I’ve been burning my CDs to FLAC. I’m almost done. I keep the FLAC files on an external 2TB drive, 320kbps MP3s on the PC. For listening to music through a pair of decent Creative speakers via the PC, the 320kbps MP3s are more than adequate. Songs sound crisp, clear, with deep bass, and have nice mids. No real need to use the large FLAC file (in comparison to 320kbps MP3) for music at all.
As for a direct, one-to-one comparison (which I have done with nearly 2 dozen songs)… I’ve found there is no meaningful, discernible difference between 320kbps MP3s and lossless audio when playing music through a PC and connected speakers. For any difference to be truly noticed (let alone appreciated), one would need high-end, audiophile equipment.
For the PC connected with decent speakers, 320kbps MP3 is the sweet spot.
With mid-grade PC speakers like that, I doubt I could hear the difference even with MP3/VBR.
The difference between a good quality MP3 and FLAC is very minimal even with audiophile-grade gear. It will probably be most noticeable with high-end cans or IEMs. Even then, not by a whole lot.
I keep everything in FLAC because of future-proofing and piece of mind more than because I can actually tell the difference. I have a DAC connected to a 2.1 setup which is no where near audiophile but quite a few steps above a pair of Creative PC speakers. I can’t tell the difference personally when playing through this setup.
With a decent setup, I need to drop down to 192 before I start noticing a difference.
People went through the whole shebang a few decades ago when lossless compression became mainstream. Extensively.
There isn’t any evidence that even with an audio chain costing more than a car that people can discern any difference after non-lossless compression becomes “good enough”. Any codec at 320 kbps is beyond that threshold by a mile. Sometimes people may prefer one version, but that falls both ways.
With MP3 and serial copy chains, where each copy is using the previous copy, the MP3 loss is injected each time. So each copy of a copy of copy degrades the MP3. Since FLAC is loss-less it shouldn’t do that.
My ears are 74 years old. Which were subjected to the sixties and seventies very lax noise mitigation at factories, and things in general. I would never hear the difference any more. Me and my grandson were listening to some music when he said “I love the chimes”. I said “what chimes”.
I’d agree with sentiments mentioned already that the audible difference between 320kbps MP3 and FLAC is not likely going to be discernible to most ears.
At that bitrate, VBR vs CBR is probably much of a muchness. I’d content that to most ears though, using LAME’s VBR with a preset of -V 3 (roughly 160kbps), is already imperceptible, particularly when paired with -q 0 (slower but highest quality encoding). I’d be interested to see if you can note the difference @UncleSpellbinder.
With respect to MP3 itself though, there are two, perhaps three codecs that I’d argue are superior, and I would be prioritising. If the target is smallest file while imperceptibly lossy, these are the rough comparative bit-rates:
MP3 160 kbp/s
OGG Vorbis 130-150 kbp/s
AAC 128-140 kbp/s more variance in specific encoder used*
Opus 96-128 kbp/s
If you have equipment that only supports certain codecs, that’s understandable. AAC is pretty commonly supported these days, but Opus has gained a lot of support in recent years as a superior open standard.
* I use Fraunhofer FDK when encoding to AAC, which is one of the highest quality freely available options for AAC. It is open source, but the license only permits source to be distributed, not binaries. As such, if you want to use this, you need to compile FFMPEG from source with FDK enabled. Eg:
yay -Syu ffmpeg-full
To then specify it’s use when encoding with ffmpeg, the codec argument would be -c:a libfdk_aac.
I think this is a realistic listening scenario for most PC users. Gone are the days of equipment that draw amps due to many components and speakers to the ceiling but that was a great sound to. It was music from the source.
My bitrates while ripping from Asunder were stuck on 192kbps and I would argue that is a poor sound on a lot of mp3 songs, noticeably. You’ve inspired me to re-do some of these.
PS–what are you doing with all the plastic discs and cases? Keeping them? I donated them all it felt good to get lighter.
I know you weren’t addressing me with this comment, but as I wrote fairly strongly about my take that MP3 @ 160kbp/s is perceptibly lossless, I want to acknowledge that listening is a very subjective thing. If one can perceive a difference at 160kbp/s and a higher bit-rate is used as such, that’s perfectly justifiable
I don’t know, my friend, sometimes the 192 stuff I did gets very static-cy. But last night in settings (gapless player) I would switch out the audio sink from alsa to pulse-audio and the cleaned the sound up only for a while. But most of playlist is fine. The inconsistencies are causing madness
I don’t see the point of listening to mp3 on the computer when you still have flac. It’s like you try to adjust the audio quality of the music to the audio quality of the hardware and it’s useless.
I use mp3 (encoded with lame -V0) only in nomad use with portable player+in-ear earphones, because mp3 decoding take less ressources= more battery life and mp3 take less storage space.
Keep the covers and the discs, since they’re flat, they’re easy to stock, and get rid of the cases.
In the moring, with my ears well rested and not having been through an all day long noise pollution, I can still find subtle differences between mp3 192k and flac.
If you really want to do this comparison properly, the best way is to use abx, it’s in the AUR.
In these things, after a decent bitrate MP3, no matter how fancy your equipment is, the bottleneck comes from the lackluster design of the human ear. It’s been stuck on firmware and software version 1.0 for the past couple million years, I don’t have much hope for updates.
Worst of all, the system degrades over time and the replacement hardware is not great since there’s no first party maintenance available options and the off-brand parts are lackluster and expensive.
In short, a 320kbps bitrate for mp3 is the upper bitrate limit.
192 kbps should do just fine for most casual listeners.
As I’ve invested a lot of time, effort and also quite a bit of money (but still on a buget with less than $300 spend) into my audio setup during the last year.
All I can say is that current tech / inexpensive audio gear (Class D amplifiers and such, entry level DACs) nowadays provide a gigantic bang for the buck, so to say.
No clue which creative speakers you’ve got. But I doubt that they’ll actually are capable to achieve above average results.
I prefer my vintage, larger bookshelf speakers. Canton GLE 70, which are 3-way speakers with a 10.25” woofer, 1.15” midrange and 0.75” tweeter. And, even if they are at least 44 years old, they still perform quite well. I’ve measured them with a calibration mic (with REW, room eq wizard) in order to create room correction filters (via easyeffects) to flatten their frequency response. And that had an enormous impact on the sound quality.
If you’ve got a decent setup already, the whole room correction is essentially available for free, except the required calibration mic. But in case of creative speakers that are intended for pc usage… I don’t think that would be worth the effort. As the actual creation of the room correction filters from the measured frequency response is a challenge in itself and will consume quite a bit of time and has a steep learning curve.
I back up my CD’s to FLAK also, much like my BR and 4K movies that I make lossless backups to my drives. I do convert some to mp3’s for my phone where I can play them on my bluetooth boombox or in the car.
Even with my very “experienced” ears I can still hear differences on (some) CD’s, especially on ones that were recorded at high volume and have a lot of clipping.
I would keep them. Honestly I wish I had my physical copies. When I first learned about flac and converted my Library over I decided that a hard drive was much easier to store then a bunch of disk I didn’t live in the RV at the time so Living space wasn’t the concern like it is now for me. However I think I would find a way to store my physical if I had it. Fortunately I haven’t Lost my collection but I did come close. I now have the entire thing on a mechanical drive that I don’t use unless I need to copy it to a new drive. Having to always worry about if the disk is going to fail has caused me a few times to regret my decision to give them away.
As far a playing I just store them in flac. I don’t use my phone anymore like I did back in the old days so I dont need a library on my phone. I have enough hard disk space for the Collection I have.
I actually have started rebuilding my Physical Movie Collection.
