Fluffy_Little_Fox t1_j1zxwfz wrote on December 28, 2022 at 5:33 PM

Reply to comment by Opus-the-Penguin in Wiil CD's make a comeback like Vinyl? by trukises

The technology has also gotten much much much better.

When I was 12 years old and I had a Koss PP125 little Auto Reverse cassette player, I had cheap drugstore headphones! Those things probably sounded like shxt, but did I even care at the time??? Nope! All I cared about was jamming to my Duran Duran tapes I found at the Junk Yard when I was scrounging with my Dad! (mutual benefit, I helped him take off parts, he let me dig for tapes). Those tapes were probably moisture damaged all to hell from sitting in wrecked cars, but I didn't care.

All of my school friends were into 2pac & Biggie and my wierd goofy ass was gushing over 80s Synth Rock. (I didn't get into Rap til way way way later).

Then CD came around and I remember getting a ton of those through BMG or Columbia House Records or whatever. The "Get 10 CDs for a Penny" deal, remember that one??? I got Prince Greatest Hits for my mom and Duran Duran -- Decade for myself. And it sounded way better than any tape I had (but like I said, my tapes were dug out of junked cars at my dad's work!).

Technology improved. Things got cheaper. And my hearing -- admittedly -- probably got crappier! I don't have the same ears as 12 year old me. But even back then I don't think I cared. I don't care now either!

MP3 320 KBPS, FLAC, ATRAC. It all sounds pretty much the same to my ears.

The purity isn't all that important to me -- the important part is to just enjoy the music. If I play an old Nintendo game --- it doesn't matter to me if it's a real cartridge on real hardware, or if it's playing off a hacked Wii with an SD card, or a hacked SNES Classic Edition, or an Emulator on Windows PC.

To me, it's still the same game.

Opus-the-Penguin t1_j20t9ch wrote on December 28, 2022 at 8:58 PM

> MP3 320 KBPS, FLAC, ATRAC. It all sounds pretty much the same to my ears.

FLAC and ATRAC should be sonically identical to what the original CD puts out. Those formats are lossless. They compress the CD info but they don't lose any of it. They're like audio ZIP files. All the info is there and it all gets played back. Anyone who claims to hear a difference is high on something and wouldn't be able to pass a blind test to identify which is which.

The MP3 is "lossy". Some information does get discarded in order to save space. The goal is to discard information that you wouldn't really hear anyway. And at 320 kpbs, that goal is easily met. You shouldn't hear any difference between an MP3 at that bitrate and the CD it was ripped from. MAYBE on a state of the art sound system some people could hear a tiny difference if they knew what to listen for. I doubt I'm one of those people.

The difference between CDs and LPs, on the other hand, ANYONE can hear. We all heard it in the 80s and made the switch as soon as we could afford to. The only problem in the early days was the recording engineers didn't always know how to use the new technology. They'd put the mics too close or something. I've got a recording of Vaughan-Williams' oboe concerto that is both breathtaking and maddening. The sound is crystal clear... and I can hear every single click and clack of the oboe's keys. It's like I'm sitting on stage instead of a few rows back in the audience.

Fluffy_Little_Fox t1_j20w2v8 wrote on December 28, 2022 at 9:17 PM

Mixing & Engineering definitely plays a factor. There is an ELO's greatest hits CD (that I also had on tape as a kid -- it's the one with the Military Medal on the cover) that sounds ~nearly~ monophonic, whoever mixed that compilation did it very weirdly.

But the "Light Years" 2 Disc compilation has MUCH better mixing, it doesn't sound anywhere near as "narrow" as the old War Medal version.