Lossless vs Lossy/ Vinyl vs CD?

[Sunset Shalom]

Which do you prefer?

I try and collect lossless vinyl rips when I can but have nothing against a solid MP3 usually.

I know many can't tell the difference and there are a lot of random factors but I find FLAC's tend to sound "fuller" then lossy formats. MP3's tend to be louder IME with less clarity. Clearly it depends on the album and how it was processed though.

Without a decent record player I especially like having vinyl rips as it makes it super convenient to listen to the best quality audio (IMO of course) when they are well ripped at least.

Right now I have a big collection of FLAC's and MP3's as some stuff is hard to find, and a lot of stuff you can't even find on vinyl or if you do it cost a ton and there are no rips anywhere

I have done a decent bit of comparing and sometimes it's very hard to hear any difference while other times the Vinyl FLAC rip sounds much much better.

Here is an example:


Random version, probably an MP3


Lossless audio converted from a FLAC ripped from vinyl

Not the best example as I can only vouch for the second video which I uploaded but the audio is surprisingly louder and definitely sounds "fuller" to me. I bet with headphones the difference would be even more apparent.

Thoughts?

 

[Alkali Ike]

"Thoughts" on this topic are not in short supply.

Storage is so cheap now that there's really no good argument for going with lossy audio. I know that double blind tests have supposedly "proven" that almost nobody can hear a difference between a good but lossy 256mb MP3, and a lossless FLAC. I'm not sure I can hear a difference.

But the Mr. Spock part of my brain tells me "Why would you choose lossy over lossless? It is not logical."

Stay with FLAC or other lossless and you know you have the best. If you have to go lossy for some reason, the low bar is 256mb MP3. Anything below that bitrate is definitely audibly compromised.

The now-old Nyquist Theorem for creating digital audio files is still solid. That is, a CD with a 44.1Khz sampling rate and 16-bit words will do the job very adequately. Increase the sampling rate to say 24-bit words @ 192KHz sample rate and it's arguably better but again, few can hear the difference. I believe most everything is recorded at 192KHz sample rate with 24-bit word depth nowadays.

Anything you upload to YouTube or whatever is being sliced diced and compressed. Don't assume the FLAC file you upload is still lossless.

 

[Sunset Shalom]

"Thoughts" on this topic are not in short supply.

Storage is so cheap now that there's really no good argument for going with lossy audio. I know that double blind tests have supposedly "proven" that almost nobody can hear a difference between a good but lossy 256mb MP3, and a lossless FLAC. I'm not sure I can hear a difference.

But the Mr. Spock part of my brain tells me "Why would you choose lossy over lossless? It is not logical."

Stay with FLAC or other lossless and you know you have the best. If you have to go lossy for some reason, the low bar is 256mb MP3. Anything below that bitrate is definitely audibly compromised.

The now-old Nyquist Theorem for creating digital audio files is still solid. That is, a CD with a 44.1Khz sampling rate and 16-bit words will do the job very adequately. Increase the sampling rate to say 24-bit words @ 192KHz sample rate and it's arguably better but again, few can hear the difference. I believe most everything is recorded at 192KHz sample rate with 24-bit word depth nowadays.

Anything you upload to YouTube or whatever is being sliced diced and compressed. Don't assume the FLAC file you upload is still lossless.

Youtube is actually better then it used to be I believe. I started converting FLAC's to WAV's because they still don't take flacs, but I believe WAV's can be lossy or lossless too.

Comparing the videos I upload vs the original audio I usually can't hear much if any difference. I even got a FLAC of a killer funk album I uploaded in MP3 as that was all I could find. Too my surprise the FLAC and MP3 upload sounded identical and probably came from the same recording or CD rip so it didn't seem an improvement. Been awhile since I read up on youtubes audio but I am pretty sure they have improved it over the years though it still probably isn't the best admittedly.

But yeah, why compromise quality when download speeds and storage are the highest they have been. I don't even have the best wifi and I still have managed to download 500gb+ of lossless music over the years.