[soulflay]

Originally Posted by Bahamut

I wouldn't take such a flawed article as consensus.

It's a consensus, not the consensus. There will always be people that disagree with something. But from my view it's a matter of empirical evidence. I can hear the flaws in mp3 just like the guy in the article.

"A 128 kbps mp3 of a live show sounds bad compared to the lossless version, so that makes mp3s of all compressions sound bad and that we shouldn't be listening to music in the mp3 format!"

The article said no such things. It was very specific about its claims.

Sorry, but that's a bad article, especially in light of all of the studies out there that shows that most people cannot distinguish between a 192 kbps mp3 and lossless, and it's dubious whether any human is capable of making that distinction.

Again, that wasn't the point of it. For one, some people can hear the flaws at that bitrate (you just have to know where to look). Second, there's the low bitrate problem of going too low (128), then there's the general inefficiency of needing to go to 320 when other codecs achieve quality at smaller sizes and are better at mitigating artifacts. The article mentions this. In either case, ocr doesn't seem to release 320 kbps mp3s.

Originally Posted by zircon

For example, your average CD player or car system will typically support MP3 CDs, not AAC or M4A CDs.

Isn't this an obscure target if this is all there is? The only other one I can think of are some die hard club djs using mp3s, but that's still just a few individuals.

Originally Posted by Neblix

If you can hear the difference between 320kbps mp3 and lossless

YOU'VE GOT SOME SERIOUS KILLER STUDIO CHOPS.

The question is why bother with such inefficient compression if you're trying to retain quality? If size is no object might as well release everything in flac.