<story><title>FLAC – Format overview</title><url>https://xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adgjlsfhk1</author><text>So to start, you should pretty much disregard anyone who thinks CD quality is worse than vinyl. CD quality is 16 bit, 44k samples per second, and despite some audiophile gear now that is 24 bit, 96k samples per second, ABX testing routinely fails to find a difference between them. As such, in terms of music quality and software quality, anything capable of delivering 16 bit, 44k samples  should be considered &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; (i.e. FLAC&amp;#x2F;CDs). There is some evidence that in studio conditions, people can hear a difference between high bitrate lossy compression and CD quality, but realistically, even Vorbis at 128kbps or other formats at 256kbps or higher will provide a very good listening experience.</text></item><item><author>jansan</author><text>I do not have very sensitive ears, but maybe an audio enthusiast can explain this to me:&lt;p&gt;In the 80s and 90s some people were going crazy over HiFi, only the absolute high end products were just good enough. I remmeber seeing stereo systems for 50,000$ and more. CDs were already seen as inferior to records quality-wise, and speakers had to be huge if possible.&lt;p&gt;Today Wifi speakers are all the rage. The music is downloaded (precompressed) and then sent over Wifi or Bluetooth with (sometimes very) limited bandwidth to a single speaker which has the size of a laptop.&lt;p&gt;How does the audio quality compare? Is it like day and night? Or do the new multi room systems play in the same league as the old system that were used by enthusiasts? I often have the feeling that overall sound quality does not matter anymore as long as the bass is strong enough, but as I said at the beginning, my ears are not very sensitive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>willis936</author><text>I feel it&amp;#x27;s important to explain why &amp;lt;44 kSamp&amp;#x2F;s sample rates are used.  No matter what the digital audio signal should have no information above 20 kHz, but running ADCs far above Nyquist lessens the importance of the analog antialiasing filter.  You don&amp;#x27;t need to worry about expensive caps and how they age if you sample at 192 kHz but filter to 20 kHz.  This drives down the noise floor and increases linearity for essentially free.&lt;p&gt;Please repeat this when people say &amp;quot;there&amp;#x27;s no reason to use sample rates above 44 kHz&amp;quot;.  While it&amp;#x27;s true for source material, it should be properly caveated.</text></comment>
<story><title>FLAC – Format overview</title><url>https://xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>adgjlsfhk1</author><text>So to start, you should pretty much disregard anyone who thinks CD quality is worse than vinyl. CD quality is 16 bit, 44k samples per second, and despite some audiophile gear now that is 24 bit, 96k samples per second, ABX testing routinely fails to find a difference between them. As such, in terms of music quality and software quality, anything capable of delivering 16 bit, 44k samples  should be considered &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; (i.e. FLAC&amp;#x2F;CDs). There is some evidence that in studio conditions, people can hear a difference between high bitrate lossy compression and CD quality, but realistically, even Vorbis at 128kbps or other formats at 256kbps or higher will provide a very good listening experience.</text></item><item><author>jansan</author><text>I do not have very sensitive ears, but maybe an audio enthusiast can explain this to me:&lt;p&gt;In the 80s and 90s some people were going crazy over HiFi, only the absolute high end products were just good enough. I remmeber seeing stereo systems for 50,000$ and more. CDs were already seen as inferior to records quality-wise, and speakers had to be huge if possible.&lt;p&gt;Today Wifi speakers are all the rage. The music is downloaded (precompressed) and then sent over Wifi or Bluetooth with (sometimes very) limited bandwidth to a single speaker which has the size of a laptop.&lt;p&gt;How does the audio quality compare? Is it like day and night? Or do the new multi room systems play in the same league as the old system that were used by enthusiasts? I often have the feeling that overall sound quality does not matter anymore as long as the bass is strong enough, but as I said at the beginning, my ears are not very sensitive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chongli</author><text>I don’t think that’s giving people enough credit. Sure, if you master for CD to exploit as much dynamic range as possible (as is often done with high end classical music) then CD quality is truly amazing and vinyl can’t even come close.&lt;p&gt;But, a lot of popular music out there isn’t mastered for that use case (high end ABX testing). On the contrary, there are tons of CDs that are extremely compressed (in the dynamic range sense) so as to sound as loud as possible on the radio [1]. If you compare one of these CDs with an earlier (or even contemporary) vinyl release which has been mastered correctly then of course the vinyl will sound better!&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, because we’re dealing with a Wild West of media, new and old, floating around in the marketplace we don’t have the luxury of a perfect ABX comparison, and so people will continue to buy and prefer old formats. It is for that reason that we can’t dismiss them.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Loudness_war&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Loudness_war&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>