50% of listeners cannot tell the difference between lossless and lower bit rates.

[idc]

Well, 47.3% to be precise. In a poll which I cannot link to as it is on another forum the following questions were asked;

FLAC ripped directly from CD always sounds noticably better 24.3%

I can distinguish a FLAC file as superior, after much time spent A/B-ing 27%

I cannot tell a difference 99% of the time 47.3%

192kbps mp3's sound superior - I love muddy transients and artificial highs!!! 1.3%

Total of 222 votes so far. (percentages rounded to nearest 0.1)

The general consensus from the rest of the thread was that kit was way more important. A lot of people admitted to importing CDs ast lossless rates even though they were in the 47% group. The forum where the poll was held is very much a hifi one.

So, how would you vote? (I am one of the 47%)

 

[chebby]

Cannot do anything about it because the bitrates are out of my control (fixed by Red Book standard, internet radio, BBC, iTunes, Freeview, Spotify or whoever) and besides, I have a decent CD player, tuner, and turntable for actual 'lossless' if that is my wont. = 1 (me)

That will be an unpopular view but this looks like it has the potential to be be a rip-rorting/joel infuriating/mod exasperating/people hurling broken DAC power supplies at each other... sorta thread (especially if it rains at the weekend) and it is NOT a *#@5*#%^ cable discussion thank goodness!

 

[idc]

chebby:

That will be an unpopular view but this looks like it has the potential to be be a rip-rorting/joel infuriating/mod exasperating/people hurling broken DAC power supplies at each other... sorta thread (especially if it rains at the weekend) and it is NOT a *#@5*#%^ cable discussion thank goodness!

Well I'm in the mood, anyone else up for it? Er,,,if it rains at the weekend, you must be in the only dry part of the country Chebby.

 

[John Duncan]

Well I've never heard FLAC, but generally I think that lossless through a DAC sounds better than CD, but that generally I can't tell the difference between lossless and 320k. So I guess that makes 320 better than CD (joeljoeljoel

)

But I kind of take chebby's lead on this one - I'm having too much fun listening to Spotify (which I just accidentally bought a year's-worth of) just now to care about how high the fi is.

 

[Anonymous]

I think discerning a difference between lossless and high-ish bit rate such as 320k does depend on decent quality components... I do not mean esoteric or high cost equipment, rather affordable dac's and quality speakers such as mid priced actives etc and ram depending on your media player of choice.

There is a VERY slight difference in transients etc but nothing so huge as to worry or fret over, as others state here... If the music is of good quality to start with then the overall enjoyment of said music won't be tarnished with a very slight loss overall. (in my opinion).

However, when listening at home i rip to .wav and playback as .wav either with a visualization running on the hdtv, or with the tv off, with the price of large storage I think you may as well for home use.

Essentially, for me, I like to think that using a home computer with all my music available at the click of a button regardless of if it is technically superior or not is besides the point, the experience is just more enjoyable for me than getting off my bum to change cd's

 

[Alec]

But WAV doesnt support tags.

And whats this about ram?

EDIT - JD, do you and i have different amounts of space between our paragraphs or is it just my rubbish eyes? If so, why might that be? I only pressed enter once.

 

[John Duncan]

al7478:EDIT - JD, do you and i have different amounts of space between our paragraphs or is it just my rubbish eyes? If so, why might that be? I only pressed enter once.

I think we do - I use the plain text editor, which I think gives me more control over spacing - I find the rich text one sticks in more lines than I'm expecting (and the odd spurious space at the beginning of a new line) and I end up having to fiddle with it to make it look right, which ended up annoying me too much so I switched it back. Note that I can only do that because I'm an admin (inconveniently for you

).

 

[Alec]

JohnDuncan:al7478:EDIT - JD, do you and i have different amounts of space between our paragraphs or is it just my rubbish eyes? If so, why might that be? I only pressed enter once. I think we do - I use the plain text editor, which I think gives me more control over spacing - I find the rich text one sticks in more lines than I'm expecting (and the odd spurious space at the beginning of a new line) and I end up having to fiddle with it to make it look right, which ended up annoying me too much so I switched it back. Note that I can only do that because I'm an admin (inconveniently for you

).

oh well, it happens.

cheers john.

 

[method man]

i think I can tell a difference between 320 and flac on my system. (avi 9.1 via squeezebox). but im not sure i would pass a blind test. so i stopped worrying. but for my system much more telling is the quality of the recording. a great example is spotify or napster. theee are often many versions of the same song/artist. even the exact same recording but on different albums/best ofs/compilations and the difference in quality and listenining enjoyment is many times that of a bitrate.

 

[idc]

This wasn't supposed to happen, I dont want a consensus, I want war.......

 

[chebby]

idc:
This wasn't supposed to happen, I dont want a consensus, I want war.......

You failed!!

(WHF mod on a bad day.)

 

[idc]

Lol Chebby, that looks like a scene from my last ever game of rugby. After watching our prop forward try and break another guys arm (it was a derby and there were other 'issues' going on) I decided to retire.

Anyway,rugby is for men and football is for men who only think they are men and CDs are pure rubbish anyway and CD players are destined for the dump, they will not even have a specialist following that has kept turntables a going concern, whatever.

 

[fatboyslimfast]

That's better..go idc... go idc... go idc (swings arms around in a Joey-from-friends motion)

CDs are rubbish...no, wait... Vinyl is rubbish... No, Lossless is rubbish.

(thinks)...Ah, I'm rubbish.

 

[idc]

Yeh, all hifi is rubbish and gets in the way of the music. I blame matthewpiano, he changes his hifi more often than I change my pants and only finds temporary satisfaction each time.

I'm going to go and get drunk, so if you think this is bad just you wait till later. Bah!

EDIT - the above is out of frustration that yet another attempt to get itunes working along side Spotify, so that I can listen to all my music without that damn crackling noise has failed. I would love to be upgrading just to try and squeeze another ounce of SQ out of my setup. Instead it has been months of frustration.

 

[shado]

I did compare Sonos through Cyrus 8xpd Amp and Kef Iq30 Spkrs in Sevenoakes months ago against a Cyrus 6SE CD Player and even the dealer agreed there was no difference. Obviously the DAC in the Amp helps. Shame I have to wait till next year before I can afford my new Hifi gear.

Just bought the Yamaha YDS 11 Docking station so am tinkering with the Soundbar and Subwoofer. Not quite in the same league as above but it will have to do in the interim.

 

[chebby]

idc:
EDIT - the above is out of frustration that yet another attempt to get itunes working along side Spotify, so that I can listen to all my music without that damn crackling noise has failed. I would love to be upgrading just to try and squeeze another ounce of SQ out of my setup. Instead it has been months of frustration.

Have you completely re-installed iTunes (download latest from Apple UK) across the top of your exisiting iTunes?

It will pick up all your playlists and settings and artwork no problem.

Sorry if I have suggested this before.

Have you got shot of all 'junk' on your computer and defragged, scanned for and removed adware etc? In other words is it running optimally?

Have you run CHKDSK /R lately? 'Start' then 'run' then 'cmd' enter. Then CHKDSK /R enter (in the black cmd.exe window) then reply Y and do a shutdown/restart of the PC.

It sorts out any bad sectors found on your harddrive and rescues/'repairs any data from them, rewites the rescued data to good sectors, and then flags the 'bad' bits so they are never used again. It does this for the entire hard-drive including unused areas and can really perk up an old machine that has never had it done before. Takes a while but can be worth it.

Other than that, buy a new PC. You can get a good Dell tower (minus screen) for £400 including 3 year onsite next business day cover and delivery. If you select from the Dell small/medium business section you can even get it with XP if you like XP. (Vostro for their compact tower range)

 

[knacker]

Chebby I think idc has tried just about everything to solve the itunes/crackling debacle!

I would probably recommend a laptop over a desktop for music due to the main issue with pc based music server thingies- NOISE

Desktops are notoriously noisy blighters even if you go to the extreme of trying to get the blimming thing silent as I have over the past months- silent cpu cooling, brushless low noise fans, hdd silent boxes. Let alone the graphic card fan noise if you want a machine that can at least display anything over 1024 x 768 without stuttering every nanosecond.

I would also try to steer clear of Dell as well- mostly as I believe idc has a Dell and knowing that they are bundled with all sorts of toot and rubbish that slows your machine down to a crawl.

Sorry, ran over. I am going now to pick up my Rega P3 so I can enjoy my vinyl for the first time in months

 

[chebby]

knacker:
I would also try to steer clear of Dell as well- mostly as I believe idc has a Dell and knowing that they are bundled with all sorts of toot and rubbish that slows your machine down to a crawl.

Have had Dell at home for over 8 years now with no problems. The rubbish you refer to is easily removed in an instant. I did it just the other day with a new tower to replace old one upstairs (6.5 years old and still going strong but wanted faster/smaller/cooler model.)

We have hundreds of Dells of different vintage at work and they are really reliable. (A whole world of reliability unknown to us when it was all IBM kit!)

I agree about using a laptop for music as I do this too. (My Dell laptop) Superbly quiet.

We also have an excellent Apple iMac 20" (intel) but it is not as quiet as the laptop.

Enoy your new Rega.

 

[Anonymous]

al7478:
But WAV doesnt support tags.

It can if it's on a CD and your player supports 'CD Text'

 

[Anonymous]

All my .wav info is stored with Artist, Album artist, Title (track and album), track length, Year, Genre, Album Art... I don't require much else personally.

 

[Anonymous]

Disk space is cheap so why not go with lossless and keep the ease of use. On a non-rigorous testing my wife and I could tell the difference between lossless and 320k, but not sure that I care enough to do it more rigourously than that.

Spotify and Last.fm give lot of fun exploring and listening to music at 320 / 256k.

Listening to music is what it is about after all. Last fm tells me that I've listened to nearly 500 odd artists in the last three months and that figure is rising, it was 400ish about six months ago.

 

[idc]

chebby:idc:

EDIT - the above is out of frustration that yet another attempt to get itunes working along side Spotify, so that I can listen to all my music without that damn crackling noise has failed. I would love to be upgrading just to try and squeeze another ounce of SQ out of my setup. Instead it has been months of frustration.

At the tme of starting this thread I was very hacked off. I had bought some phono splitters and thought that would mean I could easily switch between my ipod and and the DAC (for Spotify), but the crackling came back! However, I have now figured out what was going wrong, I need to switch off the DAC or the ipod completely to let the other one work properly.

So I was very happy, for all of an evening. Then Spotify started throttling and cutting out again. Then the laptop decided it was not gong to pick up the wireless router anymore. So it goes to be fixed as all attempts over the phone have failed.

I seem to be destined not to have both itunes and Spotify working at the same time. So I vent my frustrations on the forum and then I get drunk.

chebby:Have you completely re-installed iTunes (download latest from Apple UK) across the top of your exisiting iTunes?

It will pick up all your playlists and settings and artwork no problem.

Sorry if I have suggested this before.

Done that

chebby:Have you got shot of all 'junk' on your computer and defragged, scanned for and removed adware etc? In other words is it running optimally?

And that

chebby:[Have you run CHKDSK /R lately? 'Start' then 'run' then 'cmd' enter. Then CHKDSK /R enter (in the black cmd.exe window) then reply Y and do a shutdown/restart of the PC.

It sorts out any bad sectors found on your harddrive and rescues/'repairs any data from them, rewites the rescued data to good sectors, and then flags the 'bad' bits so they are never used again. It does this for the entire hard-drive including unused areas and can really perk up an old machine that has never had it done before. Takes a while but can be worth it.

Oooo, thats new, I'll try that

chebby:[Other than that, buy a new PC. You can get a good Dell tower (minus screen) for £400 including 3 year onsite next business day cover and delivery. If you select from the Dell small/medium business section you can even get it with XP if you like XP. (Vostro for their compact tower range)

I suspect that is coming, finances permitting. I have continued to read up on the problem and it appears that some Dells, for an unknown reason, react to itunes and crackle. It does not even appear to be a particular model number of Dell.

This posting is on a borrowed laptop.

 

[chebby]

As for your point about Dells and iTunes all I can say is that we have run my daughter's iTunes on old and new Dell towers (and an iMac) with no problem at all.

My own iTunes (through the Beresford and Naim etc) is from my Dell laptop. Again, no problems and no problems through the old Arcam and Fubar DAC system either.

I know that only represents three Dells in total but I think if it was an inherent problem then we would have encountered it by now.

 

[chebby]

Presumably you have 'no sounds' set on your PC to stop all the other applications sending their various beeps and boops through your hifi when playing iTunes?

'Start' then 'Control panel' then select 'Sounds and audio devices'. In the 'Sounds & audio devices' panel go to the 'Sounds' tab and click it.

Where it says 'Sound scheme' select 'no sounds' from the pull down menu and click 'apply' and then 'ok'

Now restart iTunes and see if that changes anything.

 

[chebby]

As for all that pre-loaded rubbish that new Dells come loaded up with, then run de-crapify soon after you have got it up and running (or if you have never run it before) ...

http://www.yorkspace.com/pc-de-crapifier