sikahr;248302 Wrote: > Do You hear any differences between properly coded mp3 and lossless on > normal listening levels. > > I think for 99.9999% of population answer is no. IMHO, the answer is a little more complex than that. I believe that many who do not hear a difference could, but do not because:
1. They do not know what to listen for. Most could learn, and they might then understand some of the subliminal influences that lossy encoding most likely has on just about all listeners. 2. The source material has so many flaws that source flaws make it harder, especially for untrained listeners, to pick out the coding artifacts. Many popular recordings have relatively high distortion; since that flaw is so obvious its easy to focus on it and miss the more subtle CODEC flaws. 3. The playback system has flaws that tend to overshadow the CODEC flaws. Poor frequency response, high distortion, etc. Back when I started encoding my CDs to the hard drive, I considered 320 kbps MP3 and high-bitrate AAC, but I ultimately chose FLAC. Although I did some listening to all formats and found the differences to be subtle, maybe even imagined sometimes, I understand that my playback system will change with time, as well as my critical listening abilities, so I decided not to base a decision for a lossy format on my current system, listening abilities and a small sampling of source material. Hard drive space has been getting progressively more inexpensive as my collection grows, so it was not a hard decision for me to chose FLAC lossless. And another advantage of FLAC is that I'm not at the mercy of Microsoft (WMA lossless) or Apple (ALAC). -- Timothy Stockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stockman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8867 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=40409 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
