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Originally Posted by terminal pharmacy
A trained ear can hear the difference quite easily, even an mp3 that has been converted to wav or aiff is recognisable. mp3's and any compressing format including flac destroy some harmonic content. generally in the bottom end is most noticable. as far as harmonic content goes, every frequency affects another whether it is in our hearing range or not and this content affects all the audio within the human hearing range. i understand people not being able to hear the difference as you would be listening to the music and not the audio quality and alot of peoples experience on here with audio would be 98% in the digital realm. alot of people here would not have grown up with vinyl and tape etc as some of us oldies have...
wav and aiff generally are 10mb per minute depending on how rich the content is spectrally (ie passable bandwidth) whereas mp3/acc/any other compressed format is about 1mb per minute (depending on kbps ripped, but still not close to wav or aiff) with the exception of flac which only compresses minutely but still compresses. digital audio is still quite a long way away from the bandwidth of analogue audio.
in the end the transmission of audio is all analogue once it is converted into air movement from the speakers but you can generally hear the difference.
this compression should not be confused with the compression that is used to control dynamics.
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I agree with everything but the idea in bold. Sure higher frequencies (even ones we cannot hear) affect the audio we DO hear. But where do we draw the line? Most people can't hear much passed 18K; With sample rates commonly found at 24/96 these days that puts the highest frequency reproduced at 48K. Are you really going to argue that the frequencies above 48K are affecting things? What next, light waves affecting what we hear? And even if all those juicy frequencies are contained on (say) vinyl, 99.9% of audio systems in the world can't reproduce such high frequencies anyway (your point is completely moot).
No, what you love about analog is the
surface noise which is now available via a plug in by UA. The debate about analog vs. digital is all but over at this point. (but I thought that was the case about global warming too and BOY was I wrong).