The Dangers of Headphones

[lsiberian]

actually aside from not owning a physical copy MP3's coded above 256kbps are pretty transparent, half of my music collection is MP3's and they all sound perfectly fine played over my system, most of them are VBR from 192-320kbps. i hear absolutely no artifacts or real loss in sound q. lossy codecs are great when you follow a certain bitrate rule, for instance, dolby digital, honestly it sounds pretty good at 86kbps per channel, but, and yes i have done this, if you encode a song in AC3 at 64kbps per channel it sounds incredibly bad, masking removes sounds we literally cannot hear at high bitrates, at lower bitrates it begins removing more then that.

If we are talking orchestral music there is a major difference. If we are talking rock then MP3s sound fine. It really depends on the source material. Of course your track record isn't exactly inspiring. I remind you of the time you thought Sony speakers were the bomb. It's true that at the end of the day the source material is still king. You'll find that I much prefer poorly encoded Bach piece played by a masterful orchestra to an Nsync song with the highest bitrates possible.

 

[lsiberian]

You think most of them can understand the implications of early hearing loss?
If it is not right away that they can process, I doubt most will care about events in the future. Your thoughts?

I think they can certainly understand it. I understood it as a little kid and my friends all understood it as a teenager. Some even took earplugs for concerts. My friends also understood that CDs sounded better than MP3s. Many people think kids are stupid, but if you give them the consequences of choices and healthy alternatives you'll find they can surprise you with good choices. Of course every teen makes mistakes just like we all have, but information can help them to make less.

I'd gander that city noise effects hearing far more than the headphones though.

 

[yepimonfire]

But even at the highest bit rate, it's not an exact copy and that's not 'high fidelity' in its truest sense. "Good enough for most people" isn't what we, as audio freaks, are looking for in recorded music. Like VHS, the lower quality version is the one everyone has been made to want, mainly because they were told that it's 'more'. An 8 hour VHS tape is definitely going to be more popular when the longest Beta was 5 hours but the quality was much worse and the added stress caused the tape to stretch, making it unwatchable at some point because it stretched along the edge where the synch track was located.

At some point, as I have posted many times, there has to be a time when we just listen to the music and not the equipment. That said, it's a lot more enjoyable when it sounds far above average, or even excellent.

i do agree, which is why i dont download MP3s anymore. considering they are floorstanders and considering they were super cheap compared to the countless cheap speaker (below 100 a pair) they are at the high end of bad.

 

[yepimonfire]

If we are talking orchestral music there is a major difference. If we are talking rock then MP3s sound fine. It really depends on the source material. Of course your track record isn't exactly inspiring. I remind you of the time you thought Sony speakers were the bomb. It's true that at the end of the day the source material is still king. You'll find that I much prefer poorly encoded Bach piece played by a masterful orchestra to an Nsync song with the highest bitrates possible.

yea i was retarded, they really sound like sh*t compared to my polks.

 

[pzaur]

A properly mastered recording "compressed" to a FLAC format is all the compression you need.

-pat

 

[Starmax]

Eh? Could you type a little louder?