http://www.facebook.com/pages/Youll-spend-so-much-on-an-MP3-Player-but-0-on-headphones/100749846662690

@Anonymous: i just realized a perfect comparison is bluray vs standard def. would you rather have a movie collection in 1080p bluray or in 480? thats what i thought.
>ITT a bunch of kids who probably dont mind watching videos from crappy stream sites in the grainiest quality

@Anonymous: you're a fucking idiot. as a musician, sound quality is paramount; there's plenty of difference. you just don't know the difference, so you bitch about it. go whine more.

@Anonymous: Actually it's completely different. You might ask me why it's completely different. I wouldn't have an answer for that. I assert that the average human ear is not trained to hear the difference between a compressed audio file and a lossless audio file. Humans rely on their eyes as their primary method of understanding the world, so telling the difference between 480p and 1080p is easy. Also it depends on how large the video is. I'm sure the same thing goes with volume/quality of headphones for the sound argument.

I don't have a concrete reason why your argument is invalid. Nor do you have a reason why it is valid.

My point is you are making comparisons based off of nothing. We might as well bring in arguments about how not being able to tell the difference between flac and mp3 is the same as not being able to tell the difference between my mother's delicious homemade french toast and the french toast that costs six-ninety-nine, plus an obligatory tip, at the corner pancake house. That's absurd you say? You're just jealous because your mom sucks at cooking.

Perception of audio quality is extremely influenced by psychological factors.
Very much like a placebo effect. If you think something is going to sound better, it probably will.

@Anonymous: Sounds like a 12 year old to me

@Anonymous: 128kbps vs. .flac is a pretty big difference. 320kbps vs. .flac isn't something everyone hears.

This format war doesn't necessarily bother me. Though Ogg Vorbis should be the top pic due to not needing to pay for a license as well as great audio-to-compression ratio, that argument is for another time and another place.

The shit I'd like to bring up here is the idiots who don't seem to understand that you cannot "upgrade" a 96kbps MP3 to a 320kbps MP3 and have it magically sound better. I knew an assclown who was ADAMANT that he had to upgrade his 128's to 320's because they would sound better. He tried to call bullshit, and there was no sinking it into him.

Up next: Assholes who don't know how to properly tag MP3 files, or, Gnutella Garbage Part 2: The Cancer of Gnutella 2 Network.

@Anonymous: What are you talking about, moran?
320kbps is a higher bit rate, obviously it's higher quality.

@Anonymous: A friend has a pair of these: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/ue/ue-earphones/devices/TripleFi-10

You can definitely tell the difference between the various encodings.

>They can't tell the difference between 96kHz, 48kHz, and 44.1kHz!
>They can't hear alias frequencies!
>They don't know what dithering is!
>They think lossless audio compression is 0% efficient!
>They don't know the meaning of the word hipster!

@Anonymous: You're telling me a 1kbps mp3 is the same as a lossless FLAC? Idiot.

@Anonymous: You can't re-encode a low bit-rate track to a higher bit-rate expecting it to sound better because the original quality of the sound is already lost on the low bit-rate version.

@stopsign: A CD holds up to 700MB of data. How exactly does that turn into 1GB when you rip it?

@Anonymous: because in the change to flac it expand the data to fit the encode but don't get more quality than the cd, but a recording made in flac from studio get all the sound from the actual recordingand that is the deal. also flac is meaninless in a computer because space is expensive

@mayestic: It is impossible to get a FLAC rip that's larger than the original audio data (a.k.a. WAV with the same number of channels, sample rate and bit-size).

... unless its a completely random sequence of bytes that's designed to break all types of data compressors.

@Anonymous: The people who say they can't tell the difference are the people who have been listening to highly compressed digital music their whole lives. Even the radio now plays digital music that's been compressed to all hell, and I can tell when their files were compressed twice or three times.

It's not that the "average" human ear can't tell the difference, it's purely a societal effect. Now, I can stand to listen to v0 but after that it becomes grating. Can't stomach 192kbps anymore, and that used to be a pretty standard CBR in the early 2000s on torrent sites. That's because I've been spoiling my ears with FLAC and now I'm trained to hear the difference.

Now, if you're on youtube and you take 480p versus 720p most people will say they see the difference. But play the clips on their own and have people guess the resolution and you might find that they can't always tell the difference. Why? Because the resolution doesn't actually coincide with the video compression method - youtube video is highly compressed and the difference between 480p and 720p is not as noticeable! The point? People who are used to compression have their senses dulled! It goes with all senses, buddy. You can consider the different resolutions as different sampler rates, but you could also just take two videos that were compressed differently and compare them and people might not be able to tell the difference because they've been looking at compressed video all their lives. It's just conditioning. And it's bad.

@Anonymous: That's not true at all, you just need good speakers or a good pair of headphones. I don't know why you think FLAC isn't better than MP3. Just compare it to image compression. A raw file from a digital camera is HUGE both filesize-wise and the more you save it as JPG

@mayestic: Okay, let's go through all the things you don't know:
- How media encoding works.
- How media containers work.
- How audio recording works.
- How mastering works.
- How digitization works.
- How inexpensive data storage is.

@Anonymous: There is a difference between 44.1kHz and 48kHz and 96kHz, and it's pretty damn noticeable when you mix audio and stuff. You just don't normally hear it because the audio source you have is at 44.1kHz, or your hardware can only output at 44.1kHz.

There's usually no difference when you re-sample the output to a higher rate because the final output is the same, but with twice as much data. You may argue that it should sound better because of the smoother lines after interpolation, but the digital signal is going to be converted to an analogue signal when it reaches your speakers so it's pretty much smooth by then anyway.

@urial: either way, at most people view it on a 13-17 inch screen.

so actually yeah, thats an accurate comparison.

@Gearmond: indeed

@Anonymous: "It's not that the "average" human ear can't tell the difference, it's purely a societal effect."

So basically, it /is/ that the "average" human ear can't tell the difference.

@Anonymous: Double album, bitch.

@Anonymous: The original lossless master files are massive (usually near or over 400mb apiece). CD audio has a ridiculous bitrate (~15000kbps) but is in a specially compressed format (that manages to lose very little quality unless it is burned and re-burned and so on) and when extracted, the waveforms (.wav files) are pretty damn big and then those are turned into FLAC files. Alternatively, the FLAC files can be made by the musician themselves and they are taken from the master recordings.

Here is an incredibly easy way for someone who may not be used to noticing audio artifacts to train themselves to hear them FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES (in other words don't do this if you're happy not being able to tell the difference.)

Take your favorite song that you own on a professional CD (yeah I know who has CDs anymore?) and convert it to a WMA file of the highest quality. Then listen to both versions. That odd metallic tingle-like sound you hear in the WMA is what people hate and is a good example of what it sounds like. FM radio is SO MUCH WORSE. Even 320kbs MP3's have it, it's not not as pronounced, but listen closely and once you hear it you can't un-hear it.