• 1 Post
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 28th, 2023

help-circle





  • It is not about the price. You can buy great stuff for $500 altogether, and you can only splash $500 for one piece of a sound chain, which was not really necessary in the first place (often people buy super expensive headphones and then listen on a cheap Android phone some 128 kbps MP3s - amazing, really!). It is all about balance. Personally, I do not aim for hi-end sound equipment, but I have also heard enough of the spectrum that I know I will not be satisfied with low-end devices.

    That’s why I settled for mid-tier offerings, and I am happy with my setup, knowing fully well that if anything goes bad, at least I will be able to replace it without taking a loan. After all, if you want to go hi-end, then you better have the cash to stay hi-end when necessary, and I have plenty of other hobbies to splash too much on sound.


  • Don’t believe anyone trying to sell you on the idea that FLAC sounds better than an appropriately compressed (read: transparent) lossy format: Opus ~128-160kbps, MP3 ‘V0’ (~215kbps), MP3 320kbps, AAC ~150kbps.

    Only partly true. If the rest of the chain is of decent quality (hi-res sound card, proper cables, quality headphones/speakers/monitors), then the difference between lossless and lossy is apparent to a trained ear. Especially the lack of dynamics and space is typical of lossy formats.

    Personally, I never understood why I would want to listen to anything but lossless in the first place. I never really had to worry about storage space too much for my music to consider converting it to a lossy format. I am more of a user who likes to archive stuff; therefore, lossless and FLAC are the only future-proof ways if you want to listen to your files in the next 25 years or so.


  • Many people I talked to said that CD’s just use mp3 codecs in the first place.

    That may be partly true for non-original CDs made out of MP3 files via CD burner, but original CDs should not be “crippled” like that.

    I think this debate is kind of late, at least a decade late. FLAC has clearly won; it is available everywhere and shall stay that way thanks to its open-source nature. With increasingly cheaper physical storage (SSD, HDD) and more affordable cloud storage, I think FLAC’s longevity aspect just beats everything, even though there may be other codecs such as Opus which may provide a better compression/quality ratio.

    But if you only care about lossless, just go with FLAC and enjoy your tunes. ;-)



  • I would also add that it is completely in line with Nvidia’s core philosophy, which has always prioritized profits first and foremost. I wonder how much more proprietary tech we will see in the future from them. I am kind of worried, as they are pretty strong with AI and might want to push something like Nvidia-GPT, their proprietary system, into games. You will then be left with the choice: play with a basic AI or go with Nvidia and enjoy a reasonably smart AI.

    I really hope this does not happen, as this vendor lock-in would only serve Nvidia and nobody else. I am writing this as a long-term customer with many Nvidia GPUs…