Do You Prefer 320 kbps?

[spark1]

The whole 'loudness wars' thing reputedly came about because record labels thought they could make their records 'stand out' more on radio plays by 'turning it up to 11'. Missing the fact that radio stations employed volume levelling of their own, for technical broadcast reasons (on FM)...

Done for more than just technical reasons.

 

[SoundStage88]

I find 320k streaming to be perfectly acceptable for casual listening, streaming in the car over bluetooth (which is never lossless anyway), listening during a workout, and other non-critical situations. It's really quite good overall, unlike some lower bitrate streams which even in those situations have what I find to be very clear artifacts and other issues.

Also keep in mind that different compression types give different results, so a 320k mp3 file can't be directly compared to a 320k aac or ogg version of the same music. The streaming services don't always tell us what they use either, making it even more difficult to compare.

But when firing up a big system where SQ is the main goal, I will always go lossless. No point in spending big money on a system and feeding it anything less than lossless doesn't seem right.