Vinyl, CD, SACD, DVD-A, MP3

[Andyyyy]

After reading that some people put their vinyl collection into CD, I wonder- Do any of you hear a difference between these formats? I have heard that there are those who have looked at the wave files of ripped CDs converted to mp3 and they claim that when using Lame, a 320 bps mp3 is virtually indistinguishable from the wave. Others make the claim that vinyl rules. Where are most of you on this? Do you hear a difference?

So much depends on the speaker leads as far as I'm concerned. You can have the most expensive system in the world but if, like me, your speaker leads are rubbish then the chances of hearing any difference between formats is minimal.

That's what I've found at any rate.

Flame on!!

[lotus]

I would say that first it depends on you ears, and in second place of the system (speakers mostly, in that I agree with KW, as even affordable electronic are nowadys excellent). If you work in a very loud place, used to go to discos with a noise level of 110 dBA 4 times a week, I think a 56 kbs mp3 would do.., you will not hear any difference to better formats.

When getting the iPod I made several hearing tests with different formats. Beginning with the fact, that all formats except true analog recordings are lossy formats (best quality recording I have is a Japan vinyl from The Concert for Bangla Desh from George Harrison), my personal preferences based on my genes and earing capabilities history are as follow:

1. AACplus 320 kbs (unfortunatelly the iPod does not digest it)
2. AAC 320 kbs (more brilliant than the lower AAC codings)
3. MP3 320 kbs

And the lower rates follow.

I have to emphasis here that I never tried flac or ogg, although there is a radio on the net which uses orgg at VBR (aprox 80 kbs) with an excellent sound

[gr8sho92]

Originally Posted by Andyyyy

Do any of you hear a difference between these formats?

In a way it almost doesn't matter for me. Even if listening to a vinyl record was superior to a WAV CD, I wouldn't take the time to do it and deal with all the nuances. Now, some people have massive LP collections that may not be available on CD at all and so digitizing the music is the only way to make it portable.

I will echo Lotus experiment which I did independently before I knew his results. I agree that AAC is better than MP3. But even 320 AAC produced some distortion on one setup I have here. Only the actual CD played certain passages properly. So you have to be able to detect the loss of quality and have a system that can reproduce that loss before it matters. If you hit these two requirements, then you might be tempted to look for another route like FLAC, which unfortunately is far from ubiquitous.

FWIW, I have been pretty happy listening to AM on the 128K stream through my home stereo system.