High Res Audio

You looking for a speaker or something for head / earphones? Anywho
I have a Cambridge audio Bluetooth speaker which delivered fairly decent sound and bass given its size or for an immersive experience I’m running shure 853s through a Fiio headphone amp, the sound is fecking awesome

 

UltimateEar Pro3; The SoundEar Pro-3 is designed with professional musicians, sound & recording engineers and audiophiles who demand the absolute peak of performance in their music listening.

 

iPhone and a set of apple wireless earbuds do for me Tommy.

In fact, my iPhone is basically an iPod, in that i dont make any calls from it anyways. Apart from texting obscenities to/from my mates and the odd bit of web browsing, thats all i use it for. Its a half decent music box. Convenient too and the earbuds work pretty well.

I'm not an audiophile though. I just listen to music very often. Daily. I need my entire collection with me at all times. For comfort. My precious.

 

If you downrate the bitrate and have the biggest iphone, no probs. Youll get a fair chunk on it.

 

At lossless you’re buggered! You’ll end up carrying a suitcase size storage medium around. I suppose it depends on the environment you’re listening in, if your sitting somewhere in a serene and quiet isolated listening room then DAC at lossless will be surreal otherwise I’d go compressed as you won’t tell the difference other than most music sounding a “bit bright”

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

 

You do need a good playback system if you want to hear music at its best. Then you will notice the difference between different file types and bit rates.

If you are planning to use a portable player and listening somewhere that isn’t quiet then the differences you’ll hear will be negligible. However audiophile headphones in a silent room will reveal the differences between not only the music files, but also different playback devices.

In my studio I can hear the difference between 24 bit 44.1kHz and 16 bit 44.1kHz wav files and I’m not using anything amazing to hear that, just a pair of old Mackie HR824 running from an old RME Fireface 800.

In an ideal world I would love to listen to music as the artists did in the studio. These days that would be 24 bit 192 kHz. I’d also want to hear it unmastered because usually the artists aren’t involved in the mastering process and even though the music may sound better after mastering (although a lot over the past 20 years doesn’t - thank you Loudness War) it’s not how the artists heard it in the studio.

For my own music collection I converted it to Apple Lossless files which to my ears sound the same as the CD. 320kbps AAC or MP3 are ok. I don’t find them aurally offensive. We use them for sending bands rough mixes because they’re small enough to email, but still sound ok.

 

I use 128kb bitrate. I dont notice quality issues via earbuds. But i do if i stream it to amp from phone. Thus i dont.

 

I can hear the difference between 128 and 192, even on my iPod using fairly cheap Sennheiser ear buds. I couldn't tell the difference between 24-bit or 16-bit though, nor between 192 and and any higher bit rate. Too many years spent on a motorcycle without using ear plugs, alas.

Hmm, maybe if I invested in above-decent headphones or speakers ... nah, spend the money on bikes, rather.

 

You guys can still hear? Clearly not riding those Ducs hard enough......