Lossless audio - is it really that important? - Yes it is!

[stevei]

Originally Posted by Deciazulado

You think I don't know what I'm doing?

It wasn't my intention to give that impression. Perhaps if I'd said "one has to be a little careful" instead of "you have to be a little careful"? I don't know you well enough to know whether you always know what you're doing or not, so don't have an opinion either way.

On the other points people have raised, some people seem to be misinterpreting some of the things said up to now. One test said that most people can't tell a 128kbps AAC encode from a CD. This is NOT the same as a 128kbps mp3 encode, which tests have found the majority of people CAN tell from a CD, and my own blind tests showed I can reliably tell this from a CD. I believe that a 640kbps DD 5.1 track will be significantly higher quality than a 128kbps mp3, probably more similar to a 256kbps stereo mp3, so a more relevant test would be whether people can tell a 256kbps mp3 from the original CD. The one test I found that seemed to have tested this in a scientific manner found no ability to discriminate between these two, and they were using skilled listeners, e.g. one was a professional sound engineer.

What I do intend to do sometime in the interests of science is to listen to different bitrate tracks while wearing earplugs to see if it affects my ability to discriminate between different bitrates. Given how perceptual encoding works I find it highly plausible that impaired hearing can result in a greater ability to discern the artifacts that would otherwise be masked by louder sounds.