Modern kids V Older technology

The quality of the music depends on the recording, a flac file is a perfect 1:1 copy of the music, cd quality is something like 256kb and anything under 128kb sounds bad. So before you trash the new fangled things you should first understand how they work. The ipod is a computer it just does what its told, if its told to play crappy quality music it will, however if its told to play perfect replicas of the original it will do that too.

 

Well i have heard stuff @ 64k that sounds ok (Streaming with WMP)

But much lower and you start losing bass....

192k sounds quite nice!

 

I have a old Sony Discman, Record Player, and TV with a VCR built in. :sunny:

 

Lol, there are people who actually think tapes produce better sound quality than digital media?

 

I have these things too, except the discman. those always break for me for some reason. I have two cassete walkmans though, which i think equals one discman....

 

They sure do my friend!

Analogue is the PUREST FORM OF AUDIO!! (Always has been)

Digital CANNOT reproduce the same nice sounds! (Not exactly)

 

^^High-end digital recordings sound like precise accuracy...

High-end analogue recordings sound like magic...:sunny:

ZW

 

Cassete tapes cannot produce better than cd quality, but vinyl can.

analog is like a pure sine wave. Digital is a stepped sine wave. You can increase bitrates all you want and yes, it does sound better to the human ear, but no matter how high the bitrate, you will still have a stepped waveform.

 

^ but then you have the cracks and pops of vinyl, especially with age.

Works great for some things (my copy of Jimmy Dean's Ringo, when I was little comes to mind), but I can't imagine listening to a band like the Ark or Phoenix without crisp, clear sound.

I do like the 'warm' sound of vinyl, in most cases; but again, can't imagine some of the really modern, clean sounding bands on it.

 

With perfectly aligned playback heads, high quality cassette tapes sound better than most mp3's.
1/4" tape beats vinyl...
1/2" tape is even better.

ZW

 

does anybody here have some kind of enhanced robotic ears?

i think digital is much better. you can have huge explorable libraries of sounds especially with the use of torrents and such. you can play them through numerous outputs from cell phones, to laptops, to ipods, to cd's, to just streaming. also you can tweak songs if you'd like. and it is always consistent, never damages or anything.

also those headphones they give you with your ipod suck. i simply bought a 20$ set of headphones, and music quality is like 3x better.

i think when all ipods and devices have a big enough standard storage capacity, a new mainstream type of file or mp3 will come around, exactly like blu-ray evolved from dvd's, improving quality.

 

There are a number of lossless formats, FLAC has been gaining popularity and I've seen a number of torrents in this format.
I don't see MP3 losing it's supremacy any time soon; but someday it will be replaced, if not by FLAC by something similar, or better, promoted by a corporation.

 

yeah exactly. if a corporation like Apple would to announce a new high quality format, it would definitely change things. but for that to happen there'd have to be just better technology in general, from the recording process, to the compression process, to the storage process, and the output process. like by the time our ipods start holding terabytes, yeah something will happen for sure. haha

I have gone through a phase of flac replacements on my computer. all of the albums i downloaded all varied in quality difference. Bjork's Volta album for example was way better than the mp3, but something like Animal Collective wasn't much of a difference at all, so i guess it depends on the studio it came from, the compression, and the uploader. and i didn't keep them cuz they took up too much space on my comp.

 

The best PCM recording I can do is 24 bit/ 96khz (.wav) but not too many people have the equipment for playback...isn't blu-ray 24 bit audio?

ZW

 

Yeah, FLAC.

I think I've damaged my hearing a little bit, so Im not as much into absolute perfection of recorded media as I used to be.

and FUCK earbuds. Full enclosure headphones FTW. I almost bought some wireless ones today from the thrift store, but the battery was missing. It was a proprietary one, so I decided against it. It was 4 bucks and it was Kenwood I believe, so I really wanted them. But the battery....

 

I like ear buds better, but they have to be the really awesome ones that aren't bad for your ear and still have all the bass and stuff.

Right now I'm using a really shitty pair, because mine broke, and they give me headaches if I don't turn off bass boost (also using a CD player, cause my DS is acting funny [working on that one though])

I'm a total thrift-store music junkie at the moment.

 

Anything above 44Khz recording and 192KBPS encoding is indistinguishable to the human ear. What is distinguishable is the quality of the player's DAC logic chips. Out of all the MP3 players we have, the best quality sound I've heard is from an old RCA LYRA 64MB player. I've got 1,2&4GB China MP4 players and laptops that don't have nearly as good audio output quality as the RCA. Not even my PC, Xbox, or DVD player come close. Those all actually output a lot of BG logic noise. It seems like most modern electronics have lost priority of high quality output to more fancy features - Jacks of all trades, (or formats) masters of none.

 

There are things being put on the shelves that were not even thought of when I first became a thrift store junkie. Like DVD playeres were 500 dollars, now they line the shelves.

 

Forget good sound, man--kids of today have no idea what good MUSIC is! LOL As for sound quality, I have an iPod--or as you so eloquently called it, a "digital piece of crap"--and I love it--I've always gotten good sound from it--in fact, the only gripe I've got about it is the size of the earbuds--I have little ears, and I think the earbuds are way too big! Other than that, I love my iPod!

 

I'm starting to buy cassettes again.