Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
I think I'm going to kill the next person who states that WAV 'still' sounds better than FLAC, or that APE has 'better overtones' than other (lossless) formats. How can people *still* debate stuff like that, after almost 15 years?
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Easy. That sort of thing reminds of the times years back when I would read a publication called The Absolute Sound, a magazine aimed at the market that would pay more for their stereo system than they would for their car. They ran lots of detailed comparisons between components whose differences could only be detected with a room full of expensive test gear. There was no way you would
hear the difference.
But for Absolute Sound's reader base, it was about status and "Mine is better than yours!", and they would clutch to their chest anything they could use to bolster a claim that theirs
was better. Being the sort of pragmatist who is only concerned with what he can actually
hear, I shook my head in wonder.
(Absolute Sound is still around, and a current article is "Best Speakers Under $20,000.
)
I'm willing to bet the stalwart defenders of whatever would fail a blind hearing test, where you let them listen with whatever gear they liked, and did a blind audio test with the
same source material encoded with several different methods, and challenged them to tell which was which. Accuracy of picks would probably be equivalent to tossing darts blind folded at a dart board.
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Dennis