geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > Please don't start throwing accusations of ignorance around. It's > ill-mannered, boring, unnecessary and also happens to be wrong. >
I do apologize if you find my somehat poor choice of words insulting. That was certainly not my intention. I am ignorant of a lot of things and personally do not find it insulting when others point it out to me, even if I disagree strongly. In my defence, I did use the term "seem to" and I did not call you stupid or ignorant in general. I wouldn't dream of it. But, as my native language is not english, my ability to be subtle and polite is sometimes lacking and I will try to be more careful in the future. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > ... > I meant that there is continuing argument about the merits or otherwise > of lossless compressed formats. Listen to any bunch of audiophiles, and > they'll probably be at it at some time. There is no such argument about > the sonic qualities of the uncompressed formats. > This is where you lose me. It is easy and straightforward to prove that the compression and subsequent decompression of any lossless format completely and accurately restores the original audio data, and frankly I think you are doing the beginners on this forum a disservice by implicitly claiming that lossless formats somehow are "unarguably" inherently inferior sonically to uncompressed formats. I'm sure you know better, but from reading your post, one does get the impression that you are grouping lossless compressed formats together with lossy formats. As for the "continuing argument" you mention, I suppose you're referring to the claims made by some, that the extra computing activity caused by the decompression in, say a squeezebox, causes sound degradation. This is (at best) an implementation issue, and not really an argument against the lossless formats themselves. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > Why does one need an "excuse" to use an uncompressed format? > "Excuse", "reason", motivation", whatever. Let's not argue about semantics. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > I happen to prefer uncompressed files because I find them more > versatile and useful and I'm also not convinced that adding to the > complexity of any process is necessarily a good thing. > I share your desire to keep things simple. It could be argued, though, that as long as the output of a process (in this case, compression/decompression) can be proven to be 100% identical to the input 100% of the time, the internal complexity of the process is not relevant. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > (Nobody mentioned the cost of processing as an argument, I believe.) > Well, you brought up the issue of cost by using the low cost of disk space as an argument for using uncompressed formats. Now, if cpu power was very expensive and disk very cheap, nobody in their right mind would be using compressed formats. On the other hand, if cpu power was very cheap and disk space expensive, few people would use non-compressed. As it is, both computing power and disk space has become quite cheap, and most of the time, neither disk cost or processing time is a detrmining factor. Keep in mind, though, that there are members of this forum with 3-4000 albums and more on their slimservers. Had they used uncompressed formats instead of .FLAC their storage cost would have increased significantly. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > That is a perfectly reasonable - and reasonably well-informed and > rational - position to hold. It certainly doesn't strike me as terribly > provocative. > I agree wholeheartedly. It was your claim of unarguably better sound quality that I thought did not deserve to be left unchallenged. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > What you say about tagging merely repeats, with more aggression but > without imparting any additional information, a point about which I'd > already agreed I knew nothing because I use iTunes, and therefore am > not aware that I need to know anything - which may, or may not, be an > advantage of using iTunes, depending on your point of view. > Sorry I missed the bit about iTunes. (I fail, however, to see how anything in that part of my post can be construed as being aggressive.) I don't question your satisfaction with iTunes, but using it to manage your .wav files does mean that you are at the mercy of Apple's ability and willingness to provide backwards compability in future versions. And without iTunes, your .wav collection is likely to be quite a lot less versatile and useful.. geraint smith;138684 Wrote: > > But I'm really not interested in an argument. I was rather hoping for > an entertaining and possibly illuminating discussion. You and me both. -- blackbear ------------------------------------------------------------------------ blackbear's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7015 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=27729 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
