[Audio Empire]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2011 07:30:11 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message

On Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:41:08 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in
message

This type of person is often the type who participate in
DBTs as well, rank laymen.

Simply not true. The DBTs I've been involved with
involved experienced audiophiles, some youngsters, some
who went back to the days of tubes.

So, you feel that you can speak for all DBTs?

That's not what I wrote. I feel no need to respond to made-up statements.

People like him and college
students who were weened on MP3s and ear-buds are the
average "listener".

Here we go again, another set of self-serving audiophile
myths. Where are the peer-reviewed paper that shows that
people who listen to MP3 and personal listening devices
necessarily have any deficiencies when it comes to
reliably detecting audible differences?

They can listen to low-data rate MP3s

They could. Heck, I listen to low bitrate files frequently because that is
how most spoken word recordings are distributed. It doesn't sound lifelike
or even good, but the goal is communicating information, not tickling the
inner ear.

But that's a totally irrelevant side issue on your part, which, I believe, is
designed to obfuscate the debate.

Fact is that many audible differences are easier to
detect with earphones and/or headphones.

And it seems that a large majority of the younger
generations DON'T CARE about these "differences" AT ALL
or they wouldn't be listening to really low-bit rate MP3s
and would insist in ripping their music at higher bit
rates.

Straw man argument because it has already been generally agreed upon that
the vast majority of music listeners aren't audiophiles and never will be.

Again withe the deliberate obfuscation. We are TALKING about the fact that
the average listener is NOT an audiophile. That's the whole point of my
bringing up the fact that most young people don't care about sound. If they
did, they wouldn't be satisfied listening to low bit-rate MP3s. When this
type of "listener" is pressed into service to participate in a listening DBT,
I don't wonder that they return a null result. They likely don't even
understand what they are supposed to be listening FOR, and probably wouldn't
recognize these differences even if they existed. THAT'S THE POINT.

OTOH, there is a rapidly emerging market for music encoded in high-bitrate
compressed files, uncompressed and lossless-compressed files, and even music
files with 24 bit data words and sample rates up to 192KHz.

But again, that;'s NOT the discussion.

There has been a major explosion in sales of high priced and in some cases
high quality earphones and headphones. Traditional vendors like Sennheiser
and Etymotics are bringing out new extremely expensive high performance
headphones and earphones. Non-traditional vendors are doing similar things
in even greater volumes. If not for the young, mobile music listener, then
who?

You are assuming that these expensive headphones are bought by people who
encode their ripped music at the lowest possible data rate (thereby expanding
their iPod-like device's capacity). And that is simply not in evidence. Every
audiophile I know has an iPod or similar device. They DO NOT use MP3 they use
FLAC or ALC and trade ultimate storage capacity for quality. They also tend
to listen with expensive headphones and many have outboard headphone
amplifiers which accompany their iPod devices

I have a number of friends with teenaged and
college aged kids with iPod-like devices. They listen to
them constantly. When I ask them what bit-rate they use,
the answer is always the same: "The one that allows me to
put the most songs in the available space". I.E.
quantity instead of quality.

These are choices that they get to make. This is also just the mass market,
not the already large and rapidly emerging market for high quality mobile
listening experiences. Remember that most of our parents were happy
listening to AM radios when they were young, and as a rule they had no
viable alternatives until the 1950s.

This just reinforces my point about the quality of listeners that take part
in these university level DBT studies such as the Meyer/Moran paper that you
are so fond of.

On balance the low and rapidly falling prices for flash memory make crushing
music in order to store huge amounts of it in portable devices more
nonsensical than ever.

While that might be true for those of us interested in sound quality. To the
average teen, larger memory means MORE low-quality music files on their
players. I know kids with libraries that include thousands of "songs", far
more than they will ever listen to, but to hear them tell it, that's not the
point. The point is to have everything. They trade songs, buy songs, rip
songs and steal songs from the internet. The game is MORE, not BETTER.