So we are left with AV Club, Gizmodo, and The Takeout as real sites. All of which are a shadow of their former selves.

Good thing too, over the last few years Kotaku has become something of an embarrassment.

Posting here for reasons about to become obvious:

I just read his post and it was incredibly clear what he was saying. It was obviously a “we’re all dying so live life to the fullest” message. Nontroversy.

Nah. Fuck charles. Let him be just a tampon for the rest of his unnatural life, that’ll be quite alright.

The title of this article should be changed from “Lossless Audio Does Not Sound Better Than MP3" to “Shitty equipment makes it hard or impossible to hear the difference between Lossless Audio and MP3". Of course, if you are using a pair of airpods over Bluetooth you are not going to hear a difference. What did you…

I’m trying to find a paper from McGill University where trained listeners (recording engineers, musicians) tried to distinguish between different bit rate MP3s and lossless CD (44.1 k samples/sec/16 bit depth) audio, for different musical genres. Double blind direct comparison, yadda, yadda. Note that lossy…

Car audio in general is not a good thing to use as a reference. The power to a car audio system is really “dirty”. You have really strict power limits, large alternators produce lots of noise and coil whine.

Car systems aren’t designed to perfectly reproduce sound, even the folks who have big thousands of dollars…

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+1 on everything you noted. I was a technician at Dell in the mid 90s and we loved playing with what was then called the “Frauenhofer Codec”: a DOS executable that ran as command line. It would take two or three times longer than the song length to encode them on the Pentium MMX and later II cpu’s of the day at…

Take studies from 10 years ago, link to articles written 15 years ago and create a premise with no testing validations...

It seems equivalent to claiming that 4k video and VHS look the same...when viewed on a 40 year old CRT TV.

It’s the same reason Facebook will show you your racist uncle’s posts before your cousin’s sweet post about their pet rabbit. The former drives engagement because you’re more likely to respond to your uncle’s stupidity, the latter will likely only get a like. TikTok, YouTube, and now Gizmodo added to the list, all…

This, on my phone standard bitrate MP3 is just fine, at home on my Dali Ikon speakers, amplified through my NAD D3020V2 amp. lossless sounds a good deal better. Much more warmth and depth to the audio. But improving further on that would require an exorbitant increase in investment

Yesteryear’s codecs weren’t as good as today’s too. Today’s MP3 files sound every bit (no pun) as good as FLAC files.

The early days of lowbitrate MP3s were trash. You could easily hear the blatant artifacts found in 96 and 128kpbs MP3s. But as the encoding technology improved and Variable Bit Rate (VBR) became a thing, you could get higher quality at smaller sizes. I’d argue, most even “audiophiles” in their own control setups would…

You know, if you’re going to claim a survey “proves” something, you might want to pay any attention at all to whether the design accounts for confounding factors... which this does not. It’s the equivalent of saying that because a bunch of people watching a video piped onto a 1" CRT screen couldn’t reliably tell the…

So, this is something I learned back in the glory days of rampant music piracy.

The subhed literally contradicts the headline. If “most people” don’t hear a difference, then some people do hear a difference, which means that there is a difference.

There is a difference, and I honestly used to care more lol. Initially MP3s were done using 128kbits which actually does sound more like fm radio to me. Newer coding at higher bit rates does much better in this regard. The main issue is the one of diminishing returns.