I’m not enough of an adiophile to understand what is the difference. Perhaps one day I’ll try to hear what’s so special about FLAC, but I fear that looking inside the abyss will make me fall into an rabbit hole that will ruin music for me and make me an very nasty person.
I have an snob sleeping in the dark part of my soul, and I fear his awakening
aw yiss, i love that copypasta
As some weirdo who can hear up to 18khz on blind tests pushing 30, while going from 192 → 320 is noticeable depending on how busy the track is, you REALLY have to be paying attention to FLAC to pick up any nuance that 320 didn’t already contain. This is also while listening with pretty top-tier equipment. The reality is that 99% aren’t “critically listening” to their music, rather just enjoying it like normal people.
Also, if you would entertain a rant of mine:
Most folks at the upper echelon of audio are typically trying to add 2nd and 3rd-order harmonic distortion with zero-feedback solid state amps, tube amps, tube dacs…
Some people like the sound of ESS Sabre vs Burr Brown, 1-bit DSD over PCM, R2R DACs over Sigma-Delta, software audio upsamplers like HQPlayer or hardware ones like the Chord Dave…
Then you get to a point where people start comparing copper and silver cables, USB cables, optical cables, stabilizers, cable risers, power regenerators, DDCs, audiophile-grade network switches…
I’m gonna fcuking explode. TURN BACK WHILE YOU CANN…
…
Like our chifi lord and savior says:
Like has already been said, FLAC using Exact Audio Copy for archiving and you can convert that to whatever format your heart desires. Audiophilia, especially for most of visual-kei is a lost cause, especially when you’ve had bands themselves upload transcodes to streaming services (which was formerly done on CD-Rs.)
You forgot the crystals.
I was tempted to add that, but it’s even a meme among even the snake-oil crowd nowadays. This is the modern example…
I want to save up the storage, but I prefer higher quality. what should I do?
why not save aac m4a (iTunes or TVBR Q127)? almost lossless, the size is nearly as big as a 320k mp3.
no need to discuss for this topic apparently.
This post reminded me of why us audio engineers are in constant war against audiophiles lmao
“I have this super-precious expensive gold-plated USB cable and it’s the only way to listen to music clearly, and your amp needs this 45 thousand dollar IEC power cable to really shine”
All the while Nolly mixed Architects’ ‘Holy Hell’ and Periphery’s ‘P4’ on a pair of Audio Technica headphones plugged directly into his MacBook Pro’s headphone output"
Watch all hell break loose
this could be a longer battle. The advances of technology + the huge wish to get everything the highest quality (audio/video)… Perhaps there is a definitive point of high quality that cannot be surpassed, we have FLAC and then came Hi-Res… what is the next lul
My true hope is the next stage is “just stop doing data compression, lossless or otherwise, storage is cheap just use the .wav files” lmaooo
lmaoooo
Absolutely. Though, to give credit, most of those I interact with in the audiophile space are salt-of-the-earth types who understand that a fair chunk of what they’re chasing has questionable, if not nonexistent, effects on their system. It’s a spending problem disguised as reassurance that keeps pushing them to “upgrade” their gear in esoteric ways. The function of a power regenerator/conditioner or DDC should already be integrated at the DAC/amp level, for something properly built at least. Though what’s funny is a lot of people don’t realize there’s another faction of audiophoolery that insists on achieving ludicrous SINAD metrics by, for example, using 100-something parallel op amps in a single headphone amp, rather than using a normal amplifier circuit. This stuff is way messier than it should be 
.
I think it’s perfectly fine to chase a certain “flavor” of audio for personal listening within your means. I personally use an R2R with a Class A zero-feedback speaker amp for a lot of my listening, but I also use basic copper interconnects and bog-standard digital cables because I’m not trying to listen to my equipment from a mile away. However, to say that it objectively makes things sound more “real” would be disingenuous. The “studio” we, as listeners, refer to has compressors, variable sample bitrates, recordings on a litany of different mics with their own sonic quirks. Then like you mentioned, tracks are mixed and mastered on Macbooks or PCs with headphones and studio monitors with their own FR, etc.
about lossy files… I prefer 1000000000% AAC instead of mp3. Mainly to digital releases, so much better in AAC.
This whole discussion plus this mentioning of highest video quality made me wonder:
I am not a big fan of HD for movies because it looks bad on a lot of TVs which has diffrent reasons and most can be fixed by calibrating the TVs but still it sometimes looks “unrealistic” because it looks more sharp than what we see with our eyes around us.
Is there a similar effect for audio? Does it start to sound “unreal” at a certain point? 
At least I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate crystal clear sounds because they are used to smartphone audio.
Apologies for I’m about to go “erm ackshually” all over this post.
…
So, yes there are some things in audio that have that hyperreal effect. I can’t speak on screw-ups on the production side, but equipment I can to an extent. There’s a bit overlap for the first point, too.
To preface, breathiness of vocals and fricative consonant sounds (“ss”,“th”, etc.) all live in the 2~6kHz range and most instruments will involve those frequency ranges and beyond.
When those high frequencies are elevated, it can sometimes come off like they’re clearer, “brighter” sounding. Many manufacturers, when tuning speakers for their products, will play around with those upper frequencies to bring details out when they’re elevating the bass (offsetting the masking effect) or simply just to add perceived “resolution” and “detail” to their middling products. (The former point is something that’s also done in audio production with bass-heavy music.)
Now when you exceed “brightness” you end up with “sibilance”.
good explanation and example of sibilance
Brightness and, in excess, sibilance can also be more incidental rather than intentional due to the following:
A hump centered around 1~3kHz is where in IEMs/earbuds, pinna gain is artificially added back in as compensation, since the audio is bypassing your outer ear. If it’s shifted too far up due to limitations in driver quality, shoddy multi-driver configurations, etc. —oof, ouch my ear bones.
An improperly dampened closed-back headphone can become bright or even sibilant due to cup resonance as sounds bounce off the inner walls. In the floor-standing speaker world, this is room acoustics.
Cone tweeters on speakers can emphasize treble.
You can also hear treble differently depending on your HRTF or Head-related Transfer Function (basically how you hear things in particular.) This along with hearing-loss is why you have so many differing opinions of the same product.
All this to say “brightness” can make sounds seem hyperreal and extremely textured. It’s also like using the sharpen filter on a picture, but similarly, you can go overkill like sibilance in audio, and make things jarring asf since you’re not adding any more information. More resolution or detail would be represented as better separation and clarity of images/instrument lines due to speed and minimal distortion of the diaphragm. Granted, there’s even debate on what constitutes “speed” and “resolution”.
Depending on the implementation and what’s feeding audio to them (your signal chain), planar magnetic and especially electrostatic transducers can have unnaturally faster transient speed (leading edge/burst of a sound) and decay (how sound ceases) than the dynamic ones we see in most products. This can have an uncanny effect on how instruments and vocals sound since it seems like everything is starting and stopping quicker than it sounds in the real world. This is why you often see estats paired with tube amplifiers as they bring back some of that natural decay.
It depends, for documentation purposes I prefer flac or alac especially if I buy whatever it is. If it is something iIwas given idrc I of course prefer lossless/ very well ripped tapes.
There’s lots of interesting technical bits here that I appreciate reading, so cheers to those sharing their wisdom !
I just wanted to throw in my thoughts and make a case in general for lossless codecs like FLAC and against lossy in general - it’s really more about future proofing the files from an archival perspective with the listening experience being secondary. It’s to avoid bad decision making today when it comes to digitization / conversion workflows. That comes at a cost with larger files but harddrives are cheap. If you’re reading this and thinking “But how can I get all of music on my phone / laptop / tablet?!” or “It sounds good enough!”, well I guess that’s that and you can stop right here since convenience is the main goal and these other issues will just be hypothetical nonsense.
In the last 20-25 years since mp3 really became mainstream and ubiquitous there’s been constant conversations along the way where people would claim 128kbps is good enough, then it was 192kbps and now of course it’s 320kbps or AAC is better than mp3.
Perhaps ‘good enough’ today is finally close enough to lossless where we can truly not stress about it anymore. But ‘good enough’ in the past often seemed like the perfect solution when in reality it was far from it. I’ve experienced this first hand whether digitizing a VHS tape, scanning images, transferring records / tapes or ripping CDs. I thought I achieved good results only to realize years later that it could have been much better. Can most people be certain ‘good enough’ - 320kbps AAC - or whatever, is satisfactory for all their future needs?
A specific example that bugs me endlessly is when a demo tape, vinyl or record was shared online in mp3 format. Sometimes it might be the only version of that sound source that exists. That demo tape is impossible to find now. That vinyl might be too expensive or too complicated for most to transfer again. The quality of that lossy encoded file is forever. It was good enough 5-10-15 years ago but now you listen to and it sounds like garbage (bad playback deck, weird clipping, subpar encoder). You can remaster the files with Audacity but with lossy formats, the encoding noise just comes right out once you start playing with the frequencies or doing some noise reduction.
Another point is that the noise floor on those demo tapes, bootlegs and records (whether inherit or introduced by hardware) can be unbearably high and can take up a lot of bitrate. So sure, it’s a 192kbps encoded demo tape…but perhaps half of that bitrate went toward encoding noise which is the most demanding of any encoder. So really your signal is bit-starved. If it were a lossless / FLAC file, there’s more of chance at restoration / remastering because of the higher bitrate and less compression. This is an edge case and is not applicable to CD sourced music which is what the majority of people hear are really concerned about which brings me to…
Not every software / encoder is the same. Some do a better job than others. Average people don’t search for the best software to use, simply didn’t know about one at the time or maybe pick the first thing that ‘just works’. That mp3 / aac encoder from yesteryear seemed great but now you’ve graduated from earbuds and finally got those dream headphones or floorstanding speakers and all of sudden you hear the defects.
So why not get flac? A lossless FLAC CD file might only be 400-700Kbps depending on the music so it’s really just double a 320kbps CBR file.
A 3-4-5-10tb harddrive easily holds 1000’s of lossless albums.
I’ve got a 4TB SSD holding 1000’s of albums in FLAC - CDs, tapes, 24bit 96Khz vinyl transfers. Maybe it’s 10-20,000 albums. I don’t even count. It’s like an endless black hole of space for a minimal price. I know realistically I can’t put everything on my phone so thinking I should crush everything to AAC or mp3 for that use-case is just an unnecessary requirement for my collection. I’m perfectly fine listening to mp3s in the car where the ambient noise will negate the subtle differences I might hear between lossy and lossless. If I want to listen loud and proud at home, I’ve got the FLACs to nerd out on.
TL:DR.
This chart is interesting thank you for all this information. Im interested in bass on this first chart. It shows that types of bass do live in a high range but not for every instrument/types of sounds.
The second chart is also helpful because I’ve had trouble with eq’ing bass at a certain point. This also shows that i was on the right track but i needed some more of a clear cut guide a bit.
I also feel like sub-bass plays a role in human hearing just little bit but not a crazy amount but I assume thats what boosted bass is. Thank you again 
The first chart is the same as this, and it actually includes the key and some interactive elements which is far more helpful. Just be mindful that while these graphs refer to 2kHz ~ 6kHz as “high-midrange” other graphs will show that range as lower-to-mid-treble with high treble only starting at 10kHz+. It’s confusing, so the numbers are easier to go by. :
This one from Sweetwater is good too:
For bass I do a shelf filter at 150~200Hz up like 3~4db and start moving it around laterally by ear until something works out. It’s not always clear-cut, so I’d look for an FR graph of the headphone or IEM to figure out where you want to boost it w/o adding mud.
OR you could just use https://autoeq.app/ if it’s in the database 
. There will always be some product variation, though.
No problemo 
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I’m either downloading 320kb or FLAC. Anything else will hardly make it onto my harddrive
Another story that I don’t think I told anywhere, but is relevant to this topic! It’s a bit of an edge case and isn’t enough to move the needle one way or another, but it is interesting!
I said earlier that the reason why I want lossless rips is because I want bit-perfect rips. Let me give you a good example of when this happens. Eleven years ago, DELUHI released the Yggdalive mini album. This album features a gapless transition between track 2 (G.A.L.D.) and track 3 (REVOLVER BLAST). The way it’s supposed to sound is that Juri shouts out G A L D and then REVOLVER BLAST immediately starts with YEAAAAH!
This video, uploaded eleven years ago, is the initial rip that was shared around the internet. This rip is missing the “D” from the G.A.L.D. shout at the end.
To the best of my knowledge, this is some kind of rounding error. Whatever MP3 codec was used to rip the original CD clipped a chunk off the end. Normally, it would not be noticeable, but this isn’t normal!
The official channel has the whole song.
If this were ripped in FLAC, then the “D” would be present and this story would not exist. But it’s because it was ripped to MP3 that there was a section of the track missing, and this was missing for years because multiple rips surfaced with the same issue, indicating a widespread encoder issue and not something on the part of the original uploader.
You can only reliably get the whole song if you rip FLAC. With modern encoders, and proper settings, it’s likely that you can extract the whole song. But that’s more work than just ripping to FLAC and having surety that you have the whole song.
Here’s a poll for everyone: If you have this mini-album in your collection, do you have G.A.L. or G.A.L.D.?
Yeah, I’d recommend nothing but ripping in FLAC using EAC when possible (sometimes the program will stall out, particularly with live-distributed CD-Rs which is when I use something like AIMP AudioConverter.) The rip I have iirc was received privately in 320kbps, and having just listened, still has the entire chant at the end.
If you want something even worse, the widely circulated (only one prob.) rip of the original ver. of トウメイナユキ (Toumei na Yuki) by Royz has major audible skips at 0:03, 0:53, 1:02, 1:29, 2:31, and 4:01. I have the CD and found no skips at all using EAC (also no potential transcode hell that the circulate rip underwent.) Corrupted files, faulty disc readers, and codec issues could’ve contributed to this. The redundancy that EAC has matters along with FLAC’s built in checksum!
