I´ve been reading a lot of debate about this issue, but I haven´t found any answer of value. I was tempted to purchase a pair of albums in Flac format recently, but I don´t know if it´s worth the price since all people seems to say it is not.

i use a decent pair of headphones (Sennheiser Px-200 II) and tried listening to various lossless archives I downloaded time ago. I found they sound louder, but not necessarily better. Or at least i can´t see big diferences.

Can you give me some opinion/tip about this?

my opinion is that flac is way to overrated. if you have mp3 with 320kbit or with maximun settings on VBR you can't hear any difference to lossless formats.
Give it a try : download a programm with which you can copy a cd into flac and mp3 (EAC for example => http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) and rip one song in both formats (best quality settings). Now have a listen to both on your headphones. If you hear a difference except from loudness than it's worth to purchase the songs as flac. If you only had the loudness difference and the rest sounds nearly the same than go and buy it as mp3. Also keep in mind that mp3 is more supported by software and portable musicplayers (itunes & ipod for example) than flac is.

ThePumisher, on 27 August 2010 - 04:35 PM, said:

Mmm. I´ll try it. I´ve got almost all my music on 320 kbps/VBR and I haven´t found they sound worse. In fact, people in forums say that it depends on the music genre of the track, like if it´s techno or rock it´s impossible to appreciate nothing. But with slower and more "detailed" genres (Classical, prog...) differences appear.

I listened WAV records of Burial´Untrue and Oldfield´Ommadawn (not schranz by any means and well, I just don´t know what to say...
What really worries me it´s the huge size of the lossless files, my player supports them.

It's basically all a big scam. Take HDMI cables with higher voltage outputs (I think), it's been shown to be total bollocks so people buy the cables with higher Hz (I think) for a higher price when it makes no difference. It definitely relates to this thread.

Vinyl wins.

We can close this thread.

FLAC is excellent for archiving purposes and trans-coding. Let's say in 10 years there's gonna be a better format,you can always trans-code your FLAC/LOSSLES files (without worrying about quality loss or trying to find them again in that X future format) but not beacuse OMG IT SOUNDZ SO CLEARRRS AND MUCH BETTER THAN MPTHREES I'M A FUCKING AUDIOPHILE FUCK YEAH!!!

also v0>320, Google ABX test.

mx/, on 28 August 2010 - 09:07 AM, said:

Absolutely totally right.
I can't hear the difference between good mp3 and lossless codec but I keep lossless versions of my CD for backup purpose and mp3 versions for day to day listening.

i hear a big difference between weak mp3s and 320

i try and everyhing in 320

i keep a couple of 'special' things in flac