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Test Your Digital Format Perception

satkinsn said:
It's an interesting problem. I'm 57, and have too much stuff, despite winnowing. That includes CDs. I'd like to continue to get new music, but I'm really not interested in the care and feeding of it - of course, that cuts both ways. If I don't have a physical copy, then I have to obsess about back ups, migrating formats, etc.

What I think about now is - if I live to be 83 (Social Security's very rough guess of my death age) that gives me an absolute maximum of 365 days times 25 years to listen to music I love.

Assuming that I can get in an album a day, that would mean that if I own only 365 albums, I can only listen to each one another 25 times. That doesn't account for, say, the big boxes from Mosaic, where I have five or six cds in the set.

In light of that, how many cds should I own? I guess another way of putting it is, my attention is now a finite resource, one I can see the end of. How do I best "spend" it?

s.
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Wow have you hit a nerve. I am the same age, well I get another 360 days on you, but you have dissected our hobby to the nerve. I am closing in on a year long period of reinvesting and upgrading my system including building a dedicated room and you just showed me the door I was ignoring.

Well, I will enjoy what I have and selectively buy new music. I am leaning more and more to the streaming services which will only get better with bandwidth. I too do not want to chase the evolving formats.

Stay warm up there and I hope you have a plow and large snowblower!
 
crwilli said:
Stay warm up there and I hope you have a plow and large snowblower!
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Completely OT, but the last three weeks have been a wild ride. I run the news department of a small tv station in Watertown NY. We've been here forever, and everyone in a three county area watches us. We're the community bulletin board when disaster strikes.

First, just before Christmas as people were trying to get vacation in, we had a massive ice storm that lasted for three days. At its height, 30,000 people were without power in bitter cold temperatures. I slept at the station, a lot of folks delayed or lost their holidays. It was the worst weather we've had since 1998.

Turn around and we just had a very serious winter storm, with the most snow in a concentrated period since 1977. The official count isn't in yet, but in outlying areas we pretty clearly got four, five feet of snow in about two and a half days, and in Watertown itself, around three feet.

And this weekend it'll be 50 degrees, which could mean flooding, roof collapses and other problems. All we need now is a plague of locusts and we're all set.

s.
 
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So I tried the test using two different songs:
1) Johnny Cash - Give my love to Rose
2) Lorde - Tennis Court

Started at 48 kbps vs WAV - 100% correct
96 kbps - 100% correct
128 kbps is where I began guessing.

I'm listening on my computer feeding a Firestone Fireye II DAC/Amp and some Beyerdynamic DT990's.

Either my hearing is fairly subpar....or my DAC is less than stellar, or I'm too honest LOL!!!
 
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onwardjames said:
I'm pretty sure I cannot tell the difference between 320 and FLAC. Anything above 256 is a challenge, and only with cymbals and acoustic guitars can I perceive a difference.

With that said, I rip to FLAC. WHY? Because one day, perhaps stem cell research might fix my ears. Maybe Oscar Goldman will rebuild my ears. Hell, aliens might give me supersonic hearing.

All jokes aside, it makes me happy. And, one day my gear might get to the point where it reveals it.
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When I started ripping ALL of my existing CDs to digital, a year or so ago, I used Asunder on my Linux box (which relies upon cdparanoia, a very good tool for accurate ripping) and ripped to both FLAC and 192 MP3.

Turned out to be a bit of a mistake for me for a couple reasons. First, because I really underestimated how much disc space I would need to maintain all of that, and second, because I absolutely, positively, could not hear the difference between them.

I ended up deleting all the FLAC files.

However, because I have this deep lingering suspicion that perhaps, somehow, despite all appearances to the contrary, there might really be an audible difference, I have begun ripping all new CD acquisitions to 320 Khz MP3 instead of 192.

I cannot define a logical reason to do so. But it makes me feel better. I consider that a valid reason. I just won't claim it is necessary or that I can hear the difference; I cannot.

I *suspect* that no one can. I will leave it at that.
 
Why rip at all?
Compression is used for limited disk space and for transmission = old days, when HD disks were small, not anymore.
 
rcs16 said:
Why rip at all?
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Because if you don't rip the CD, you don't get a digital copy of it on your computer. That's what 'rip' means in this context.

Compression is used for limited disk space and for transmission = old days, when HD disks were small, not anymore.
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I have 5+ terabytes online. Still not enough for my entire photo and record collection if I rip to FLAC or WAV (and RAW for photos) with backups. So yeah, disc space still matters.

That's why.
 
Well, I finally got around to a little more blind ABXing this morning, though not with the rigor I should use.

The track was Ken Peplowski's version of the Beatles' "Within You. Without You," picked mostly because I already had it ripped onto my computer as an uncompressed .aiff file, and when I was playing through a bunch of music over the weekend, I thought I could hear a difference between Peplowski's album and an Art Pepper album I had that was at standard iTunes 256 kbps.

So I bought the iTunes 256k version of "Within You, Without You" and gave the two five spins using an ABX tester, a USB dac, headphones.

Each test gave me five plays of the song.

Test 1 - 60 percent

Test 2 - 60 percent

Test 3 - 60 percent

Test 4 - I decided to listen longer, and more carefully, if such were possible. I was pretty sure I could hear some differences this way and sure enough, 80 percent.

Test 5 - Applying the same care, 20 percent.

Let's be honest: I was listening for stuff I *thought* was different - did Peplowski's breath (he plays clarinet) sound fuller on the aiff track? - and as hard as I bore down, I got nuthin.' Listening longer appeared to not only not improve my results, something which I have claimed in the past, but it may make them worse.

Of course, this could all be a matter of my laptop to headphones simply not being "resolving" enough or something, but I doubt it. What I would consider as a partial explanation is 57 year old ears which seem to top out in the 12-13 khz range, but even then, if there were real, important differences in files, they should be more obvious than this.

s.
 
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robgmn said:
Because a 30% reduction in space used means 30% more stuff can be stored?
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Main reason for ripping now is to have files with proper metadata embedded into them. As a side benefit you get this 30% reduction in size. When Flac or similar file is expanded, there is no difference from source, so no worry about sound quality.

When cell phones have 32 or even 64GB of storage onboard (equivalent to 100-200 CDs), there is no reason to compromize quality with lossy compression even for mobile use.
 
for_p1 said:
Main reason for ripping now is to have files with proper metadata embedded into them. As a side benefit you get this 30% reduction in size. When Flac or similar file is expanded, there is no difference from source, so no worry about sound quality.
Click to expand...

I can have that with .wav files, and the metadata doesn't become part of the CD if you have to create a new one to replace a lost/damaged one.

I rip to FLAC for the file size reduction (otherwise, I wouldn't bother).
 
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