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  1. A bus journey. Web on the iPod is great but no wi-fi. So what I do is tether my 3g connection from my mobile so that I can browse on the iPod. Then I figured why bother carrying both devices? I hate having stuff in my pockets so 1 device is required. Android isn't there yet, Nokia ain't great for web browsing so the iPhone wins. I still hate them but i'll start playing Crazy Birds again and all will be well.
  2. Originally posted by vanquish:[..]




    Sigh, why is it that everyone wants to argue with every bloody thing without doing any research themselves and just opposing anything that goes against their existing views (and not providing reasons for doing so either)

    See, you all fail to realise that I also seriously considered ripping all my CDs to lossless for my iPhone, but instead of simply assuming that it would be better, I actually did my research and saw that it was overkill.

    If the acknowledged experts say putting lossless music on your iPod is a big waste of space, then please argue with them instead of me.

    I was merely presenting an expert opinion, not just some whim of mine because I have nothing better to do with my time.



    I wasn't arguing with you. That smiley indicates that your post bored me. Tis all.
  3. Originally posted by germcevoy:[..]

    So you seriously considered ripping your cds to lossless but stopped because some random 'expert' said it was a waste of space? Fuck off. I can hear the difference and my player has sufficent space.

    Who were these 'experts'? Be your own expert for once. Rip your own music and see what you think. If you hear no difference that's not to say that the difference doesn't exist, it just means YOU can't hear it. Jeese.


    Not some random expert, a community of audiophiles - Hydrogenaudio is THE forum for anything to do with audio, in the same way that say interference is the U2 forum.

    If you can hearing differences it could be for a variety of reasons.
    1. The lossy rip was badly done or done from a different source to the lossless.
    2. The placebo effect (observation bias) which may cause you to 'hear' that the lossless actually sounds better.
    3. You can actually hear the difference - this is rare as normally only trained ears or those with extremely good hearing can hear differences - and normally only on certain sections of certain tracks (eg classical music or reverb heavy percussion). Again, get a frequency generator app on your iPhone and see how high a frequency you can still hear.

    The placebo effect is very real and can only be eliminated if you do a double blind listening test , where you have a program that lets you play the lossless track, a lossy rip and a unlabeled track (which can be either of the two) and by listening to the three you have to determine whether the unknown track is the lossy or lossless. Then you have to repeat this test for different songs to get a large enough sample size and accurate results.

    I did this test when I was deciding to go lossy or lossless and found I couldnt tell the difference.
    Perhaps I shall post an ABX test on here with U2 tracks and so you can see for yourself



    I see

    Originally posted by drewhiggins:[..]
    [..]
    It depends on what you can hear. If you have loads of CDs then a mix of lossless-lossy is alright - specially if you got like 200 you just wanna shove the whole lot on there. For maybe 20 albums I'd go lossless considering when I rip an album it goes from WAV to MP3 anyway - so save the hassle of that.

    I went lossy because I had a minimum of space before and no laptop to store them on. Now I have 32GB and 1TB of space, it doesn't worry me so much. For my remixes and demos I'll do lossless always but for normal stuff it doesn't warrant the lossless route. That said, I can hear the difference and maybe one day I'll get round to doing proper lossless rips.


    Lossless files are great for archiving (in case you lose your CDs), it is possible to hear a difference between lossless and lossy but this depends on the quality of the rip. i.e anyone can hear the difference between 128kbps MP3 and lossless, generally MP3 is considered transparent at bitrates above 192 kbps, so if you're listening to a LAME v0 variable bitrate encoded MP3 there should be no discernable difference.

  4. It doesn't depend on the rip. It depends on the individual! Will you please stop treating your word as gosple. Interference.com is thee U2 fan forum so is that to say it is full of experts? No. It's full of fans sharing their opinions.

    If there are no differences between lossless and lossy then why the hell aren't CD's ripped with MP3's? I have a CD which is 400MB with all tracks. I rip it to (high quality) mp3 and that decreases to 100mb. What was the missing 300MB made up of?
  5. Originally posted by germcevoy:It doesn't depend on the rip. It depends on the individual! Will you please stop treating your word as gosple. Interference.com is thee U2 fan forum so is that to say it is full of experts? No. It's full of fans sharing their opinions.

    If there are no differences between lossless and lossy then why the hell aren't CD's ripped with MP3's? I have a CD which is 400MB with all tracks. I rip it to (high quality) mp3 and that decreases to 100mb. What was the missing 300MB made up of?


    But see, It's not my word as gospel! It's not my subjective opinion but rather objective fact backed up by thousands of listening tests. There is very little difference
    It's objective though, it's like saying

    As for your question, MP3 works by excluding frequencies outside the threshold of normal human hearing (ie. above 20khz) that are present on the CD. Then it also utilises a psychoacoustic concept called auditory masking where higher frequency tones are unable to be heard when other tones of lower frequency are played.

    Lastly the MP3 is also compressed (like FLACs and other lossless codecs are) which reduces the file size further.

    But enough talk, listen to these lossless vs lossy samples of Promenade I just made:
    http://rapidshare.com/files/422084456/Promenade.zip

    They're both made from the same WAV file I securely ripped from the UF remaster. One is FLAC and the other is high quality variable bitrate MP3 encoded using LAME.

    I chose Promenade because it's relatively short (making it easier to compare) and has a lot of atmospheric and ambient noises (which are harder to compress).

    Please listen to both files and tell me if you can hear any difference. And if you can hear differences, please tell me at what time you hear them.

  6. I don't need to prove my hearing ability to you because you simply don't believe that I can hear a difference. The fact is that some people can hear the difference. I don't care about your science or what somebody said on a forum. A true audiophile wouldn't be listening to mp3s.

    Promenade is a poor choice btw. No drums in it which is where I normally hear the difference in quality. There's very little in that song actually. All those remasters suffer from clipping anyway so not much use is comparing the samples.
  7. bla bla bla.


    To each their own.


  8. Originally posted by germcevoy:I don't need to prove my hearing ability to you because you simply don't believe that I can hear a difference. The fact is that some people can hear the difference. I don't care about your science or what somebody said on a forum. A true audiophile wouldn't be listening to mp3s.

    Promenade is a poor choice btw. No drums in it which is where I normally hear the difference in quality. There's very little in that song actually. All those remasters suffer from clipping anyway so not much use is comparing the samples.


    Well, then I'll do another track with drums this time - TUF? SBS? GOYB?

    And the point is comparing lossy vs lossless, if the remasters suffer from clipping it won't affect the outcome as both samples come from the same source.

    The UF remaster is good, atu2 had a professional musician do an in depth comparison of the three versions of the album and it was definitely better than the original and nudged out the MSFL version as well.
    http://www.atu2.com/news/the-three-sunrises-a-listeners-guide-to-the-unforgettable-fire-remaster.html

    And true audiophiles do listen to MP3s on their ipods.

    And did you say that my objective science is worse than your subjective opinion?
    I'm sorry but if you're going to argue with me, either posit your reasons, rebutt mine or give me some evidence that you can hear the difference. I've twice asked you for what frequency you can hear up to and the fact that you don't want to respond is telling.

    Now if you want to waste space on your iPhone by using FLAC that's fine by me but please don't argue with me simply for the sake of it unless you can prove your point of view.
  9. When will you stop? Listened to the sample. Mp3 was way better. . . . . I have now converted all my FLAC to mp3. Women are throwing themselves at me. I wish i'd did this sooner. Thank yoir forum friends for their insight.
  10. I don't own an iPhone and even if I did I wouldn't test frequencies using it's duff speaker.

    My point of view cannot be proved. I prefer FLAC and I have the space to store it. In your point of view this simply doesn't make sense. You are the argument.
  11. Agreed. Lots of people at hydrogen audio wasting time at this argument. Doesnt care if someone hears a diference or not.

    If you want to hear it at the best quality available listen to FLAC, if you want to hear it at 90-99.999999% of the quality MP3s will do. How important that 0.1% is to someone else is not up to you.
  12. Originally posted by germcevoy:When will you stop? Listened to the sample. Mp3 was way better. . . . . I have now converted all my FLAC to mp3. Women are throwing themselves at me. I wish i'd did this sooner. Thank yoir forum friends for their insight.

    This and BelgianBono's "1%" are the comments of the week.
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Contribute to the U2 community with uploading photos or by telling us which shows you have visited.
Contribute to the U2 community with uploading photos or by telling us which shows you have visited.