volume back down a bit), put in a "THX certified" dvd and pressed play.
Once again I smiled the smile of a thousand men.

Later that day ......

I returned to my new toy to choose some of my favourite tracks from my timeconsumingly(tm) ripped CD's, queued them up and pressed play.

Something was wrong.
These songs never used to sound like this.
These songs never used to sound this .... bad.

What could be wrong?
What is that stupid water sound I hear at the high end?
Is that ...?
Could that be ...?
A compression artifact?!?!

"Nooooo" I screamed into the sunset, "Now I have to rip them all again but use a lossless format!"

But as they say: Every cloud has a silver lining.
"At least I will save the excess of my costs by not 'going out' for a month while I rip my CD's again!"





Bottom line: You may not be able to hear differences now, but that's probably because your equipment isn't up to producing the range of sounds that the original copy contains.  Spend the money on the disk space and save yourself time in the future by ripping losslessly.  Personally I'm going to go with APE ripping in 'secure mode', probably because I've been with MJ/MC for a few years now and I can't imagine my support for them or their support for APE ever dropping

[Jakester]

Amen!

I wish more of the .mp3 crowd could experience this.

If you're willing to tell, what was your old system and what is your new system?  That will give people a data point on hardware thresholds for this sort of thing.  I never did the PC audio thing until after having my current HT setup, which is good enough to hear the differences.  So, I went 'secure' ripping to .ape and use ASIO for playback - see this thread for more on the ASIO issue http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=26238.0

[Matt]

That's why I wrote Monkey's Audio -- a stereo upgrade left me bummed with my MP3s.

I guess ignorance is bliss.

[hit_ny]

Sure if your music requires APE then by all means do it.

The test is simple, if its machine generated it compresses pretty darn well with LAME VBR (avg 200kbs), copy on to any mp3 player out there and enjoy the space savings and transmission costs.

Mp3s at 128 are a bad idea.  i stopped using them over  5 yrs ago.

[KingSparta]

I wish more of the .mp3 crowd could experience this.

You need good ears first mine went along time ago when the song "freebird" (before mp3) came out ever since then i can't hear too much.

but i can always say "What?" to my wife many times and get away with it.

[Robert Taylor]

My ears are perfectly happy with my collection of (mostly) VBR high/extreme MP3s, played thru a Yamaha amp via fibre from HTPC with onboard nForce chipset.

Like King, my ears are past their prime (too many years of loud live concerts, loud music in cars, etc.), so my MP3 collections sounds just fine, and I can fit my 18-20000 track collection on a 120Gb RAID array...

horses for courses...

[GHammer]

If MC either allowed APL files to work with MP3s, etc or if the CUE file support was finished, I'd probably archive the APEs I have and use MP3 or WMA day to day.

I like having the APEs around for those "Hey I need 12 hours of music for the train" moments. Much better quality when going from APE to any rate MP3/WMA than if you start with lossy.

And, even to an old guy with Ted Nugent ears, I do hear a small difference between MP3s and the APE files. Only on some songs though.

But, not enough difference to warrant buying new drives for my ever larger collection.

[Alex B]

I have same kind of thoughts as GHammer. My current way is to rip in the whole album APE/CUE format. Then I make the APL files and fix & add the tags.

My music collection would need over a terabyte of storage space if all of it was lossless (including the two backups I would like to have). It would be too much work for me to maintain that kind of storage space constantly. My increasing video collection will eventually need even more storage space.

That is why I make lossy compressed files at about 200-300 kbps for everyday use. I archive the newly ripped and tagged APE/CUE/APL albums to storage HDs. Those rack mounted HDs are not in constant use. I keep only a catalog of them on my main media computer.

I have searched for the best possible lossy format without a definitive answer. High-bitrate MPC is the most transparent format in my opinion, but MP3 has wider support and the quality difference is very small. Perhaps I will continue to use my old LAME standard "VBR preset extreme" and if I occasionally feel that a certain album deserves lossless I will keep that in the main library.

I would very much like to have a possibility to use MP3/APL files. For those albums that need gapless playback it would be a natural choice since I am already ripping the archived files in the whole album APE/CUE/APL format.

MC11 can play separate MP3 files gaplessly quite often, but sometimes I still hear errors. For my car or portable MP3 CD players I need to use the whole album MP3 files instead.

[jgourd]

Good advice for those who can afford it, and for those for whom technology has progressed enough.

I have about 26,000 songs, currently in MP3 at 320kbps.  They are stored on a FreeBSD server in my basement using RAID 5 and Samba for Windows sharing.  It's about 270GB of disk space. 

If I go to lossless, that will at least double, possibly close to triple the disk space requirements.  While I can easily expand the RAID 5 storage to handle the increased space requirements, I also need to consider backups.

Currently the largest single disk is 400GB, and that won't hold the backup for lossless.  It does hold the backup for 320kbps.

Maybe in a year or two I'll be able to switch to lossless, meanwhile the 320kbps is more than adequate for my listening needs.

When I want to listen to high-quality tunes, I pop a DVD-Audio disc into the player, feed it into a Benchmark Media DAC-1 converter at 96kHz/24bits, and then directly into the power amp..... 

The real question is: Do youy need 26,000 songs? I used to have 50,000+ songs and found that you just don't need that many. After a horrific crash I re-ripped everything to OGG (mistake, mistake, mistake) and I pretty much live with the 10,000 tunes I have now quite happily. I'll eventually replace the OGGs with APEs. Since for some reason, no hardware manufacturer will make a portable OGG player I always have to transcode. If I am always transcoding, I may as well start with APE and not OGG.

[GHammer]

The real question is: Do youy need 26,000 songs? I used to have 50,000+ songs and found that you just don't need that many. After a horrific crash I re-ripped everything to OGG (mistake, mistake, mistake) and I pretty much live with the 10,000 tunes I have now quite happily. I'll eventually replace the OGGs with APEs. Since for some reason, no hardware manufacturer will make a portable OGG player I always have to transcode. If I am always transcoding, I may as well start with APE and not OGG.

I thought iRiver played OGG format. But only certain bitrates.

And truly, on a portable I can't hear enough difference to worry about the differences in this or that format. WMA, MP3, OGG, matters little to me.

I'm kind of deciding along your lines too. I have SO many songs that I never listen to I have recently started forcing unheard random play.

But as I do it I am rating them. Any that fall below a 3 will likely get the axe one day. And if I do that I can get rid of the complete CD APE file and choose to keep the selections as APE or some other lossless format. Because I will still have the need to transcode from time to time no matter how many songs I keep in my library.

[KingSparta]

Since for some reason, no hardware manufacturer will make a portable OGG player

I would not hold my breath waiting on a "APE Media Player" (However it does sound good).

I can picture the Commercial with an APE in a cage throwing some Samsonite luggage around and the Luggage brakes open and out falls the "APE Player" and the next thing you will see is the ape with head phones on listening to her "APE player"

a cutaway "1 Year later" and 2 baby APEs and mom and dad each are listening to there APE player with some small Luggage at the feet of the baby APEs

[Mr ChriZ]

Well.
From day 1 almost I recorded in the highest quality I could.

Then I went out and bought as good a stereo as  I could.

And I plugged it all in.

Then I just wished I could afford the decent size room to put it all in 
Grrr
Love sitting on my speakers in my Box cupboard really!

(hriZ

[hit_ny]

I would not hold my breath waiting on a "APE Media Player" (However it does sound good).

i would agree with this.

Lots of people questioned why Apple came out with the lossless ALAC codec, when FLAC would have done the job just as well (if not better)

The reason i was given to believe was control, Apple controls the ALAC format, and does not have to depend on what the FLAC commitee says or does. Isn't it likely other manufactuers would do the same. Sony has ATRAC, that leaves the hungrier Korean company iRiver who might consider it.

There is another reason we wont see APE immediately is thats its expensive in terms of decoding compared to FLAC.  Not a problem on a desktop but makes it harder to get more hours of music on a portable player.

Its possible as tech improves, this might not be so much of a problem. But we always hear about how things get  faster and smaller. Yet we still wait to see improvements in battery life.

[JimH]

ATRAC is lossy.

There is another reason we wont see APE immediately is thats its expensive in terms of decoding compared to FLAC.

Requires more CPU?  That's hard to believe.

[bbrip]

dedidio,

your experience should be copied to any forum in this world. This is the experience any serious music lover will make sooner rather than later.

Yes, for use in a car - where you got plenty of sidenoise, or aplane or the underground MP3 is perfect. For use at home on a reasonably high value and high performance hifi MP3 is simply a joke. It is hard to believe that there a re still thousands people out there proclaiming there is "no difference" . A loss is a loss. Whether it is in bandwith due to compression or on my stock portfolio. Losses simply hurt and are a pain

[Imatation]

I remodel homes for living and a recent customer of mine was setting up his home system. He had at lest 100k in equipment being hooked up to play 250gb of mp3’s! Why would you spend that kind of money on equipment if you can’t tell the difference between mp3 and lossless? I didn’t say anything because I’ve learned not to question the logic of someone in a position to make my life miserable.

[RobOK]

When people use the term "mp3" in this thread, do they mean close to the highest possible quality with MP3, like a 320 VBR ripped with EAC (LAME --alt preset extreme) or 128 CBR mentioned in the first post?

I use MP3 and am quite happy with it, but I do go out of my way to make what I think are high quality rips.  At some point I will experiment with Lossless, and I will probably be able to tell some difference, but I don't think to the extent of the first poster.

To ask it another way, if on a scale of 1 to 10, 128 CBR is a 1 and secure Lossless is a 10, where would you rank an ultra-high quality MP3?

[KingSparta]

When people use the term "mp3" in this thread, do they mean close to the highest possible quality with MP3, like a 320 VBR

I Do

I Use Vbr As High As I Can Get It, to Peek At Around 256-320Kbps

[Alex B]

To ask it another way, if on a scale of 1 to 10, 128 CBR is a 1 and secure Lossless is a 10, where would you rank an ultra-high quality MP3?

If the encoder used was LAME 3.9x my answer is 9. MPC at the same bitrates would be 9.5. I would say that 90% of my LAME "preset extreme" MP3 collection is transparent. The rest 10% can be differentiated, but that needs intensive side by side listening tests.

[KingSparta]

If the encoder used was LAME 3.9x my answer is 9

ditto

[Charlemagne 8]

Expecting lossy of ANY bitrate to sound as good as the original material makes about as much sense as taking money out of Social Security to "fix" it.

Most of the stuff I rip is APE. A substantial amount, howerver, is MP3 at various VBR. It depends on the source material.

Even a CD of a 30 year old (or older) recording is limited by first the technology of back then and second by the quality of the source which at best is usually a 30+ year old master tape.

Whatever your encoding method is, you can't make a CD of Ray Charles' early recordings sound like it was recorded yesterday. Why use the disk space?

Having said that, unless it's something I got from Emusic, it's for the most part no lower than 160. Like King, the majority of my MP3s are VBR 320. There are, as I said, exceptions.

I LOVED the opening story.

CVIII

[jcoalson]

Since for some reason, no hardware manufacturer will make a portable OGG player I always have to transcode.

The iAudio M3 and Rio Karma both support Ogg Vorbis (and FLAC).  someone already mentioned iRiver.

Requires more CPU?  That's hard to believe.

yep.
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/hvdh/lossless/lossless.htm
http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html
in embedded devices it makes a difference.  because of the codec design APE will have a tough time.

Josh

[GHammer]

I still wonder why I'd want lossless on a portable?
Usually the environment is noisy or I'm distracted by other things.
Usually the S/N ratio of the gear isn't the best, do you know what the iPod's are for example?
And the playing time would have to be way shorter.
Unless it was a RAM based unit, something would be spinning 3-4 times as much for a given song as opposed to MP3, WMA, OGG.

[Alex B]

It's often forgotten that the problems with audiophile quality lossy encoders are different to what we usually experience with mediocre quality hi-fi equipment. If traditional hi-fi equipment has problems you can usually hear them all the time. Harmonic and IM distortions, noise and bad frequency response curves are some basic examples of the problems. Of course there are many other factors. You can just open a hi-fi magazine or an audiophile web site and read some reviews to find out more.

The best lossy encoders are different beasts. Normally there is no extra audible noise, frequency response curves are good enough and they don't add audible harmonic or IM distortions. When using good encoders at high enough bitrates the music is most of the time indistinguishable from the original. Sometimes the used psychoacoustic model makes wrong decisions and something audible gets removed or there are simply not enough bits to reproduce the audible part of the recording sufficiently. The encoders can have some pre-echo problems with transient intensive music and some people are more sensitive to pre-echo problems than others. All those and some other errors are not instantly audible. You need to compare with the original if you like to find them.

Once I had hard time trying to find out what was wrong with an MP3 encoded classical symphony when I compared it with the APE version. I described that here: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=21002.msg147264#msg147264.

Actually, that "Ape Vs MP3, no Difference?" thread was quite similar to this. It was almost a year ago.

[risingdamp]

Thanks for this thread, it's great reading and it's a great story.

I'd be interested to know what you mean by high quality stereo? 

I have a large MP3 library (around 40K) with a mixture of 128, 160, 192, VBR extreme and 320 kbps tracks.  They all sound pretty much the same to me.  I can tell the difference between the 128 & 320 kbps tracks (only just) but I certainly can't tell the difference between a 192 or 320 when compared to an original wav.

So does that mean my ears are shot or is my stereo not what you'd call high quality?  I have a Denon AVR 3802 (around £900 when I bought it) with £1875 worth of B&W DM 600 series speakers (including the whopping ASW675 sub).  I have an M-Audio delta 24/96 sound card connected to my Denon via a digital co-ax cable.  Is this classed as high quality, so-so or low quality?  Are my ears shot or do I need to spend more £££?

I do sympathise with those with large collections because it's a big money and back up headaches to rip 40K tracks in lossless format (and difficult when you don't have all the originals!)

[Mr ChriZ]

I don't understand peoples space concerns really.
Hard disks are phenominally cheap now.
I picked up a decent 160Gb disk for £60.
By my very brief calculations 2 of those would allow you
to store about 300k songs in APE at extreme compression.
Thats just £120.
Not much if you've spent a couple of grand on hifi kit!

[Mr ChriZ]

Actually that may be a tad optomistic maybe 100k of songs
but still thats a heck of a lot of music :-)

Plus even if you rip at an incredibly fast rate by the time
you've filled those they'll have a Terrabyte disk out thats
twice the speed and half the price ;-)

[Iridescence]

I have the same thing, unfortunately I did a bad job of motherboard research and can have only 3 hard drives so I have "only" 880GB of disk space. I could always get rid of some of my movies and make mre space but is it worth it. Most of my collection now is stuff I've downloaded I haven't even got around to ripping most of my CDs so I download an MP3 that 128 Kbps and I convert it to 192 with MC and I can notice some difference so I generally do that but with 192 and 320 I really don't notice that much difference. My system is old but it was top of the line in the 1970s, the guy I bought it from spend like $10000 for it then so it's not crap. I also went out and got the best headphones I could find, Sennheiser HD650. I guess my soundcard sucks but I'm wondering if my system can detect the difference in sound and I just haven't listened to enough 320 kbit mp3s or ape files?

[Mr ChriZ]

Is there any point in going from 128 -> 192?
Surely the qualitys gone.
It would be like upgrading a 16 colour picture to 65536 colours....
you still only got 16 colours in the first place?

Maybe MC is cleverer than I thought and mathematically corrects...

Sennheisers good tho.
Got a pair of there RS headphones, can walk down the highstreet and
listen to my music :-) (People give you funny looks tho)

[Deivit]

Iridiscence, just a couple of quick notes. More knowledgeable fellow interacters will give you a better advice than me, but:

I download an MP3 that 128 Kbps and I convert it to 192 with MC

Don't do that. You're winning nothing but just losing quality if you convert a lower bitrate to a higher bitrate. To put it in an understandable way: the "bits" that were lost when the original wav was compressed to get the 128 Kbps file are unrecoverable. Therefore, you are compressing an already compressed file, so more "bits"will get lost on the procedure.

I guess my soundcard sucks

The best quality you can get with any system is the one that the weakest element of the system provides.  However, if it sounds good to you, then don't worry too much about that... you're the one who has to judge, after all 

[KingSparta]

Is there any point in going from 128 -> 192?

none at all

[Iridescence]

Thanks for the info, so there is no way to improve the quality of an MP3 once it's been ripped? What about converting it to a WAV and then converting it back to a higher quality MP3?

[risingdamp]

Thanks for the info, so there is no way to improve the quality of an MP3 once it's been ripped? What about converting it to a WAV and then converting it back to a higher quality MP3?

To put it in an understandable way: the "bits" that were lost when the original wav was compressed to get the 128 Kbps file are unrecoverable.

[risingdamp]

I don't understand peoples space concerns really.
Hard disks are phenominally cheap now.
I picked up a decent 160Gb disk for £60.
By my very brief calculations 2 of those would allow you
to store about 300k songs in APE at extreme compression.
Thats just £120.
Not much if you've spent a couple of grand on hifi kit!

I have 37K MP3's using up 160GB.  If they were all in APE I'd expect to use about 4 times the space AND I would need to double it for back up space.  Therefore I'd need 4 hard disks just to support what I have now and a separate drive space available for a removable caddy for backups along with another 4 back up drives.  And all those drives in my system means I have to set up a Raid array which a) I know nothing about and b) makes for a more complex system with more to go wrong.

[jcoalson]

I still wonder why I'd want lossless on a portable?
Usually the environment is noisy or I'm distracted by other things.

the main advantage is not having to transcode in order to copy to the portable, if your library is already lossless, just copy and go.

And the playing time would have to be way shorter.
Unless it was a RAM based unit, something would be spinning 3-4 times as much for a given song as opposed to MP3, WMA, OGG.

it's not way shorter.

Josh

[KingSparta]

does windows media player lossless work on a player that playes windows meda files?

if your going lossless, i think that would be the best format

[modelmaker]

From risingdamp:

So does that mean my ears are shot or is my stereo not what you'd call high quality?

You're ears are not neccessarily shot, however, they can be fooled.

Ears have no memory and adapt to what they hear. If the majority of your source material is encoded at 128 to 192, your ears will get used to that "sound" and won't generally notice a big improvement when you play a CD.

However, if you turn that around and listen to some CDs or lossless rips for a while (15-30 minutes or so) and then play an mp3 at 128, you will notice the degradation in quality right away.

As you grow your library and over time you rip at higher quality levels, all thos older rips at 128  & 192 will become more and more obvious.

One of the most basic rules in audio reproduction, already mentioned in another post here; Your audio system is only as good as it's weakest link and if you start with an imperfect source, no matter how much you spend on amps, speakers etc, it ain't gonna get any better than that source material.

[Jakester]

WMA Lossless - it's a special offshoot of WMA that is NOT supported by most systems that support WMA.  I looked into this when deciding on what lossless encoder to use.  Also, when you factor in the Digital Rights Management system (DRM) WMA starts to look pretty scary to me.  Yes, you can turn off DRM when encoding files for now.  And what if Microsoft's encoder turns it back on at some point without telling you?  Everyone knows how Microsoft's products like to think for you.  I'd stay away.

Space for .ape - I've got 9,500 .apes on my 250GB HD and it is 92% full.  I expect to get just over 10K songs on it, leaving a little space so things don't go screwy.  That's probably a good rule of thumb - 10K APES per 250GB.  I plan to swap it for a $250 400GB drive soon.  And I have a 400GB USB drive for backup.  Still pretty cheap for the peace of mind that lossless provides.  You can just simply forget about all that encoding stuff - almost every BB has multiple (or MANY) threads that eventually decay into arguments over what encoding method is best.  Lossless, for fairly low cost these days (relatively), allows you to just remove that variable from your system and frees you from spending any more effort on this topic.

[RobOK]

Ears have no memory and adapt to what they hear. If the majority of your source material is encoded at 128 to 192, your ears will get used to that "sound" and won't generally notice a big improvement when you play a CD.

However, if you turn that around and listen to some CDs or lossless rips for a while (15-30 minutes or so) and then play an mp3 at 128, you will notice the degradation in quality right away.

I like that point.

I don't think that means you have to go fully to lossless though.  I know you willl disagree with me, but thats okay too.  You guys are getting me closer to lossless.  Keep chipping away  :-)

[modelmaker]

The following is not for audiophiles:

There was a time I would have been insistant about lossless, but my ears aren't prime anymore (I'm over 50 & a lot of rock concerts under my belt!).

My listening habits have changed as well over time. This is also key in setting up a system. How do you listen? My listening is probably 90% background now.

I have chosen mp3 VBR Hi Quality (256+) as a good compromise between quality and storage space. I have an old JVC SEA-80 EQ (w/spectrum anylizer) and an equally old RG Dynamics expander that allow me to shape the sound and put some punch back into the music.

I very rarely listen to CDs anymore, so my ears don't really "remember" the difference. I can certainly hear the difference if I do critical A/B listening tests, but that's not really "real-world" listening, is it?

As I said, listening habits change and I now just enjoy the music without all the analyzing, (speaking as a former audiophile).

[Iridescence]

Yeah I've found too that whenever I've improved my sound I've been blown away for the first few days and then my ears get used to it and it just sounds normal and what I used to use sounds more  crappy all of a sudden. But even after my ears have become accostomed to it I still appreciate things like hearing individual instruments distinctly or the vocals more clearly...


MC is a real find couldn't believe how much better it sounds than Winamp

[GHammer]

I know when I take some music to a friend's house it sounds way different. The 'bad' different. Not a very good sound card, no DirectX addins, small speakers with little bass.

After about 256 Kbps in any format I'd say most can't tell a difference with most music types. If you think you can, you can always install foobar and the ABX plugin for it and see how you do.

It's good to see that the old 1970's "my cartridge is better than your cartridge" arguements have been revived by digital formats.

While I don't wish for 64Kbps MP3s, I spend my time listening to music. I don't spend my time listening for "artifacts".

If you are certain that you can tell the difference between an MP3 made from LAME 3.96.1 --preset extreme and the WAV (APE, FLAC, etc) please post your ABX results.

[hit_ny]

AS i said earlier......the test is if its machine generated IE electronic it compresses pretty well.

Now if you listen to classical orchestral music, rock music and ambient (did i leave any genres out), lossless is not going to be adequate (even at 192+kbs), if you want to hear separation between instruments in an orchestra i doubt lossy could handle this. For that matter i think you would also need a decent hi-fi setup to even hear it at all.

Music with lots of string instruments is in the same boat. Cymbals is another weak point, it sounds a bit muddy sometimes, other times not. Again quite common in classical & rock music. The snares should be crisp & the cymbals should ring. Its those extra harmonics that are created that lossy cant accomodate so well. For these genres or albums go with a lossless codec. PERIOD !

Vocals compress pretty well, if you noticed the phone only uses 4k of bandwidth to transmit an intelligible signal.

Always see on various boards, people advocating one format over the other, i think there are places for each. Using one over the other involves a compromise at some point. If you know when to use either i think you got the best of both.

[modelmaker]

I have to admit that I still listen to classical and most jazz strictly via LP (FYI: Decca cartridge & a Thorens turntable - on its 8th belt). It still sounds the best to me. I also managed to lay my hands on a Monk's LP washer back in the 80's, so the LPs have remained in near pristeen condition, (& an SAE 5000 takes care of the few pops and clicks that do occur). Newer jazz(CD) I do rip to ape.

But all the rock & pop mp3 as mentioned in the earlier post.

[GHammer]

AS i said earlier......the test is if its machine generated IE electronic it compresses pretty well.

Now if you listen to classical orchestral music, rock music and ambient (did i leave any genres out), lossless is not going to be adequate (even at 192+kbs), if you want to hear separation between instruments in an orchestra i doubt lossy could handle this. For that matter i think you would also need a decent hi-fi setup to even hear it at all.

Music with lots of string instruments is in the same boat. Cymbals is another weak point, it sounds a bit muddy sometimes, other times not. Again quite common in classical & rock music. The snares should be crisp & the cymbals should ring. Its those extra harmonics that are created that lossy cant accomodate so well. For these genres or albums go with a lossless codec. PERIOD !

Vocals compress pretty well, if you noticed the phone only uses 4k of bandwidth to transmit an intelligible signal.

Well, as I said, if you claim to be able to differentiate, ABX it and remove subjective points.

Voice does not use 4Kbps. Look at the channels in a T1 or the channels in an E1 if you'd like to see the bandwidth allocated for voice traffic.

[hit_ny]

Voice does not use 4Kbps. Look at the channels in a T1 or the channels in an E1 if you'd like to see the bandwidth allocated for voice traffic.

Your're right...its at least 64k.. It used to be 4k before things went digital...hmm like 30 years ago.

But 64k is still plenty for voice. I've heard people that do telemarketing using even less than that mulitiplexed over VoiP.

[risingdamp]

You're ears are not neccessarily shot, however, they can be fooled.

Ears have no memory and adapt to what they hear. If the majority of your source material is encoded at 128 to 192, your ears will get used to that "sound" and won't generally notice a big improvement when you play a CD.

However, if you turn that around and listen to some CDs or lossless rips for a while (15-30 minutes or so) and then play an mp3 at 128, you will notice the degradation in quality right away.

As you grow your library and over time you rip at higher quality levels, all thos older rips at 128  & 192 will become more and more obvious.

One of the most basic rules in audio reproduction, already mentioned in another post here; Your audio system is only as good as it's weakest link and if you start with an imperfect source, no matter how much you spend on amps, speakers etc, it ain't gonna get any better than that source material.

Thanks for a great explanation