Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of “Tom’s Diner” by AnnenMayKantereit. There’s a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can’t hear all that well anymore.
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can’t tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
My hearing isn’t extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of “Tom’s Diner” by AnnenMayKantereit. There’s a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly