Any audiophiles here?

Mr ProgFreak wrote: ^ you should be able to identify 128kbit MP3 even on a half-way decent system. As for whether you should use 192, 256 or 320kbits ... who cares? If you already have most of your collection at 192kbit, why go through the trouble of re-ripping it all again.

Exercising your futility of course.

I'm audiophile enough to refuse every cd/mp3 if I can get (in theory, some vinyl is hard to get) a vinyl copy of the record.

The difference between 192kbps MP3 and loseless audio is absolutely squat for me, and if there is any difference, it's not worth the extra hard disk space.
I'm not really an insanely audiophile-ish person, I honestly don't really own an expensive audio systems. My main thing is about production really. I cannot listen stuff (or just not as often) that has really poor production.
Examples, such as metal albums with guitar tones that are a horrible, grating mid scooped grind (... And Justice For All, Cowboys from Hell) tend to make it a difficult listen for me. I'll probably end up selling me copy of AJFA purely for that reason alone.
 It's just so much easier to sit through an album with bigger and warmed guitar tones (like Colors by Between the Buried and Me with it's big low mid chunk and pretty much all of Pelican's stuff for example) for me personally because you're not being blasted with excesses of low end and high end.
Once I get a more permanent job however, I will upgrade my studio monitors to something more high end so I can take advantage of the well produced albums in my library.

kingfriso wrote: I'm audiophile enough to refuse every cd/mp3 if I can get (in theory, some vinyl is hard to get) a vinyl copy of the record.

Sacred 22 wrote: ^^^^   If I play a MP3 track and the same track in lossless I can certainly hear the difference in both detail and dynamics but to be honest you do need a system that resolves well in order to notice the difference from my experience. Even my so called non audiophile friends can hear the difference, but on most computer based systems I dare say you would be hard pressed to notice much of a difference.

http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3test.html

They used high end equipment and the test was inconclusive ... and I can't hear a difference either, not on my low-cost (but quite well sounding) PC speakers nor via my studio quality audio interface and AKG headphones. And of course you always have to take into account the bitrate of the mp3s and the quality of the encoding algorithm. I think that with a modern encoder and bitrates of well above 200kbit you really can't hear any difference anymore, no matter how good your ears or equipment.

BTW: Of course it's entirely possible that you *think* you hear a difference ... it's just how our brain works. If we are sure of something and expect a certain experience, the brain will try to make it happen for us. Which, in this case, is fairly easy to accomplish since the two sources (if ripped/encoded properly) are virtually indistinguishable.

I will say that as you increase the sample rate you are going to find that the sound will become harder and harder to determine any differences, but what I have found is over long periods of listening to MP3 format as opposed to red book CD format is that listener fatigue sets in quicker with the decreased sample rates. The higher sample rates are naturally going to be more accurate, they have to be all things being equal and the brain knows. That's why listener fatigue sets in.

Is it possible to go to a studio, record the velocity and position of every air molecule, and some how retrace that to the air displaced by the amps originally used to record a piece of music and somehow turn that data into sound? Would it be more accurate than vinyl? 

inrainbows wrote: I do agree, there are noticable differences between the several bitrates, which I certainly can hear in just one track played in both formats. A spectral analysis can prove it :

The spectral analysis doesn't give you any indication about whether you're going to *hear* a difference - it just shows the mp3 compression algorithms at work. In modern mp3 encoders there is no "cutoff frequency"  - if the compressed files contain much less of the very high frequency parts of the signal it's usually because when playing the track you can't hear them because other (louder) parts of the signal mask them. That's how mp3 (or any other modern) compression achieves the small file size ... it discards part of the signal. Of course this can't be done in a perfect way at any bitrate ... so if the target bitrate is too low, the algorithm also removes parts of the signal which we can hear.

Mr ProgFreak wrote: Sacred 22 wrote: I can tell you that I can hear a difference and it is not something of a dream either. In fact many of the people who come over and listen can hear the difference. You only have to live with a quality system to fully appreciate the organic sound that it offers compared to any computer system I have ever listened to. You may have a fine sounding computer based system but I'm not giving up what I have for a computer based system, maybe at gunpoint, but that's about it. I never said that your system doesn't sound better than mine ... actually I'm quite sure that it does. My active Logitech 5.1 speakers cost 80 EUR (that's amp + subwoofer + 5 speakers), and what I am saying is that they sound much, much better than any other system in that price range, and that they can even compete with a typical 500-1000 EUR hifi system (I have such a system, too), especially when you sit in front of the computer, at a 1-2 m range. Please tell me: How do you conduct these listening tests? Are they really "blind" tests, with neither of the contestants knowing which is the mp3, and which is the real CD?

\

Mr ProgFreak wrote: inrainbows wrote: I do agree, there are noticable differences between the several bitrates, which I certainly can hear in just one track played in both formats. A spectral analysis can prove it : The spectral analysis doesn't give you any indication about whether you're going to *hear* a difference - it just shows the mp3 compression algorithms at work. In modern mp3 encoders there is no "cutoff frequency"  - if the compressed files contain much less of the very high frequency parts of the signal it's usually because when playing the track you can't hear them because other (louder) parts of the signal mask them. That's how mp3 (or any other modern) compression achieves the small file size ... it discards part of the signal. Of course this can't be done in a perfect way at any bitrate ... so if the target bitrate is too low, the algorithm also removes parts of the signal which we can hear.

The specral analysis shows what your ears listen to. There is no other way to prove the difference.

Lossless Data Compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. This can be contrasted to Lossy Data Compression, which does not allow the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. i.e. lossless data = same to cd audio experience.

MP3 uses a lossy compression algorithm that is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording.This results in a file that is typically about 1/10th the size of the digital data found on an audio CD, and many signals are lost forever (in particular low and highest signals should never be reproduced).
A good audio system allows your ears to hear the differences. Just play the same file in two different formats following one another, in a good audio system and I'm sure you can hear the difference.