Then you must have exceptional ears (you might have) because I've seen no test where people could tell the difference between these two reliably, only by lucky guesses. I'm guessing the "horribly compressed sound" of 320s is imagined.

You could blind test yourself, though. Put a CD with some songs you know well in your CDROM, then rip them to 320 and to 160. Try one song at a time and listen to them on shuffle so that you don't know which version is playing and see if you can guess which one is which.

If I'm not busy I'll get around to it tonight. It does seem interesting.

FLAC is 1411k! Are you sure you can't find a compromise? :D

Hah, discovered this old thing :p:

A friend of mine pointed out something that might be of relevance. He said higher frequency sounds that could be outside my audible range might create harmonics in lower frequencies. I'm not sure if this is something you'd want to preserve - you'd have to up the bitrate sufficiently to catch such interactions and maybe they're "noise" rather than something you want - but it's an interesting point.

great read, thanks for bumping this, i never would have found it :)

i always try to get music in the highest bitrate possible - preferably 320 or V0. i can't really tell a difference with anything over 256, but i figure with drive space as cheap as it is, i might as well. besides, some day i might have the cash to buy a real sound system, so i like to think of it as 'future-proofing' my collection while internet is still fast and music is still dreadfully easy to come by :D

I know that I can definitely hear the difference between different bit rates of the same piece of music. I think a lot of the time the difference is less perceptible if a greater degree of dynamic compression went into the original recordings, hip hop being a good example. As it stands right now I try to get everything at at least 256kbps.

I think it's easy for people to jump to conclusions. Reading studies on this, I have read instances where people believe they can hear a difference between bitrates and when they do a blind test, it turns out they can't. I myself turned out to be worse at this than I thought.

In order to be certain you can or cannot, you have to subject yourself to a blind test. Hearing a difference is not really the question either - the real question is can you hear which one is the higher quality one? I know that I'm not as good at this as I previously suspected and I think many would be surprised.

edit :

Actually, I can set up a blind test in the games forum, I'll encode a couple of mp3s in varying qualities and then people can download them and check if they can guess which ones are the correct ones. :)

.. Although they'd have to promise not to look it up on the file, though - or filesize. Hm.

I'd have to find a way to make people stream it I guess.

i tested myself once to see if i could tell the difference between a remaster and a regular recording. album was Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. i had 320 CBR that was ripped from who knows what, and a FLAC rip of the Mobile Fidelity Gold CD remaster. i picked the remaster correctly every time. i was really surprised at how clear the difference was.

but that's kind of :offtopic:

From my experience at the lower end of the bit rate scale you experience phase distortion which is that whirring white noise that most people associate with poor quality audio streams. As the bitrates progress further it becomes the sound stage and the dynamic range that is affected (mainly in the treble range, cymbals being a prime example), and the perception of distortion at dynamic peaks. I have done blind tests to be sure that there really was a different I was perceiving, but to me the difference between 192 and 256 is night and day. It should be noted that some people's ears are just more sensitive to this type of thing, being an audio engineer helps. Trust me, my hard drive wishes I didn't care.

I too hoard high bitrate files so for me the big difference is that I won't turn down a 160 if I can't find anything higher, hehem .. :p:

I have bad hearing, though, no way around it. In the studies, there are some that can pick the high quality files and these are people with good hearing who should arguably get their music in high BR. They seem to be a definite minority though. Satch, what you write is correct - one of the graphs I had in my post which is now sadly gone showed neatly how an mp3 up to 112 kbps could rather accurately represent sound of up to 15k hz or so before there was a rather steep dropoff point. 128k improved on this significantly, but would still create a dropoff within audible range for many if not most and the relationship between this dropoff and bitrate is not linear. An increase in BR does less for the quality the higher up you go meaning in theory there's a larger difference between 112 and 128 than there is between 256 and 272.