Martin Karne on 17/5/2007 at 03:25
Whoa whoa there, this ain't firecrackers, dig, this are LAMs straight from Unatco.. erm
I mean no freaking way, 128kbps is quite noticeable when there is some main instrument louder another background instrument just disappears.
Rogue Keeper on 17/5/2007 at 08:06
Quote Posted by Bjossi
That tells me your ears aren't.
Then we can perform a blind test on you, yes ? ;)
Back in around 1999/2000, 128 has been widely considered as a sufficient bitrate, but hey, we didn't have so big hard drives and neither so we had refined encoders. Later the common consensus was that 192 should suffice for most people. Those times are gone as well. Our hardware has evolved significantly. But one important thing hasn't evolved since '99 - human hearing! For a long time we were happy with 44.1/16 standard widely established by CDDAs and indeed, quality music in this dynamic range is sufficient for human hearing even today. Speaker and amplifying technology doesn't change so rapidly. If you think about it, people have rather limited hearing in comparison with many animal species. If dogs were intelligent audiophiles, they would think the dynamic range of our CDs is some cutted down compression format. And we live in the age of INDUSTRIAL NOISE! Human hearing wasn't designed to be bombed by heavy basses on concerts, dance parties and from our personal audio systems, it was designed to distinguish subtle noises in the nature. We are damaging our hearing because we love it.
Phibes has a good point. A LOT of individual psychology has impact on perception of the sound. The essence of an audiophile isn't in owning high-end audio eqipment, it is primarily in understanding of how the sound WORKS - the more someone understands the sound, the better he can tell what has real impact on the quality of the sound, where are the borders of the laws of physics and where irrational audio snobism begins. An ambitious audio expert should be thinking nearly like a scientist, and scientists use critical thinking to prevent themselves from being affected by commercial bullshit. No way "I trust this device works like it was supposed to (nobody really knows how because the manufacturer didn't exactly tell us), afterall it was EXPENSIVE!". That's for laugh.
It is an irony though that professional audio technicians have their hearing worn out rather earlier than other people.
phibes on 17/5/2007 at 12:24
i suffered from beeing an 'audiophile'. It was my hobby from my childhood time on. I was subscriber of all german Hifi-magazines (Audio, Stero, Stereoplay and Hifi Vision) and I payed a lot for equipment. Friends of mine still buy high-end power-cables(!) and swore they hear the difference, they buy racks that are supposed to make the sound better... When they hear names like Accuphase, Krell or Mark Levinson their eyes start glowing ... they believe in anything those Hifi-Mags tell them. They are slaves to the high-end industries and those industries goes hand-by-hand with those magazines. I feel sorry for them. Studying computer science (which includes electronics as a minor field) saved me from this ... it enabled me to look a bit behind the scenes, and i didnt like what i saw because my lifetime-hobby was rendered bullshit ... i threw thousends of DM out of the window as well.
I just had to accept: Hifi as a hobby is dead, wasted time and money. Transmitting frequencies up to 20kHz is a joke for todays electronics. Even the low-end CD-Players from the early 90s had perfect frequency responses and almost reached the theoretical 96dB. Same goes for amplifiers from the 80s: if you want to draw their frequency response you need to take a ruler ...
When the industries found out that theres nothing left to justify their high-end equipment they simply threw in all this crap, ... suddenly the cabels became important ... CD-Players suffered from jitter ... amplifiers had to show a good damping-factor to get all 5 stars in the result chart ...
Speakers are another story, so are (the always underestimated) room-acoustics.
So finally i had to look for a new hobby and found fotography very interesting ... much better than beeing an audiophile because you have to discover your creative side as well :)
Bjossi on 17/5/2007 at 16:11
Quote Posted by BR796164
Then we can perform a blind test on you, yes ? ;)
The reason I use 320k is because I tried to listen to 128k after I got my headphones.
But I know that the bitrate isn't all the quality. Ogg vorbis for example sounds very good when encoded in 128k, and so does aac. And the codec itself can also make all the difference, one mp3 codec may sound horrid on 128k while another one sounds much better.
So in other words; I can tell the difference with how I encode my mp3s, they always get an obvious background noise and a little echoy. If I don't hear these, then chances are I won't hear the difference.
Martin Karne on 17/5/2007 at 21:04
Pay attention, audiophile and credible guy is not the same, I mean who in their right minds pay for speaker spikes at 5000 dollars?
Vibration damping ok, but just use a soft cloth pad underneath the speakers.
A magnet used over a CD/DVD player? Mumbo jumbo again.
Expensive wires that change the sound?
Mumbo jumbo again.
There are some expensive wires that use parallel wiring and those can destroy some amplifiers because of an increase in capacitance.
Al_B on 17/5/2007 at 23:14
Quote Posted by Martin Karne
There are some expensive wires that use parallel wiring and those can destroy some amplifiers because of an increase in capacitance.
There are also some professional quality cables that use symmetrical cable construction techniques to eliminate common mode interference as much as possible. I agree that there is a lot of moonshine in the audio cable business, but some of it is relevant when talking about long cable runs. (Probably not relevant in the context of this forum, however)
Martin Karne on 17/5/2007 at 23:56
Yeah but we are not speaking either of professional amplifiers that can take any load and survive.
Al_B on 18/5/2007 at 00:07
Quote Posted by Martin Karne
Yeah but we are not speaking either of professional amplifiers that can take any load and survive.
You are correct, and in any case the wires I was talking about are normally used as inputs and not as loads presented to amplifiers.
I agree that many cables and products sold into the audio market are either over specified or completely misleading, but there are circumstances where a careful choice of product can produce a noticable improvement to sound quality.
AxTng1 on 20/5/2007 at 17:26
I think we are all missing the real issue, which is:
Can Terri Brosius be persuaded to record answering machine messages for us all?
Or maybe something for the front page?
MysteryDev on 21/5/2007 at 05:44
Okay, here are the .wav files off the CD.
Because these were ripped digitally at 44.1 / 16 bit it's the highest quality possible given the source material, since anything higher would be fabricating data that isn't on the CD. Looking at the checksums, the songs were all ripped without any burst errors, so this should give everyone the exact files I have at the same exact same quality.
The file is big, of course, but hey, people wanted the uncompressed source data.
If you want FLAC or ogg or some other format, feel free to encode it yourself. At this point I've put the original quality files out there, so the audiophiles can take care of the rest. I didn't take the time to name the tracks, but it's in the same order as the mp3s I posted so it should be easy enough tag them however you like.
Enjoy!
(
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TIXHJVIJ)
