How do you listen to yours?

[Ek weet nie]

It's time for the most boring thread ever in OTMusic. I'm too young to remember anything except CDs (the first two or three albums I bought were on cassette). As a result I haven't a notion of the respective arguments of vinyl v. cassette v. CD or any other medium. Nowadays I listen to music on my computer through it's run of the mill speakers or through my ageing iPod using low to middle end in ear headphones.

So, the question is what quality of mp3 do I really need? Space isn't a huge factor but I'd like to minimise HD space if the drop in quality isn't obscene. At the moment I put things on to the computer at 160 kb/s and will reduce things I download to that bitrate too. Is that level too low or are the differences in quality lost on somebody with my sub-audiophile ears? Should I be encoding different genres at different bitrates?

So, what settings do you use then?

[Sam]

How do you listen to yours?

If you need to ask the question, I'd have thought the chances are that the differences in quality are indeed lost on you. 160kb/s is fine for bog-standard PC speakers or mp3 earphones, I find. Turn the volume up a bit and you'll hear the difference though - although that depends on the speakers as well.

I use Windows Media and rip and variable bitrate most of the time, which means the computer chooses the most appropriate compromise between disc space and quality. Before I go to Argentina I'll be putting my entire CD collection (and maybe some of my vinyls) onto an external hard drive, and for that I shall probably use a lossless format. But that's because the ripped files will be all I'll be able to listen to for the next few years...

[Nurse Duckett]

How do you listen to yours?

Ripped at 192k, about 50-50 listened to on PC with decent speakers including sub-woofer and Creative MP3 player with in-ear headphones.

From my earlier experimentation with different bitrates, I'd've thought 160k was fine. I was hard pressed to tell much difference between 128k and 192k, but mainly because I was unable to listen to two versions at the same time (unlike comparing two photographs, say).

[Ek weet nie]

How do you listen to yours?

Well, the thread wasn't intended just to answer my question as to what my settings should be. I am curious to how people on this forum listen to their music and how much they value the quality of the source. The fact that people on this forum take their music so seriously is a factor in my curiousity.

[Nurse Duckett]

How do you listen to yours?

OK, well if it's of any help, I'm from the old school of liking to own something tangible, so I've never bought any downloads.

I like to buy a CD, rip it (192k) and then listen to it as mp3, either via PC speakers (while browsing the internet at home) or MP3 player (at work or when shopping by myself). So I can always go back to original (lossless!) material should I want to, or re-rip if necessary.

Hardly ever listen to the "proper" hi-fi system downstairs any more - just not in the habit. Occasionally listen to CDs in car, but that's mostly on family outings so it's something we can all listen to, not "my" music.

Certainly not an audiophile - I just like the convenience of mp3 which outweighs CDs which outweigh vinyl.

[Sam]

How do you listen to yours?

Nurse Duckett wrote:

OK, well if it's of any help, I'm from the old school of liking to own something tangible, so I've never bought any downloads.

It might surprise you due to my age, but I'm the same (although I've bought maybe six tracks or so on legal download sites, a few years ago).

I have a small but decent enough CD player down here next to the computer which I regularly listen to music on in the evenings, and a much nicer one up in my bedroom - not hi-fi seperates quality but still not bad. If I weren't planning to move to a different continent next year I'd be looking seriously at a proper hi-fi system.

When I'm in Argentina I'll be mainly listening through my computer but I'm going, at the very least, to get some decent speakers for it, and quite possibly an okay-ish CD player to take the stuff I'll be buying whilst out there (there won't be anywhere near as much funk and soul, but there'll be a lot more tango, enough música tropical, and Argentine rock is fantastic).

At the moment my methods of listening, in order of frequency from most to least, are:

- mp3 player (with Sennheiser CX300 ear canal phones)
- Cheapo downstairs CD player
- Nicer upstairs CD player
- Vinyl turntable plugged into nicer upstairs CD player

[Amor de Cosmos]

How do you listen to yours?

As recorded here previously I'm laboriously ripping all my vinyl. I use Audio Companion and so far it's worked fine. I convert everything to AIFF format — it's a Mac thingy, and as I use iTunes and an iPod for playback it seemed to make sense. The only thing is, compared to other file formats, the volume on an iPod needs to be cranked much higher than other formats (oddly the same doesn't apply when playing directly off my computer) does anyone know why this should be so, and if anything can be done about it?

[Wyatt Earp]

How do you listen to yours?

Bitrate ought to rhyme with nitrate, I think.

[G-Man]

How do you listen to yours?

Tough to follow that through, though.

[Nigelwyn]

How do you listen to yours?

The price of hard drives is so cheap now that you shouldn't really need to worry about drive space. A 1Tb external drive can be had for £70 or so. That's enough to store the full data of around 1200 CDs or around 4000 CDs worth of mp3 at 320kps.
Also, I'm not sure, but I think that converting a higher rate mp3 file to a lower rate file (e.g. 190 kps to 128kps) will give you a worse sounding file than converting straight from CD to 128kps.
My listening is usually mp3's on desktop speakers or mp3's in the car - either from an mp3 CD or ipod plugged into the car radio.
About once a year I'll plug up a turntable and play some old 45's through my much neglected hifi, resolve to rip them all to mp3's and promptly forget about it for another year.

[hobbes]

How do you listen to yours?

Most of my music is at 128 because my MP3 player was only a 20Gb (my new one is only 16Gb but Sony have gone drag and drop so it's not much of an arse to move stuff about.)

If I can ever be arsed, I'll redo it all in lossless or at least 320. it's not so much the quality as what you miss at the top end - the little details that make music surprising.
Having said that, these days everything is so horribly compressed, it can actually sound better losing the high-end as it's less painful to listen to.