High Quality Ceramic Speakers to Fully Appreciate Lossless

[The Pezman]

The guy who made these is an associate of mine, and the article claims that speakers of this caliber can accentuate the difference between lossless and mp3 files. Any comments on the scientific veracity of that claim?

http://gizmodo.com/5378529/joey-roths-ceramic-computer-speakers-review-500-gives-your-pc-audiophile-cred#comments

[Yoozer]

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/19/176209

They look pretty cool, though.

[Harmony]

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/19/176209

LOL. 1/3!? Hilarious.

For those of us in the other 2/3 of people, I'd expect the difference between lossless and say 128kbps to be able to be represented on any old pair of speakers with a high enough frequency response. In an A/B comparison I can hear that difference on $10 ear buds, so I don't think that gold plated copperless whatevers are required.

[OverCoat]

I can't tell the difference between 192kbps MP3 and FLAC. I usually encode my stuff at ~160kbps VBR. Nobody complains.

I like flac as a format because for those who can tell the difference, they can keep the .flac file or for those who can't, they can convert it to whatever they like.

[Fishy]

Whoa whoa whoa, read that carefully: 160kbps mp3 and 48kbps AAC.

Part of a module I did last year was on compression artifacts of different types of encoding at different bit rates.

AAC has a very different way of breaking up and producing artifacts then mp3 and it only really becomes audible to average joe at particularly low bit rates. Apples and pears. This doesn't surprise me at all. If they were both mp3 it would be incredibly depressing stats, but this is pretty par. That's a very misleading title.

[Kizyr]

They don't seem like that depressing stats. You're forgetting that not everyone is as much of an audiophile / whose ears aren't as trained as your average person on OCR (including folks like me who don't contribute and just bring that average down). I mean, it's the same way that I figure most people couldn't tell the difference between Korean and Japanese, even though to me they sound totally different.

I probably couldn't distinguish between 128 and 192kbps, although if I'm burning to a CD then I'd still prefer FLACs or anything else lossless.

On the speakers, though, they do look pretty sweet. KF