There's plenty of discussion of this on the web by very informed folks (in this forum and other places), so I don't want to turn this thread into a repeat of all that info. You may have amazing hearing, but there is lots of scientific evidence that clearly indicates that it is fairly rare for any individual to be able to ABX in a blind test the difference between a properly encoded 128 mp3 with the original CD. If you were posting over at Hydrogenaudio.org the folks would demand that you post your blind ABX test results to back up your statement about detecting differences (one of their terms of service). Of course, we're not over there and things are much looser here.
I can't speak to streams from pandora as there are so many more variables in the mix other than just the actual source file (and not sure how to easily do an ABX test with pandora stream since you don't have the source file in another format). Keep in mind that even extremely small differences in volume can make one source sound better than another (again, lots of hard evidence on this). Bottom line, Pandora may very well not sound as good as your local files, but in general, 128 (created with a modern, quality encoder) is typically transparent for most users on most music. Your statement that the reverse is true flies in the face of lots of controlled experiments. I'm not trying to pick a fight by the way, I just hate to see myths about lossy encoding quality be perpetuated. That said, there are lots of reason to rip music to FLAC (or other lossless format), and I do so with all my own CDs. -- garym ------------------------------------------------------------------------ garym's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17325 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=71602 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
