I really have to second this. A pair of $2000 floor standing speakers
can't compete with the flatness of a good pair of headphones (due to room
modes if nothing else).
After spending about $100(us) on a pair of Grado SR80s, my 'tolerable'
collection of 30+gigs of 192Kbit/sec bladeenc encoded mp3s sounded so
digusting that I rm -Rfed the whole lot of them. (To be recompressed as
Vorbis files).
(Not to mention that I've had a lot more fun listening to music with these
headphones) :)
On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Roel VdB wrote:
[snip]
> At the risk of sounding even more arrogant, I'd like to advise everyone here,
> putting hours in the development of LAME, if they have not already
> have done so, to _invest in some decent pair of headphones_.
>
> I myself bought a good pair of Sennheiser HD-490 headphones ($45,
> belgium) and a sb128 soundcard ($25, nice linear play and high S/N
> ratio(linux compatible, ensoniq)).
>
> I think this would be a _very_ rational investment, considering the
> countless hours spent tweaking and perfecting lame.
>
> I've heard several times that people say: I cannot hear the artifacts
> because of my bad hearing (age), but I'm convinced that just about
> everyone here can hear what I'm hearing (with ease).
>
> _Take my word for it_ that when you listen to some clips with this $70
> equipment you
> * will hear the >16kHz region (and miss it when filtered out)
> * will find 192 insufficient for some uses, let alone 128
>
> It's just, being blunt (we're all adults), I find it such a loss of
> efford and time and unnecessary introduction of arbitrariness to
> the debate of sound quality when you don't explore this option.
>
> (btw: my hifi is _not_ a crap system, but the headphones just add a completely other
> dimension)
[snip]
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