Quote:
Originally Posted by Lowe
I honestly can't hear the difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC, but I can spot albums ruined by the loudness war, easily.
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Yeah, that was my main point in the other post.
When having this sort of discussion with other people (friends, colleagues, etc.) I usually end up explaining the term 'compression' (in this specific context), because everyone associates 'compression' with MP3. A common misconception -- everyone knows that MP3 decreases sound quality, but apparantly nobody knows that DRC (dynamic range compression) does affect the sound quality a _lot_ more.
I suggest everyone interested in this topic to read this three Wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
Music lives from its dynamic range, reducing this range to a few dB destroys the feeling (it simply gets boring). The ignorance of this issue really makes me sad...
EDIT:
@Mika: The remaster of the Vagrant Story album is using DRCed versions of the original waveforms from the DigiCube release. However the main issue is that now a lot of the tracks clip, and once a waveform is clipped the information (contained in the clipped part) is lost.