I got myself new headphones (ATH-M50) and decided to check if i finally could hear the difference between a 192 kbs file and a 320 but i really cant. I rip all my music from cds in 192 kbs to save space. Is it just me who cant hear any difference or anyone else? What is the difference really?

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Originally posted by trancedanne I got myself new headphones (ATH-M50) and decided to check if i finally could hear the difference between a 192 kbs file and a 320 but i really cant. I rip all my music from cds in 192 kbs to save space. Is it just me who cant hear any difference or anyone else? What is the difference really?

Is definitely you. There is a relevant difference between 192 kbps and 320 kbps, just like there is a difference between 320 kbps and wav.

i think what sticks out most to me in your sentence is your new headphones. you can't possibly know all the little subtitles of your new headphones to make educated remarks on audio fidelity. It's taken me almost 4yrs to really KNOW my studio speakers, and i think only recently can i say with confidence that. I would work in the highest format you can and if you're listening to those CD's as reference material for tracks then make sure you take that into account

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Originally posted by TranceElevation just like there is a difference between 320 kbps and wav.

Not a perceptible difference. Some people with hyperacusis can just barely hear a difference at 256 kbps, but a good 320 kbps encoding is completely transparent within the most liberally-chosen boundaries of human hearing range.

Even 192 kbps is imperceptible in most cases because the quality loss from the listening equipment itself overshadows any quality loss from the compression.

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Originally posted by DigiNut a good 320 kbps encoding is completely transparent within the most liberally-chosen boundaries of human hearing range.

Ah the old 'how good is 320k' debate...

The long and the short of it is that it depends on the input material. MP3 is a very complicated kind of encoding and you can't just judge it by comparing the frequency content of one recording before and after compression (which is what a lot of people base their "it's shit" arguments on). MP3 is designed to focus on removing frequencies our hearing isn't as sensitive to, so when that and things like frequency masking come into play, you could potentially have an MP3 with a frequency spectrum which looks terrible, but which sounds exactly like the original to the human ear.

Some sounds compress better than others in MP3, so if you're using a constant bit rate of 320k there will naturally be bits which compress without anyone being able to distinguish the difference, bits which everyone can distinguish and bits in between where some people will be able to tell and others won't. And similarly entire songs which fit into each of those categories.

Even if it did degrade every recording by the same amount, there are so many ways in which a signal can be distorted: frequency response, non-linearity, harmonics, additive noise, phase distortion... and the sensitivity of human hearing to some of these aren't very well known.


To most people, most 320k mp3s sound as good as WAVs on most audio systems. That's about the most accurate anyone can be, without giving specific examples.


Some researchers say that a surprisingly large proportion of young people are more likely to say they prefer the sound of an MP3 to a WAV: so much exposure to the format has resulted in teenagers learning to find the 'sizzle' (which we'd call digital distortion) desirable. So you could argue that MP3 is actually better than WAV because it introduces that 'improvement'... but please don't.



All of the above applies to 192k as well, so a few tracks might be indistinguishable from 320k, but most will be noticeable to a trained ear. For that I'd say "to a lot of people, a lot of 192k mp3s sound as good as 320k mp3s on a lot of audio systems"... I'd guess in this case "a lot" is probably more than 50%, but I haven't got any data to back that up, it's just a gut feeling.

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Last edited by Stu Cox on May-10-2011 at 00:16

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Originally posted by DigiNut Not a perceptible difference. Some people with hyperacusis can just barely hear a difference at 256 kbps, but a good 320 kbps encoding is completely transparent within the most liberally-chosen boundaries of human hearing range. Even 192 kbps is imperceptible in most cases because the quality loss from the listening equipment itself overshadows any quality loss from the compression.

I can hear the difference between a 256 and 320k file on crappy consumer headphones without any problem (though to be fair, a lot of that probably comes from crappy compression methods than anything else). 320k and WAV, though, is stretching it. I tend to rip my stuff in FLAC, just so that if I ever happen to magically be able to tell the difference (or get decent monitors), I have to option to start using WAV.

Also, the difference between even 192 and 320k might be imperceptible if you've just been listening to low quality music long enough; I have a friend who guarantees me that everything in his music library is high quality stuff, but it's all in 192k that sounds like it's a lower-quality upscale.

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Originally posted by TranceElevation Is definitely you

I'd be willing to bet money that 9 times out of 10 you can't tell the difference either, regardless of what your ego wants you to think

My e-peen is bigger than yours.

Oh wait... N/m

If the files are encoded properly then there is fuck all difference imo

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Originally posted by Kysora I'd be willing to bet money that 9 times out of 10 you can't tell the difference either, regardless of what your ego wants you to think

Now is clear why your mixes/music is/are so awful.

i can def hear the difference between a wav and 320 kbps. It has to be my own track tho.

the problem isnt really the mp3 convertion. the problem is with 16bit. if you compare a 24bit track with a 16bit track you will hear difference! of course depended on the track but it doesnt even have to be that awesome produced to hear the difference imo. wav is a bad standard today when we have almost unlimited megabytes at low cost. but we are lucky, it was originally planned to be 14bit. in most cases i cant hear difference between 320 and wav, but i can on 192 and i can between wav and 24bit wave.