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Which format is better?

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FlyinPenguin:

--- Quote from: nstgc on April 28, 2012, 12:58:04 AM ---I rip all my CDs (yes I actually buy music) as FLAC as well as AAC. AAC is much better than MP3.

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Same here. I rip all my CDs in FLAC and put them on my server for distribution to my HTPC and Archos 5. I then re-encode certain albums to AAC for some of my smaller flash based players such as my smartphone.

mgz:

--- Quote from: Tatsujin on April 28, 2012, 01:07:23 AM ---
--- Quote from: Clannad_92 on April 27, 2012, 03:30:26 PM ---so FLAC is good bcause it preserve sound quality?
Interesting...thank s all...

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Yes. If you have some good or high-end speakers - on the plus side, for maximum sound quality, you want a good sound card and real speaker cables for pure quality - and to notice the real difference between lossless vs. lossy. If you got some shit speakers/audio-output/cables then you can go with MP3 or Vorbis.


--- Quote from: kitamesume on April 28, 2012, 12:35:37 AM ---1) MP3 - most, if not all, affordable portable players supports it. small in size so you could put a whole lot of songs on the player, quality is still great since i doubt you'd be bringing a 500$ headpiece with you.

problems : lossy format. thats it.

2) FLAC - lossless, not as large as wav. good for archives and occasional listening if you want pure quality.

problems : pretty big in size. not every songs has a flac version available. theres only a few portable player that supports flac. needs a really good headpiece and soundcard to be appreciated.

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^ What this person said.

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tatsu speaker wire has been proven to make very little difference, they have taken tons of audiophiles and played music over the "nicest" speaker wire money could buy and over the same speakers with clothes hangars and people couldnt tell the difference.

Just getting decent speaker wire that isnt the thin as fuck shit that comes in like HTiB is all you need

x5ga:
If you have a good sound system, go for lossless formats. FLAC will give you a reasonable compression rate/decoding speed ratio and also it's highly compatible with a lot of devices... including some portable MP3 players (tho I dunno why you'd put lossless files on a device with limited space, but if you want, you _can_). APE has better compression at the cost of decoding/encoding speed, and it's not that compatible... some players don't even play it (get foobar btw). TAK has all the advantages of FLAC and APE, except I don't even know of a player that supports it besides foobar and winamp, and even those, with 3rd party plug-ins only.

As for lossy formats, and MP3 vs. WMA, I remember a blind test (or was it double blind?) made by an independent research company, and WMA _kinda_ beat MP3 at (subjective) sound quality, at both 64kbps and at 128kbps. Which is expected since the actual base of the MP3 format is almost 20 years old. WMA is only about 10-12 or so, and WMA Pro is kinda recent (few years old). AAC beat them all btw. At all tested bitrates. So, go with that if you can.

vuzedome:
Audiophiles...  ::)
And when they start arguing about the objectivity of a subjective test, boy oh boy.
I stopped using the "not this shit again" picture but I guess I should have put it up on my first post in this topic.

x5ga:
yeah, audiophiles are elitist bastards... like every other -philes ;3

Anyway, in real world, if you use an onboard sound card and you bought your headphones at the local grocery store from next to the potatoes, you won't be able to tell the difference between a 16bit 44khz 128kbps MP3 and 24bit 96KHz FLAC. Justin Beaver will still be crap, no matter if it's at 16kbps 8bit mono MP2, or in Dolby TrueHD. Also, bass frequencies compress well so they usually sound good no matter what format they're in. MP3 has problems with high frequencies tho, it tends to cut them off.

Just download a few FLAC songs, compress them with your fav. encoder, and see if you can tell the difference. I usually get FLACs if I can find them, but even with what sound system I have, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between lossless and a well-made lossy compression.

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