Good article at Stereophile on CD vs lossy vs lossless

[gus6464]

http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd/index.html

Basically the gist of it is that while 90% of people won't notice the difference between 320k mp3 and lossless, the omission of some frequencies by lossy compression can be audible especially with classical.

Also 320k AAC is better than 320k MP3 but FLAC (lossless) is best as it will encode a file that is exactly like the CD but at a smaller size. Considering hard drives are cheap nowadays, one might as well just encode everything in FLAC.

 

[davidtwotrees]

OMG! Stereophile said that people basically couldn't hear the difference between 320 and CD??!! That is huge, imo. Anytime mp3 gets mentioned in stereophile you'd think they were talking about pedophiles or something equally dirty! Do you think the objectivists are making some headway into stereophile???

I have some classical loaded on my server, but mostly for background music. I have some sacd and dvda classical if I want critical listening. The best my server can do is 320........I couldn't afford the Audio Request servers that do flac. I have 80gigs that will hold up to 600 hours at 320............I just wonder what the osd you guys with computers use? The osd and gui for my server is really sharp on the plasma.

 

[OttoMatic]

OMG! Stereophile said that people basically couldn't hear the difference between 320 and CD??!! That is huge, imo. Do you think the objectivists are making some headway into stereophile???

I don't think it's really that big a deal. If 10% of people can hear a difference, that's still very significant, and I would imagine that the more the person is into the hobby and the more sophisticated the listener, that percentage would increase.

The best my server can do is 320........I couldn't afford the Audio Request servers that do flac.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I have a rather old machine that I use as a server (I think it's 700MHz or so). It has no problem streaming FLACS to my HTPC.

I have 80gigs that will hold up to 600 hours at 320............I just wonder what the osd you guys with computers use?

Storage is cheap. Here's a 1TB WD for $130, so don't let drive space stop ya!

 

[gus6464]

Well if you listen to mostly classical it would be safer to just encode everything in a lossless format and leave it at that. I did find their measurements of AAC vs MP3 surprising though which pretty much put to rest the assumption people seem to make that itunes has a crappy encoder.

 

[bandphan]

FLAC should be an easy choice for many that care about quality. If its casual listening its probably irrelavent, and I know the argument about portable player offerings, but the options, imo, seem pretty good.

 

[gus6464]

FLAC should be an easy choice for many that care about quality. If its casual listening its probably irrelavent, and I know the argument about portable player offerings, but the options, imo, seem pretty good.

The mac mini with the itunes flac hack works pretty good as well. With airfoil you can use front row which is one of the better GUI's out there handling tons of music since it's just like the ipod.

 

[corey]

Good article?

It confirms that the out dated Fraunhöfer codec is not too good, and is very bad at compressing test tones. My untested guess is that not even the modern mp3 codecs are good at compressing test tones. I tried converting tones I use for frequency response testing to mp3 & it didn't work. I use wav's for my test tones.

I kept looking a phrase something like "extensive double blind testing" & didn't find it. I'm not aware of any blind testing that shows a difference between high bit rate (>256bps) mp3's and red book. Somewhat off topic, but I don't know of any similar tests that show a difference between red book & the HD audio formats.