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nwimpney
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May 15, 2018
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I am not going to buy stuff from HD tracks to compare, but I know quite a lot about digital audio, and I know that there's no way I could hear the difference between a 44/16 and a 192/24 properly downmixed from the same source. If the "high res" version sounds better, it's because it was mastered better. In many cases this is true. If original tapes, or pre-crushed sources are available, they can produce a much better track than something someone turned up to 11 and ran through a ton of dynamic compression to bring it to -3dBFS. That said, an equivalent remastering would sound just as good when resampled to 44/16 (and would take a lot less space)
IMO 320kbit lossy is just silly. If I want something max quality or for archival purposes, I'm going lossless (redbook is fine). If I just want it to sound good, and save some space so I can fit it all on my portable player, I'm fine with ogg q5 or q6, (160 or 192 ABR IIRC?) I generally keep all of my music as flac (rips from my CD collection, or ones I've purchased in lossless format), and I have an ogg copy of the entire tree, which I use on my portable player(s)
I _never_ convert lossy to lossless, or transcode lossy to another bitrate. (This sounds like hell, and wastes space)
When comparing online sources, you need to keep in mind that not all services follow my standards. I have spotify premium, and regardless of what bitrate they're feeding it to me at, there is "A LOT" of music that was clearly transcoded from trash-tier sources. Bubbly sounding under-water pre-echoes, and cymbals that sound like they're running through a chorus pedal, etc. This doesn't mean ogg q6 (or whatever spotify streams at) is bad. It means that they've transcoded low quality sources. It's like taking a high-res photo of a low res print.
May 15, 2018
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