Hi,

In message , Colin Soames
writes
good enough to fool the 'Golden Ears Brigade' representative

IMHO, at least with classical music, the processing of MP3 makes the music
fatiguing and unsatisfactory when listening for any period of time ( 30
mins) even if you can't 'instantly' tell which is which. I've been using
.flac and .ace for classical rips.

Interesting to hear that - I have similar experience, but I can't really
put my finger on why. I tend to get 'tired' of listening to mp3 files
much sooner than uncompressed audio, even at fairly high bitrates. The
problem is that it's hard to be objective about it, as it takes a while
to discern a pattern. Over time though, I have noticed that I find it
easier to listen to uncompressed music for extended periods, even if I
can't tell any difference in an ABX test.

The compressed music I've encoded recently is either WMA9, VBR 98%
quality setting or Monkey's audio, and I haven't noticed these to be
fatiguing, but with the older stuff I encoded in mp3 format (with LAME
at 256/320 kbps) I tend to turn it off (or lower the volume) sooner than
with wav files from the same source, on the same playback system. I
really don't know if this effect is 'real' but it does seem consistent.
It doesn't seem to happen with Dolby Digital material, but I don't use
that on the same music system, so can't draw any conclusions.

It makes me wonder if compressed music stimulates the ear/brain
differently to uncompressed music, but that's pure speculation. My guess
is that it would be extremely difficult to test accurately because of
the extended time frames. Many people don't seem to have any problem
using mp3 players for hours at a time, so perhaps it's just me!

--
Regards,
Glenn Booth