Imo the biggest bump is from mp3 to lossless. The drums sound more organic on flacs whereas on most mp3s they sound like a computer MIDI sound.
The biggest bump for me was the change in headphones. It made my really old aac 256kbps music sound bad.
I tend to agree, but the audiophiles always have an answer to rebuttal it with.
I’m into audio and headphones, but since I’ve never been able to reliably discern a difference with hi-res audio, I no longer let it concern me.
bitwolf@lemmy.one 8 months ago
kogasa@programming.dev 8 months ago
320kbps cbr and v0 vbr mp3 are audibly transparent. Most likely, 250kbps and v2 are too.
vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Tried flac vs 192 vorbis with various headphones. E.g. moondrop starfield, fiio fa1, grado sr80x…
Can’t tell a difference. Kept using vorbis.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Opus is the way these days. Pretty much transparent even at 128kbps (arguably with even lower bitrates in most cases).
vividspecter@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I’d somewhat call myself an audiophile, just one that cares about actual measurements and audibility, and not snake oil. Haven’t heard a good term for that yet, though.
Audiophiles also tend to care about some some sort of audio purity, but I’m willing to go wild with EQ, room correction, and impulse responses, which is pretty much the opposite of purity.
PastyWaterSnake@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I’ve bought pretty expensive equipment, tube amplifier, many fancy headphones, optical DACs. A library full of FLAC files. I even purchased a $500 DAP. I’ve never been able to reliably tell a difference between FLAC and 320k MP3 files. At this point, it really doesn’t concern me anymore either, but I at least like to see my fancy tube amp light up.
I will say, though, $300 seems to be the sweet-spot for headphones for me.
pete_the_cat@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah there’s a clear difference between a pair of $25 or $50 headphones and a pair that cost a few hundred. When I first got my Sony WH1000-XM3s I let my coworker try them and he said “Wow, I didn’t know music could sound this good!”. When I upgraded to the XM4s a few years later I let my brother try them and he was similarly impressed.
Beyond a few hundred and the thousand dollar range you hit diminishing returns.
vividspecter@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I just keep FLAC around so I can transcode them to new lossy formats as they improve. And so I can transcode aggressively for my mobile when I’m streaming from home, and don’t need full transparency.
barsoap@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Blackmail – Evon. That’s the one song where I ever heard a difference, though that was ogg, dunno what bitrate I used back then but it was sufficient for everything else. Listening on youtube yep that’s mushy. The noisy goodness that kicks in at 0:30, it’s crisp as fuck on CD.
…just not the kind of thing those codecs are optimised for I’d say. Also it still sounds fine, just a bit disappointing if you ever heard the uncompressed thing. Which is also why you should never try electrostatic headphones.