I believe if you have the right sort of program, you can hear the effect of
mp3, though the current coding is miles better than it used to be of
course.
The trade off is not in frequency responce, but in phase relationships of
low level components. In the early mp3s, the so called swizzle effect was
pretty obvious as the trade off tended to move the sound stage about by
phase, but the higher the bit rate the less this is obvious of course.

Its really a personal call, I suppose. I find that listening to a small mp3
player for a longish period leaves me with a kind of swizzling effect on
normal sounds for some minutes, even though during the playback it was not
that obvious.

Brian

--
Brian Gaff -
Note:- In order to reduce spam, any email without 'Brian Gaff'
in the display name may be lost.
Blind user, so no pictures please!
"Michael Chare" wrote in message
...
I have been struggling to hear much (any) difference between flac and
320kbps mp3 files pulled from the free downloads on the Naim website.
but then I also found that the max frequency I can here is more like
11,000 Hz compared with the 15,500 Hz I could hear in the 60s.

It would appear that I am not alone in not being able to tell the
difference:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/re...-Good-To-Me/p1

Can anyone hear the difference?


--
Michael Chare