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Ever lower fidelity

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bluecrab

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  • 2 weeks later...

The article said 'probably three to five years away from widespread use of so-called "loss-less" compression schemes'. Keyword widespread, as in people will wake up and ditch mp3 for flac when storage and bandwith are no longer concerns. Effectively, once portable devices can hold a few hundred gigs or a terabyte, there's no reason to use lossy codecs anymore. As it stands now I have about 550 albums compressed in a mix of flac and monkeys audio and they take up around 177 gig. 250 gig drives are about $70 nowadays, it makes lossless a no-brainer for the desktop. IF, of course, you care about sound quality. I'd venture to say most people from 15-30 nowadays do not. It is all about convenience for those folks, until they get bit by the audiophile bug. We're on the verge, in 3-5 years time we'll easily have 1 terabyte 1.8" drives, and the 1TB PC harddrives of today will cost $70 or less like 250 gig drives do now. Yay for advances in technology. :drinks:

Edited by streaml1ne
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Perhaps in 2 to 3 years there'll be portable players at 150 - 200 gb or so but most people will ot buy one of them & use lossless. Instead, they'll buy high capacity flash players (say 32 gb) & continue using mp3 etc.

This is because the flash players will be smaller, lighter & more convenient. And what's portable music about if not convenience? Really high capacity HDD portables will be a vey small niche market.

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Right now LAME 3.97 V2 NEW FAST is nearly as good as uncompressed, and fools most of the people most of the time. The arguement about how bad compressed audio is has come to be almost ridiculous. To wit: a fellow I know had a "golden ears" friend who could distinguish compressed from uncompressed, easily, he claimed. So, my freind played the golden eared fellow ten tracks, all the same music and asked his buddy to choose which was compressed and which was not. The golden ears held up his list proudly at the end of the test only to be told he heard the same 128 Kb file ten times in a row. The listener never again spoke to the tester.

Not all folks are that asinine, but on an ABX test very, very few can tell them two apart. ;o)

Cheers

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