Sounds Good Quality Seriously Headphones

If you take the music and the sound quality seriously, however, while audio formats and compression ratios are probably things that matter to you. At Digital we regularly criticize DAP and players for their inability to support the lossless formats like FLAC or WMA Lossless. We have readers who comment after a review they would not buy a specific drive for exactly the same reason, or because he lacks the raw capacity to manage its library of FLAC or Apple Lossless tracks. There are still people who flee digital downloads, buying albums on CD so they can tear themselves and ensure optimal quality (that would be me – ed). Although I personally do not go that far, I can say that I have avoided buying tracks in some online stores for the sole reason that the format of MP3 tracks they sold were encoded at 256kbps and not 320kbps. In my opinion, the additional quality was not even worth paying a little money.

Recently, however, a number of things have left us wondering if we were putting too much emphasis on the importance of lossless compression and file formats specific, especially when it comes to buying or listen to music on portable devices. Firstly, like most people we have spent much time using streaming services like Napster and Spotify. The former uses 256kbps MP3 files for download tracks and 128 kbps for MP3 tracks streamed, while the following applications 160kbps Ogg Vorbis (if the premium users can switch to 320kbps). While high-end headphones or speakers can reveal some shortcomings in the low bit rate formats, we could not describe the sound came out as awful. In fact, it is usually “good enough”.

Secondly, some people over the last six months or so – people who take their audio seriously and have spent thousands of pounds on Hi-fi – have privately admitted to us that 256kbps MP3 is easily good enough listening seriously, and that they struggle to hear much difference at 192kbps MP3 in many situations. This we believe: when we pretend that we can make the difference between an MP3 320kbps and FLAC encoding, we really mean a substantial difference, or are we simply say that one is better than another? [via trustedreviews]

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