Technology

The moment you give me a link to a banana tree/MP3 player/ripeness tester/EQ:

I only listen to music with overripe bananas. It sounds best that way. Copper wire just doesn't sound as good. Believe me: My ears are very sensitive and superior to yours.

Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection

At that quality of MP3 you'd really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.

Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.

For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it's state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.

Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless

I'd be surprised if anyone could.

However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it's especially obvious with better equipment.

People who say 128kbps mp3 is fine, are full of shit. I've been to weddings where it's been so obvious that whoever's in charge of the music is just blasting 128kpbs mp3s and it's brutal.

The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can't hear all that well anymore.

I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.

Slow, chill music is completely transparent when compressed, no matter how hard I “audio peep.” It’s not even a question.

But something “dense” like System of a Down has audible distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense, though even the extreme end is hard to notice unless you know the particular song very well.

Also… a lot of recordings kind of suck. It’s crazy to worry about tiny bits of distortion when a bit perfect master is already noisy and distorted.

HugeNerd is correct, 90+% of audio quality is in the mic and speakers. Transducers make electro acoustics real, everything else is support.

Get really great used speakers cheap and an adequate amp just good enough to drive them. Your shit will sound excellent for anyone.

i'm into oxygen free listening lately