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Old 03-10-2014, 05:32 AM   #26 (permalink)
Ponzio
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Join Date: Mar 2014
Location: Wit's End, Fredonia
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Noob here, coming from an audiophile background. To be honest I haven't read the whole thread in great detail but the gist seems to be whether MP3 files are up to h-fi standards? Is that correct?

From an audio quality perspective in a nutshell a SACD disc track is better than a standard CD, a CD track is better than a WAV file, a WAV file is better than a FLAC file and a FLAC file is better than a MP3 file.

Having said that, a high-bit 320kb CBR MP3 file copied from a standard CD, using good conversion software like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) would be indistinguishable from the original to 96% of listeners ... provided it's being fed to high-end headphones/receiver with a good DAC on a laptop/low quality sound card/audio I/O on a MB, on a PC. The best option is a good MB (Asus/Gigabyte, etc.) audio I/O outputted to a receiver/amp/AVR (Yamaha/Denon/Marantz, etc.) with a built-in DAC processor chip (Burr-Brown, Sabre 32).

Personally I'm using my audio I/O port out from a PC with a Asus Sabretooth X58 MotherBoard fed to a Yamaha RX-V2700 AVR (Burr-Brown DAC chip built-in) to a pair of KEF LS50 speaker's in my office or I stream my files (both MP3 & FLAC) thru a DNLA server to a Oppo BDP-105 (Sabre 32 DAC chip) in my living room and to date not one person has been able to distinguish the difference between a high-bit MP3 file and a standard CD track. I had a fellow audiophile who stated that it was impossible that a MP3 file would be as good as the CD track. So we set up a blind listening test with the same track. Guess what? He couldn't tell the difference till I pointed out certain passages in the song where the CD was ever so slightly more detailed than the MP3 file and it's even harder to detect when you use FLAC or WAV files.

So to summarize a high-bit MP3 file can sound just as good as a standard CD track to most people.
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