The Distortion of Sound: Decline of sound replay doco

[blackwiggle]

Most forum members would be used to the highly compressed music that has saturated the market over the last 10 years.

But for old farts like me, it has been a SAD decline in quality.

I remember days when you used to spend hours tweaking your sound system to get the best out of it.

Hardly anybody now days would have a clue on how to set up a Turntable correctly, or Speaker positing .

Watch this YouTube video to see what you don't know what you have lost.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDZcz-V29_M#t=40

[Ace3000]

Anything below 256kbps mp3 is unlistenable to me.

I do prefer lossless formats, but I can listen to anything above 256kbps mp3.

I am a sucker for high quality speakers. I will NEVER buy some shitty $5 earphones, I would look for something that has excellent quality and range. I also do the same when I buy headsets for home use.

When I'm out and about I use some excellent quality Sony in-ear phones. It does its job very well. At home, I use a Plantronics 780 gaming headset. While it is intended for games, some gaming headsets have fantastic quality.

My friend uses Logitech z506 5.1 surround sound speakers. The quality of those are fantastic. He also likes to use record players, and I think he connects that up to his speakers.

Although, it's not always the quality of the speakers or the digital file. Sometimes an album is so horribly "mastered", you can't listen to it cause it's brickwalled like hell.

Because I don't like anything less than 256kbps and I have >10,000 songs, I stopped using my 32GB iPod Touch and bought a 160GB iPod Classic.

I love bandcamp as you can upload lossless music, and when you buy an album, you can download lossless music back, and the lowest quality you can get from there is 256kbps VBR mp3 (aka v0.)

Look at me, talking like an audiophile. But I care about music, I love it. I have a library of 10,188 songs. and all of that would be unlistenable if it was in a shitty quality.

The only kind of piracy I'm against is the goddamn awful quality versions of music/movies/whatever.