Kids prefer shitty sounding MP3s to CD or vinyl

[Silva]

Personally I think that if you must use mp3s there's no excuse for using anything other than 320kbs/constant bitrate.

Well, there's space. I have a somewhat limited space for MP3 files and every month or so have to dump some to a DVD, so I usually rip mine at 256VBR. I doubt I have the equipment to take advantage from more than that, and even to my ears should be enough. I was surprised to feel the difference between a few albums I had when albums ripped to 192 were the "big thing" and when I actually bought them, but rarely noticed anything up from 256 to 320.
For the MP3 player (1GB), usually take a hit and go lower with 128. Since I'm usually listening with regular in-ear phones and on the street/bus/subway, I'd rather have a shitload of songs than a few quality ones where can't enjoy the details because of ambient noise.

Out of the technic wankery, judging from other people I see, most of them (particularly kids) aren't interested at all in quality, just in volume. Just a few months ago I posted on my a blog a call to stop all music coming from the speaker of mobiles and a return to gigantic boomboxes

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Can you make FLAC files into audio CDs?

 

[belboid]

Can you make FLAC files into audio CDs?

yeah, once you've converted them back to aiff or wav


I'll never rip anything below 192, which is fine for listening on the headphones/in the car. Occasionally I'll go for 320, always if it's a rip from vinyl, or if I know it's likely to be the only version of whatever it is that I'm likely to own

 

[Greebozz]

I consider myself to be a survivor of heavy duty hi-fi bullshit. reading reviews in hi-fi magazines, all that oxygen free cable crap.

In my own experience enjoyment of music happens on its own, and it doesn't matter if you're listening on a crap little speaker or a full hi-fi set up. I think 90% depends on what mood you're in.

 

[N_igma]

Never had and don't want an Mp3 player or i-pod or whatever that shit is called!

 

[berniedicters]

I consider myself to be a survivor of heavy duty hi-fi bullshit. reading reviews in hi-fi magazines, all that oxygen free cable crap.

In my own experience enjoyment of music happens on its own, and it doesn't matter if you're listening on a crap little speaker or a full hi-fi set up. I think 90% depends on what mood you're in.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. But in between all the oxygen-free cables and audiophile hokum there is some scientific validity and common sense. 128k mp3s are more than adequate for 90% of the music listening I do (not-so-brilliant computer speakers, playing on the car radio), but I've noticed that a 192k rip sounds noticeably better on the hi-fi in the living room (nothing crazy, just a Cambridge Audio amp, a couple of Gale speakers and some unnecessarily high-tech speaker cable, just because) than a 128k. There's definitely a feeling of there being more there in the sound.

And there's a scientific basis to it: the whole point about mp3 encoding is about removing more and more from the signal to achieve the level of compression required - it's designed around a model of the human hearing process. It seems completely valid to me that there over the whole range of compressions, you're going to get a clearly audible loss of information (try music at 64kb/sec), through a region where the improvements become less and less noticeable (128-256kb/sec, maybe?), and beyond which the differences really are pretty well indistinguishable. I suppose it depends on the kind of music, the quality of the soundsystem (stuff's only as good as the weakest link in the chain), and the critical faculties of the listener, but my guess is that, as you head up toward the stratospheric heights of lossless compression, the law of diminishing returns applies with a vengeance.

I'm not going to try and redownload everything I have at 320kb/s - 192 offers a fairly good balance between compactness and quality for me - but stuff I really love, and music with a wide dynamic range, eg classical stuff, I will probably aim to start getting at higher bit rates, partly as a result of reading this thread!

 

[ExtraRefined]

I'm not going to try and redownload everything I have at 320kb/s - 192 offers a fairly good balance between compactness and quality for me - but stuff I really love, and music with a wide dynamic range, eg classical stuff, I will probably aim to start getting at higher bit rates, partly as a result of reading this thread!

Higher BR mp3s don't increase dynamic range, they just decrease artifacts and increase the cutoff frequency. For 192kb mp3s, the cutoff is ~18kHz, which is already above what most adults can hear - if you don't find flyback transformer hum on CRTs annoying, you're certainly not going to hear >18kHz harmonics.

Before you waste your time redownloading stuff in 320 or .flac, install http://www.foobar2000.org/ with the ABX component (you need to select it at install); install lame.exe; and download a work you know really well in flac. Transcode it yourself to 192, and then use the ABX feature to see if you can really tell the difference.

I'd invite anyone else who's interested to try this too - IME, for most people on most equipment, 192 mp3 is transparent.

 

[berniedicters]

Higher BR mp3s don't increase dynamic range, they just decrease artifacts and increase the cutoff frequency. For 192kb mp3s, the cutoff is ~18kHz, which is already above what most adults can hear - if you don't find flyback transformer hum on CRTs annoying, you're certainly not going to hear >18kHz harmonics.

Before you waste your time redownloading stuff in 320 or .flac, install http://www.foobar2000.org/ with the ABX component (you need to select it at install); install lame.exe; and download a work you know really well in flac. Transcode it yourself to 192, and then use the ABX feature to see if you can really tell the difference.

I'd invite anyone else who's interested to try this too - IME, for most people on most equipment, 192 mp3 is transparent.

This is interesting. I'd got some vague idea in the back of my mind that part of the process of increasing the compression level involved compressing (in the audio sense) the signal, thus narrowing the dynamic range. Evidently not.

I'm no audiophile, though as a classical performer I like to think I've got a reasonable ear, and in all honesty I've not been able to tell the difference between an mp3 track at 160kb/sec and the original CD track, but I'm quite prepared to accept that there are people who could tell the difference in a blind test between even higher rates and uncompressed data. It's quite gratifying that you're saying that 192 is transparent. Does that ABX plugin have a Linux equivalent? I usually do all my compressing in place on the Linux box, rather than moving it to the Windows machine and then moving it back.

Thanks for this response, though - it's good to be able to separate out the myth from the reality just a little more...

ETA: OIC, ABX isn't about better compression, it's so you can do a double-blind test. I'll give that a go.

 

[rubbershoes]

Never had and don't want an Mp3 player or i-pod or whatever that shit is called!

N_igma yesterday...