Now that I've got your attention (lol). It really sounds horribly different! Here's the story: in my car, I have an iPod/iPhone interface so I can listen to my music through my car stereo. I happen to have the same song on my iPhone in VBR MP3 @ ~128 Kb and on an audio CD. Both songs were encoded from the same FLAC files -> MP3 & Wav.
So I got both to the same part and switched between the two. Wow!
The worst part is that the CD player provides a much louder base sound output so the amplifier has to be turned up less--that alone gives a great impression of power. Also, it definitely sounds much better. I always knew 128 wasn't a great bitrate but what's a person to do with only 8GB of space? I mean that's hardly anything with WAV or FLAC. I can't even get all my music that I like on it as it is with the 128 Kb encoding!
Then, what about movies and shows! It would be great if I could add some of my video to my iPhone!
Take a good average size sync collection of 2,000 songs--close to my personal collection--that will fill up 8GB in the lowest acceptable quality setting. Double that to get 16GB. Then you're at 256 Kb. I'm thinking that would be good enough to not be able to tell the difference. But what about a lossless format? Now you're looking at another double: 32GB, 512 Kb. Lossless takes more like 1,000. So double again. Now you're at 64GB for a reasonable sized collection.
I guess what I'm finding is that it took me quite a while before I realized to just go with lossless on my desktop...I'm hoping it's not too far off to where I can just go with lossless on my portable device. You know, if the iPhone's cellular network was fast enough, I could just stream all my FLAC music over the cell network! Wouldn't that be amazing?! Then I could either store my video on it or just stream it, too! I was able to get very nice looking video on it at 400 Kb/second--Edge is around 200!
In a way I wonder if we will ever get lower frequency cell phones--so they have greater range--and then just start streaming all our media from home! Why bother syncing at all?! If you're always connected, just access your server! Many people use a server at home so why not use it on the go, too? I use my server's music at work, home, vacation...why not in between? I think the iPhone should be capable of interfacing with Media Center over the cellular network.
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Topic: Which sounds better: 128Kb MP3 or FLAC/WAV? (Read 1225 times)