Do Higher Bitrates Payoff?

[brad1011a 10+ year member]

And as the article states the best way to compress is VBR, because increased musical complexity requires higher bitrates to sound 'lossless', but certainly not all the music needs such high rates. Obviously this keeps file sizes down without sacrificing quality.

 

[krisfnbz 10+ year member]

I try not to listen to anything under 160, I do have alot of 128 though and Im in the process of redownloading what I listen to for quality purposes

 

[Raven 10+ year member]

MP3 itself is horribly dated. If you're only using a PC to play the music and you're using the LAME/ MP3 format, you shouldn't even call yourself an audiophile. It's like calling yourself a movie lover and then encoding all your movies in WMV or trying to make Flash / MNG animations using the GIF format. Popularity of the format is the only reason to use it.

I've used LAME 3.97 to encode CD rips. Unless you explicity tell it not to, it will filter out higher frequencies and resample them to lower ones. (12-18khz depending on bitrate). I know if you tell it not to, you'll get some mad distortion and ringing in these higher frequencies at low bitrates. On the bright side, you can set the slope of the crossover, but only as a percent of the frequency.

 

[konechiwa 10+ year member]

why spend so much money on audio equipment then skimp out on limewire/itunes MP3's?

to me mp3's sound good, but always different then CD's.

buy CD's!

 

[ngsm13 5,000+ posts]

ExactAudioCopy FTW.

That's the only encoder I use, have actually surprised some "Audiophiles"... have asked if the album we were listening to was CD or Mp3CD.

nG

 

[Buffalohed 10+ year member]

EAC is the best program for sure but it is also one of the slowest.

If I have a CD I want to rip to my computer I almost always rip it in V0, but if it is one I listen to a lot I will rip it in FLAC as well. Sometimes I can hear a difference, sometimes not. But only on my headphones.