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Can You Really Hear the Difference Between Lossless, Lossy Audio?
CWmike writes "Lossless audio formats that retain the sound quality of original recordings while also offering some compression for data storage are being championed by musicians like Neil Young and Dave Grohl, who say compressed formats like the MP3s being sold on iTunes rob listeners of the artist's intent. By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track, and when you compress that CD into a lossy MP3 or AAC file format, you lose even more of the depth and quality of a recording. Audiophiles, who have long remained loyal to vinyl albums, are also adopting the lossless formats, some of the most popular of which are FLAC and AIFF, and in some cases can build up terabyte-sized album collections as the formats are still about five times the size of compressed audio files. Even so, digital music sites like HDtracks claim about three hundred thousand people visit each month to purchase hi-def music. And for music purists, some of whom are convinced there's a significant difference in sound quality, listening to lossy file formats in place of lossless is like settling for a Volkswagen instead of a Ferrari."
Usually if the bitrate is above 256kb/s, i dont notice any difference.
Ofcourse it still effects some songs (especially the percussion parts).
There is a long discussion among very qualified individuals on this subject. You can read it here
I am quite sure I prefer a lossy compressed version of a 24 bit, 96 kHz track than a lossless compressed version of a 16 bit, 44.1 kHz track.
Caveat: You have to have decent headphones (not Apple earbud BS), and/or good speakers, but that's about it. The difference is negligible once you hit ~320Kbps MP3, in my opinion, but anything under 256Kbps, regardless of lossy format, you can *clearly* hear cymbal hits turning to an underwater splooshy mess.
I can't tell which one is better though.
... and scratchy/poppy vinyl records. MP3s on my cheap ear buds are good enough most of the time.
No you can't. Not with any reasonably modern encoder and bitrates above 256. Anyone who tells you otherwise is experiencing the placbo effect. BTW, you can't tell the difference between 16bit/44.1khz audio and 24/96 audio either. And vinyl might sound "better" than digital to you, but digital is objectively more accurate.
Audiophilia is saturated with woo. This is the same market that brought us $500 ethernet cables.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm listening to a performance, not some audio benchmark. If a bit of loss bothers you, it must be some pretty damned uninspiring music you're listening to.
And if you're listening on some random mp3 player with bud headphones while walking around doing stuff, compression loss is the least of your worries.
as fast as a Ferrari.
Since I do most of my listening in a car, and am almost 48, I can't hear the difference between an mp3 and a vinyl album, or a cd, most of the time. Well, except for the lack of skipping. Ever try to listen to an LP in a moving car? But I digress. Sure, people who are younger and $pend lot$ of dollar$ on the Finest Audiophile equipment areound can tell. Me in my Chevy? Not so much.
Best Slashdot Co
We recently discovered that human hearing beats the linear response assumptions used in lossy codecs. So yes, their criticisms are scientifically founded.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The concept of improving consumer listening experience using studio quality recording has been thoroughly debunked, right here on Slashdot...
Why Distributing Music As 24-bit/192kHz Downloads Is Pointless
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
The reason people use lossless compression for audio (i.e. FLAC or SHN) is not because they can tell the difference. Maybe you think you can, maybe you think you can't, but that's irrelevant anyway. The reason people choose lossless is that lossless is the only suitable solution for archiving. If you want to preserve your CD audio exactly as it appears on the CD, the only possible solution is lossless compression. If you choose lossy, you aren't making an archive or the original, but rather an approximation of the original.
That's all there is to it.
Anyone know of any good double-blind studies comparing people's ability to tell FLAC from 320kbps MP3? Googling just turns up people debating in forums whether you would be able to tell the difference rather than any serious academic research.
We still like XKCD around here, right?
This signature is false.
Yes, I can hear the difference. When working in a small sound recording studio, I trained my ears to pick up on fine details. There was one day in particular I remember listening to a track, and wondering what the strange noise in the background of it was. I realized that I was hearing the audio artifacts from the mp3 compression. Not sure how Mr. Young figures that a CD is only 15% of the master, though. A CD is pure uncompressed audio. If you recorded and mixed in 44.1k audio, then your cd is an exact copy of your master.
The difference is the ability to transcode to different bitrates and formats without losing anything from the original source.
And there's the rub of course. That general of a question can't be answered yes/no. It depends on a variety of factors, most notably the content, the codec, the bitrate, and the playback.
I don't even know why this article submission got accepted. It's like asking "can you win a race against a Toyoda?" where do you even start with that....?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Mine goes to fiveier.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you've got decent equipment and a quiet environment. With cheapo earbuds, I don't notice the difference. With my good headphones, the difference is obvious. When I'm driving down the highway, I can't tell. In my living room, I can tell.
With storage so cheap and bandwidth so plentiful, there's really no reason not to use lossless audio. My $40 Clip+ with a $25 miscrosd card can hold 40 gigs of content and can play FLAC. There's no reason to use a lossy format.
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market). After a certain quality threshold, say 256kbps mp3 or $100 bottle of wine, nobody can tell the difference in a blind test. Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track...
[ -- insert appropriate Neil Young lyric for satirical effect here -- ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nope. Not if the quality is high enough, I can't tell the difference 99% of the times. There are some musical instruments (harpsichord) and singers (Tori Amos) where compression is very obvious. The lossy version becomes almost unlistenable once you've heard the lossless version.
On "normal" speakers I can rarely tell the difference, but on reference monitors the difference is noticeable on many tracks. Not terrible distracting but still noticeable.
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.
Just because Neil young and Dave Grohl are famous musicians, it doesn't mean that they actually know what they are talking about. 40 years of exposure to loud music has probably damaged their hearing enough that they really don't know what they are hearing.
Saying that A sounds better than B is completely subjective and affected by many things. Not just how the music was encoded, but the quality of the DAC used for playback and the quality of the speakers/headphones used.
There have been more posts on Slashdot in the last 14 years on Slashdot about this topic. What I recall of them, is that people have been tested with blind and double-blind tests. And about ten years ago you could hear a difference between lossless audio and low-bitrate mp3's. The latter has less high and low, and mostly a certain "Hiss" sound through it. The preference was with the lossless audio then.
What struck me in later tests, was that people seemed to favour mp3's above lossless audio. I reckon it has to do with getting used to the Hiss-sound in mp3's, and therefore having it as a preference. A big factor in music taste is how much you are used to hearing similar music and sounds, and the hiss-sound does make a usual sound.
To be fair, I do think that mp3's in a high bitrate like 320 kbit are almost as good as lossless audio. Even though I prefer the lossless audio, just to be sure.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
it doesn't matter how lossy or lossless the file is if you're listening with shitty white earbuds.
I would pay more for audio tracks that are mastered properly.
Far too much of the music released these days is mastered to sound "loud". A sound-level compressor removes the dynamic range, and then the music is gained up about as high as possible, or sometimes higher than that (gained so high there is hard-clipping).
In the best case, the dynamic range is gone and the music loses some of the drama and impact it should have had. In the worst case, the sine waves are hard-clipped into square waves, which sounds terrible. Hard-clipping adds unpleasant harmonics and distortion and you definitely can hear this.
I promise you that a properly mastered track at 16-bit/44.1 kHz will sound dramatically better than a poorly mastered one at 24-bit/96 kHz. Mastering trumps format.
So if they are going to the trouble to make 24-bit/96 kHz tracks, I'm hoping that they will let the mastering engineers do their jobs properly! If they do, I would pay the extra money and bandwidth to buy the music in the higher-quality format.
The music industry is convinced that most of their customers are idiots, unconcerned about sound quality, who can be distracted by shiny things or loud noises; so they try to make every album as loud as possible. But maybe, just maybe, they will be willing to try something different with the high-quality downloads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
dude, my approach is, so what? somebody worked hard to get a little pot of money, and wants to use the money on something that makes him happy. audiophile stuff makes him feel happy. it wouldn't make me feel happy for the price, but who am i to tell him otherwise? Life got a lot easier once i let people be their own people.
Or not using Monster Cable
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
This is the real point: People are so used to listening to music with no dynamic range, on ear buds, in crappy acoustic environments that they wouldn't know where to start listening for a difference.
No sig today...
I know in imaging that having better than the human eye can see is important in intermediate products as visual manipulation on low fidelity content could produce visible artifacts. Is it the case for audio as well? If someone is going to resample audio for a remix, is there risk of the decreased fidelity ultimately manifesting in the final product?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And if you put them up for a test, and told them which source was which in advance, I'm sure they'd be able to tell you the flaws in the one you said was the mp3 (or whatever). Even if you deliberately swapped the cables over.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I don't think that lossy audio compression is inherently hurting recorded music. Lossy is fine as long as good encoders and sufficient bitrates are used. At a certain point, no one can tell which is which (lossy or lossless) in a blind test.
I mostly listen to MP3 encoded rock music. The loss of quality is very noticeable to me at 128kbps. The loss of quality is much harder to discern at 192, especially if a quality encoder is used. I use LAME -V 2 when I rip CDs and usually end up with average bitrates from ~190-215, and I can't tell the difference between those MP3s and the original CD.
IMO there are bigger problems facing recorded music anyway. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
You jerk! I clicked on that link!
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market).
Show me a rational market, and I'll have to inquire as to the nature and evolutionary history of the species of aliens participating in it.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I've been into compressed lossless audio from the start. First, AIFF is definitely not one of the most popular lossless audio formats for distributing music because the popular formats are compressed lossless audio and AIFF is uncompressed. The top formats are FLAC, APE and ALAC. FLAC is the most popular because it is open-source and versatile. APE was highly popular in the late 90's and early 00's and still is with some because it has better compression than any of the other formats. However, as time went on hard drive space became more plentiful and mobile devices started popping up. APE achieves its superior compression via calculations that are more intensive than FLAC uses and thus more taxing on mobile devices. It is also less cross-platform-compatible. ALAC is Apple's Lossless Audio Codec and is a latecomer onto the scene. It has good iTunes support and slightly better compression than FLAC, but that's about it.
Also, it is definitely possible to tell lossless audio from lossy audio, even at higher bitrates. Around 2002 I had a friend who completely mocked my lossless ways, even though I'm not one of those gold-cable audiophile people -- just a normal guy who likes his music. I just had a decent pair of Klipsh speakers with a subwoofer. My friend was so certain that this was all in my head and I was so certain that it was not that we devised a simple test. He would show me two identical-looking files in iTunes, just showing the titles. One was a high-bitrate AAC and the other a FLAC file. I could click on them to play them as much as I wanted. I was then to decide which was lossless and which was lossy. We did this with 10 files. It was basically double-blind as he didn't know which was which either until he took the computer back to check my answer. He set up 10 files this way. All in all the test took just 5 or 10 minutes.
I got 9 of 10 right. It is hard to describe sounds, but the lossless music is "deeper," especially bass, guitar vibrations and high notes. This makes it obvious for many songs.
However, I expect not everyone has hearing like this. I suspect this because one day I heard this annoying buzzing sound and asked my girlfriend about it. She couldn't hear anything. So, I searched all over for what was causing it. It turned out it was a television that was on, but that was on a non-channel so it was completely black on the screen. However, the CRT television emitted a sound from being on in a silent room that I found annoying and my girlfriend couldn't even hear. My sister could also hear it when I tested her later. I also sometimes find the sounds fluorescent lights make annoying too.
Anyway, lossless is great and, yes, you can hear the difference if you have hearing which can hear the difference. It's sort of tautological, but it's the truth.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
The opening of Royal Oil by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It starts out with a quiet snare roll that gets progressively louder, joined by a simple bass line. I've yet to hear a lossy codec at any bitrate that doesn't turn it into watery gibberish.
Disk space is cheap. Rip to FLAC or ALAC. For portables, 256kbps AAC seems to do the least amount of damage.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
digital is objectively more accurate.
but music isn't
This is the real point: People are so used to listening to music with no dynamic range, on ear buds, in crappy acoustic environments that they wouldn't know where to start listening for a difference.
Nor can they afford any better so while they are listening to a lesser quality, they couldn't begin to purchase equipment to give them what these artists say they are missing.
Coding Horror did a great experiment with their readers where they provided several samples of the same song at different bitrates and then had everyone vote on which they thought sounded best. The result? People could only tell the difference between 128kbps and everything else, and even that was not overwhelming. In fact, 160kbps beat CD!
Good point. Sadly, my $3k hearing aids don't seem to help either.
Bitrate doesn't matter much if your ears are the lossy part.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Thank God my hearing isn't worth a crap and I don't have yet another thing to geek over.
As long as Frank Sinatra doesn't sound like Donald Duck, I'm cool with it.
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication.
People don't claim to feel better, they do feel better. There is no incentive for them to lie, in fact, there is a disincentive for them to do so. The reason behind the cause of the "placebo" effect is in the mind of the patient. The patient believes they should be getting better and then they do. Power of thought, belief and, if defined correctly, faith. Really, it is the power of consciousness which no one fully understands.
This can be applied to apparent differences in audio formats. The observer believes that one source should sound better and then it does. Since qualifying better/worse is entirely subjective, objectivity has no place in the argument.
Look, you want your 0's and 1's to look like stupid Comic Sans 0's and 1's or like high quality, stylish Zapfino 0's and 1's?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track"
And nothing of value was lost in the remaining 85% of the *data* that is inaudible to the human ear.
"Young, in fact, created his own digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) service called Pono. Young has tweeted that the Pono cloud-based music service, along with Pono portable digital-to-analog players, will be available by summer."
There's your cash-in scheme lurking behind all the BS.
"Young's service would increase the quality, or sampling rate, of the music from 44,100 times per second in a CD (44.1KHz) to 192,000 times per second (192KHz), and will boost the bit depth from 16-bit to 24-bit."
I would like to repeatedly hit you over the head with http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
"The sample rate of a digital file refers to the number of "snapshots" of audio that are offered up every second. Think of it like a high-definition movie, where the more frames per second you have, the higher the quality."
NO, do not think of it like that unless you're a charlatan. Refer to rebuttal on xiph.org.
"Millions of people in the world are audiophiles."
No doubt, Millions of people in the world are fools and they have money that could be yours.
"It's just common sense that the higher the resolution -- the more data that's in an audio file -- the better the sound quality, Chesky said."
Too bad this thing called SCIENCE has been trumping "common sense" for millenia now.
"The site also recommends high-resolution player software such as JRiver, Pure Music, or Decibel Audio Player. The software, which basically turns your desktop or laptop into a music server or a digital-to-analog converter,"
HILLARIOUS. I won't even begin to..
"The most popular music server among audiophiles, according to Bliss, is an Apple Mac Mini."
This is beautiful. I am not surprised in the least to see this audiophile-appleophile overlap.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
For chiptunes, I can hear a difference between 256 and 320, but just barely.
The biggest factor is how the high frequencies are filtered out before the audio is compressed, because the filtering appears to be the same regardless of the final bitrate. Even ultra-high bitrate audio will sound awful if the stock frequency cutoff is used, and I have to fiddle with the settings in LAME to make my songs sound good, even at 320.
AAC (like MP3) is a frequency-domain codec, and can therefore never provide transparent audio. It has nothing to do with "deeper". but instead is an inability to represent transients... non-tonal components like percussive sounds and other noise.
If you had performed the test with Musepack/MPC or even MPEG-1 Layer II at high bitrates, you would have failed the test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Quality
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Nor can they afford any better so while they are listening to a lesser quality, they couldn't begin to purchase equipment to give them what these artists say they are missing.
Plus none of them have a special quiet room where they go to to sit down and do nothing but listen to music.
They want music/noise constantly and as a backdrop to whatever else they're doing at the time.
No sig today...
There was an experiment I heard about on Radio Lab where several pieces of colored paper were given to someone to tell apart, supposedly this would identify someone with 4 color receptors rather than 3 (a small percentage of woman) and was largely analogous to color blindness tests (normally men). In theory people with 3 color receptors would be unable to tell the hues apart.
What they found is that some people with lots of experience working with color could tell the color samples apart fairly easily, while most people literally could not. A lot had to do with training and life experience apparently. So yes, some people really see more colors than you because they are trained to as incredible as that sounds.
Sound could be the same way. Plus, depends on your stereo system I guess.
That's a myth. Monster cables are no better than cheaper products from other vendors.
If you can hear a difference, then it's probably because you have your ethernet cable connected backwards.
You need to go deeper.
Shitty black earbuds okay then?
No matter how much space is on my current player, I never have enough space to hold my whole collection (well, except on my 160GB iPod classic...but I digress). That means either juggling what is and isn't on my device, or compression, or both. And, its entirely possible that I might choose a player that doesn't work well with the format I've chosen (cough*mp3Pro*cough).
Having a lossless version of everything means never having to worry about re-compression. My perception trails off between 200-230kbps. I can deal with 192 pretty easily, and 128 isn't the end of the world if I'm in my car or am on a cheap pair of earbuds. Heck, on my SwimP3, 64kbps is overkill. But a 200kbps that then gets re-coded to 128 can really end up with some weird sounding shit. So all my old CDs were ripped to FLAC. When I switched from Creative players to iStuff, I just recoded all of my library from FLAC to ALAC. No loss, no worries, no re-ripping. Most of what I buy today gets ripped straight to ALAC, but if I ever ditch apple, I can just recode it back over to FLAC.
It matters that you get a lossless format because then you can convert it to any format that works for you. And if you change formats in the future, just re-code and never worry.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I think the real point is that there are known limits to human hearing and many audiophiles fantasize about their hearing being superhuman. It just ain't so. Dynamic range compression is one thing, but perceptual compression, sample rate, and bit depth are a different matter. No audiophile has ever heard the difference between FLAC and 320Kbps mp3 audio in an ABX test at a statistical rate that is better than guessing.
Any time this argument starts, I refer people to this well written article that lays out the limits of human hearing compared to the specifications of recording formats...
Support your local electronics outlet. I buy all my audio and computer cables from You-Do-It Electronics in Needham, Mass. Not only do they have the least expensive, largest variety of cables, they also have actual experts on hand to help -- and no, they don't sell Monster.
I do think once you go belo 256 bit rate you start hearing issues or at least you do with some music. But then people also listen to these songs on shitty PC speakers, cheap headphons or worse yet their mobile's speaker. Lossless vs lossy doesn't matter as much when playing the music through poor speakers.
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrangewell don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
ALAC is Apple's Lossless Audio Codec and is a latecomer onto the scene. It has good iTunes support and slightly better compression than FLAC, but that's about it.
Apple's ALAC lossless codec is only a dozen C/C++ files (C for the actual codec, C++ for the file format). It's easy to understand, port, and include in other software. To build it you type 'make'. So from a source code perspective ALAC is much better... FLAC has many dozens of source files, assembly, uses automake etc so it's annoying to work with the actual source.
Not that any of that matter to users, but to programmers ALAC is *much* better.
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.
Don't dis the placebo effect, it works (for some limited benefits), even in cases where the subjects were aware that they were receiving a placebo
The most similar analogy would be to say that someone can enjoy lossless music more than lossy music. This could be true even if they can't tell them apart in a blind study. Of course, under these assumptions, they'd also enjoy lossy music more than lossless music if the labels were switched and they believed the labels. It's enjoyed more simply because of what it is believed to be. That may be silly, but hey, who am I to crap on someone's enjoyment?
On the other hand, making the claim that you can tell the difference, i.e. discriminate between then, is more directly challengeable and probably false in most cases.
Thanks for the pointer, I've had my electrons swimming upstream all along. I also rewired my usb mouse after I discovered that it was wired the wrong way around at the factory. You won't believe the warmth of my lefts, the mellowness of my rights, the dynamic ups and well rounded downs.
http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/kids-prefer-poor-quality-mp3
(and remember, kids are able to hear frequencies that you can't!)
I have a DSD (SACD) Player. I have several discs of the same music in CD (red book 44.1 KHz 16-bit) and DSD. DSD is PWM at 2.8 MHz.
I have done A/B tests with myself, and "blind" tests with friends. Everybody prefers the DSD playback. This is on higher end consumer gear, not high-end audiophile stuff by any means.
I have no doubt the DSD versions were mastered more carefully. Perhaps that is the biggest difference. However, they do sound better than PCM CDs to my ears.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
it doesn't matter how lossy or lossless the file is if you're listening with shitty white earbuds.
Dude, use some alcohol wipes on them before you get an infected ear.
"Modern music" is recorded with much higher gain than previously so having higher quality equipment probably won't make much of a difference if your taste is mainstream. A couple of links:
The loudness war.
This made me smile. Why? I was listening to a youtube clip on pc speakers to pick up the affect on sound quality after clipping occurs...... he does explain it well though.
Disclaimer: Most of my digital music is in flac format - sounds brilliant through my main system at home, not so crash hot on my phone using black earbuds.
BM3
'The more that pseudoscience goes unchecked in the world at large, the harder it is for truth to overcome truthiness... even if this is a small and relatively insignificant example.' ~ http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/06/0048259/why-distributing-music-as-24-bit192khz-downloads-is-pointless
'For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.' ~ Carl Sagan
Asking for people to behave rationally may not always be the easy way, but in my experience it is almost always worth doing. I think as a species we'd be a lot better off if everyone valued rationality highly, so I think we should encourage that in everyone.
Tetrachromats can pass blind tests. Audiophiles cannot. That's the difference.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The linked article features $500 for some simple cables. But people can spend MUCH MORE MONEY than $500 on simple cables. For example:
$699 for 3M of speaker cables: (look for STEREOVOX Firebird Speaker Cables, 3M): http://www.gcaudio.com/products/steals.html
Ironically, the products are labelled "steals". Very true indeed.
But there's more. Not all products are "steals". "The next step up is the LectraLine cables priced at $295 for the 1M" http://www.gcaudio.com/products/newArrivals.html
But it gets better. At musicdirect.com you have power cords for $2,699.99 !!! Obviously it's "The Absolute Sound Golden Ear Award Winner!" Of course. http://www.musicdirect.com/c-650-power-cables.aspx
But it gets better, again. At nordost they build power cables made out of "99.99999% oxygen free copper conductors." I let you imagine the cost of production. A mere 1.25M of power cord is 8,795.00 (and these are UK pounds, worth more than a dollar). For 5M count 20,495.00 pounds. Yes, that's about $31K !!! http://www.highendcable.co.uk/Nordost%20ODIN%20Power%20Cords.htm
But it gets better, so much so that it gets boring. But still. Can you spend more than $31k on a simple pair of wires? Well, yes, you can. Look at the bottom of that page, 6M of speaker cable for only $50k. A bargain, really. http://www.audiofederation.com/dealership/prices/nordost/index.htm#prices
It is astonishing to say the least. That said, it some people have the money...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
It doesn't take massively expensive equipment to hear differences. Just a decent amplifier and decent speakers.
As others have said, there are valid reasons to record/mix in high def. But you should be able to downsample the final result to CD-quality with no audible loss in quality.
"I think the real point is that there are known limits to human hearing and many audiophiles fantasize about their hearing being superhuman"
No. The difference between a live acoustic instrument or human voice and a recording is immediately obvious, even to people with significant hearing damage. Waving paper cones around in boxes is not a great way to reproduce sound, it's just all we have with today's technology.
Audiophiles are not trying to get the last few percent of reproduction quality, they are trying to get some improvement on the terrible quality we have today.
I say that as a studio engineer with 30 years experience. I do my best, but we are still in the very early days of recording and reproducing sound. Matters have not improved for so long that many people have forgotten how much of a compromise audio reproduction currently is.
As ever, the hard part is the transducers. Wide bandwidth storage is practical now, but microphones and speakers generate huge amounts of distortion, and have bizarre phase responses and radiation patterns.
I rip CDs to flac, because I don't want to keep worrying if I could have made a better rip.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Genuinely not sure whether joking or audiophile.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
I was in college before CDs came out, so the audiophile types had vinyl, fancy-for-the-time turntables, high-quality cartridges and needles, etc. One of my housemates liked classical music, and said that once he had a medium-quality stereo system, it didn't make sense to spend more money upgrading the audio quality - it was a lot more important to get records from better orchestras with better conductors. His system was good enough that he could pretty much hear what they were playing, and if you were listening to Beethoven you wanted the Berlin Philharmonic, not the 101 Strings, and you probably had opinions about whether you wanted Furtwangler or von Karajan conducting, and getting rid of that next-to-last bit of distortion wasn't going to fix a lousy recording.
I mostly listen to music in my car. A decent MP3 is close enough to CD quality when played over road noise, and it doesn't skip when you go over bumps.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You can be trained to hear the lossy compression artifacts. But trust me, you don't want to be. Once you can hear them, you can't unhear them.