For those who listen to music at 128kbps....

[miketheidiot]

max vbr

"dark side of the moon" takes up 200 mb, not sure how that compares to lossless.

anyways i'm using z-640's and the difference is clear.

for those who are dumb, those are medicre speakers.

 

[archcommus]

Default CD is 192?

 

[Legend]

I'm pretty sure CD audio is much higher than that.

I'm not sure how you rate bit rate with it tho. Everything I've seen says something like 16-bit 48 KHz sampling.

 

[LongCoolMother]

Originally posted by: archcommus
Default CD is 192?

if you're talking about the CD audio itself its 1411 kbps (WAV)

 

[LS20]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
i cant tell the difference even on my $800 pioneer stereo..... did i just waste $800 on a pioneer stereo when my hearing is so bad that i cant tell the difference between 128K MP3 and music from the real CD?

because people say otherwise to make themselves feel better

128 isnt big of a deal for me... klipsch 2.1.. most of the times im in my room with all sorts of background noise

however, i do try to get most stuff at 192kbps because when i listen on canalphones in quieter environments i will be able to tell a difference

 

[archcommus]

Just compared with my Klipsch 5.1 and Audigy 2, listened to a track straight from the CD, and then the same track again encoded as a 128 kbps MP3. I listened for every subtle difference I could, especially in the clarity of high pitches and background sounds. They sounded identical.

 

[jamesbond007]

Originally posted by: jamesbond007
Any of you guys try the Windows Media 9 format? I haven't messed with it much, but their demo sure sounds good. In the real world, is it that much better? I haven't encoded a CD before with WMP10.

EDIT: Forgot the URL

Anyone?

 

[FrustratedUser]

Originally posted by: AgaBoogaBoo
Try 320 once, sounds much better! :beer:

Who let Captain Obvious out from his cage?

 

[Dubb]

see this thread, where I was able to pick out the 320 mp3 from the flac originals in all but one case (a case in which the source sounded like crap)

to be fair, I couldn't pick out the 320 aac.

cruddy system + untrained ears, it doesn't matter.

good system + trained ears, 128 just sounds totally lifeless. I can't think of how many albums I "previewed" at 128 or 192, and then later bought, only to get extremely enthused at how much more immersive the real cd was.

can't wait to pick up a few DVD-Audio discs now that you can rip the high res tracks (I play all my music off a flac fileserver, un-rippable media is useless to me)

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: sharkeeper
And just where are you getting these files from?

Funny you ask, I just take my 128kbps files and conver them to 320kbps and pray to god

 

[LongCoolMother]

Originally posted by: archcommus
Just compared with my Klipsch 5.1 and Audigy 2, listened to a track straight from the CD, and then the same track again encoded as a 128 kbps MP3. I listened for every subtle difference I could, especially in the clarity of high pitches and background sounds. They sounded identical.

ohhh you will probably be very hardpressed to hear the difference out of the klipsch 5.1 ultras. the audigy 2s arent too great either. you will most def. hear a diff 128 vs CD on some detailed headphones and a semi-decent source. 192 vs CD would be much tougher though (from my experience) i think the 192 kbps is where we can draw the line for the majority of computer-audio solutions.

 

[Noema]

I can tell the difference between 128 and 320 in a second.

And I have on board audio and crappy, 8 year old JBL speakers that came with a Compaq presario I bought years ago. The difference is enormous.

For example, I sampled some Dream Theater songs just to goof around at 128 and then ripped them again at 320. You can't even hear the bass nor half the drums in the 128kbps version. The lows seems to suffer the most in my opinion. It sounds so tiny, like someone recorded it in a shoebox.

 

[Legend]

Just compared with my Klipsch 5.1 and Audigy 2, listened to a track straight from the CD, and then the same track again encoded as a 128 kbps MP3. I listened for every subtle difference I could, especially in the clarity of high pitches and background sounds. They sounded identical.

There's many factors. Like the type of music recorded (frequency range and amount of instruments) and quality (if it's crap on a CD, it's still crap). That and your ears.

Because the difference to me on my 5.1 Ultras is night and day. I can tell a huge difference between CD audio and DVD audio. DVD audio is so clear that it's like the music is be performed for you live without people making noise.

 

[sniperruff]

192-320 vbr mbps sounds much better than 128

320 sounds so much better than 192-320 vbr

i am able to tell the difference in a pair of senns HD-497 hook to a SB Live. cheap stuff anyone can afford. the difference is apparent.

 

[archcommus]

Hell, I have some music here at 96. I'm not sure what the original CD is, but I compared my MP3s to the CD, sounded identical.

 

[ethebubbeth]

When your equipment is good enough, the difference in quality is night and day.

If you have any SBLive! or Audigy soundcard (I use an Audigy2 ZS), the drivers natively upsample everything to 48khz. However, this conversion is done in a shoddy manner which introduces a lot of harmonic distortion. I reccomend the kX Drivers along with either a decent resampling plugin for winamp (uses a lot of cpu resources unfortunately) or the kernel streaming output in foobar2000. Then Creative Labs cards sound as they should. If you aren't interested in gaming performance, I'd highly reccomend that you look to another manufacturer for your sound card.

I use Grado SR80's as my headphones and Klipsch RF-3's as loudspeakers (excellent speakers, unfortunately run through a cheap onkyo amp so they don't reach their full potential) and the difference between 128kbit mp3 and other encoding methods is IMMEDIATELY discernable to nearly anyone I ask. If you use a decent encoder (LAME), mp3 can sound acceptable at 192kbps, especially if its intended target is a portable device. Alt-Preset-Standard sounds excellent, and is difficult to discern from 320kbps. When Fraunhofer was doing initial testing with the codec, the vast majority of their sound engineers could not consistently distinguish mp3 from the original cd when the bitrate was set to 256kbps or higher.

One of the few things missing from high bitrate mp3's is a fully developed soundstage. Joint stereo encoding is usually the biggest culprit in this case, but is a necessity at lower bitrates to preserve quality. I personally prefer the Ogg Vorbis codec, in that it allows higher bitrates than mp3 (and sounds better per bit as well). On my desktop, I keep my music at Ogg Quality 10 which is VBR up to 500kbps, averaging about 464kbps. Only in one or two instances have I been able to discern a difference between that and FLAC, and at that bitrate the ogg files take up half the space of FLAC. For my portable player, I use quality 6 which still sounds excellent and further cuts filesize in about half.

Phew, that was long but I've put a lot of thought into all of this recently. Of course, this is all my opinion. Your mileage might vary depending on your equipment and ears.