[Audio_Empire]

....that many so-called audiophiles either can't, don't, or simply won't
hear. For instance, I was at an informal listening session for a group
of local audiophiles over the weekend. The organizer of this session had
assembled (with my help) a bunch of compressed files. He ripped some CDs
at different data rates: 32, 64, 128, 192, 384 kbps (MP3) and FLAC. I
supplied some internet radio at 128 and 194 kbps (one of them was a live
concert).

Nobody (except me and one other guy) could really hear any statistically
significant difference. The vast majority of the 15 "high-enders" there
were wrong more than 50% of the time! Most said that they really heard
no difference in anything above 64kbps! They couldn't hear the obvious
compression artifacts in the music at 128 Kbps, which surprised me.
These are some of the same guys, whose big incomes have allowed them to
buy equipment such as Pass amps, Wilson Sasha speakers or, in one case,
Magnepan MG-20.7s, as well as outrageously and needlessly expensive
cables and interconnects. They don't know bad sound from good yet they
talk endlessly about how changing to this mega-buck interconnect "opened
their system up like never before." and how they never realized how much
of the music they were missing before installing this or that brand of
speaker cable. Phooey! They can't even tell a heavily digitally
compressed and lossy playback from a lossless FLAC file and they're
talking about cable and amp or CD player "differences." Talk about the
emperor's new clothes!

Audio_Empire

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