Is FLAC really "better" than high-bit rate MP3?

[megabyteme]

I have been grabbing quite a bit of music lately to feed my new stereo. I find the FLAC albums from What to be quite nice. I have also grabbed some MP3 albums, but don't think they sound quite as amazing. It is easy to get fooled by audio gimmicks (fancy interconnects, speaker wire, etc), and I have to wonder if I am simply biased towards FLAC...

Thoughts?

[haslingdene]

There are some technical reasons why FLAC is 'really' better, but if it sounds better to you, that's ultimately what matters.

[Cabalo]

Without going deeper into the discussion, or getting all technical, I don't see any reason to download FLAC instead 320Kb/s. At least on my sound setup, which is quite good btw. Some professional DJ friends of mine also say that it's very rare the case when they need a flac version of a song.
I stopped bothering downloading FLAC, as I used to do a lot, and just moved on to high rate MP3. In the end it was all a waste of bandwidth.

[Skiz]

There are some technical reasons why FLAC is 'really' better, but if it sounds better to you, that's ultimately what matters.

It isn't very technical at all, really. FLAC is a completely lossless format of audio, when referring to quality. MP3, with its varying degrees, has lost some of that quality.

Like Cabalo, I have lost nearly all of my interest in FLAC. The real usefulness of FLAC for me is when I'm burning music onto a disc to play in the truck or something. I've always felt in the past that MP3s on a burned disc have a high probability of sounding like shite, so these days I'll download the FLAC version and burn that onto a disc, giving me an exact quality replica of the purchased CD.

I still have a shit-ton of FLAC but I don't download much of anything but V0 these days. I just so rarely tell the difference.

MBM, you should have the wife set up a Pepsi Challenge type thing for you, and play some FLAC and V0 versions of albums and see if you can tell the difference.

[megabyteme]

MBM, you should have the wife set up a Pepsi Challenge type thing for you, and play some FLAC and V0 versions of albums and see if you can tell the difference.

That could be fun. I'll see if we have time over the weekend.

[Burnsy]

I only ever downloaded a couple of FLAC albums and tbh I never noticed any massive difference.

Given, I don't have a stupidly priced stereo at home, I don't have time to listen to much music in work and the vast majority of the time the only chance I have to listen to some tunes is in the car driving (I do a lot of motorway driving)...

Maybe it's the fact I don't have the necessary quality of hardware to benefit from the lossless rips, but I find ripping .mp3 copies of albums serves me just as well as the few FLAC albums I have in my collection.

[Nissouri]

I prefer FLACs myself, mainly because they offer a (hopefully) perfect duplicate of the original. My hobby is to play around with music editing software doing compilations, remixes and mashups, so losses is a must. FLACs are also useful for saving work in progress when removing noise and glitches from captures of vinyl recordings or restoring dynamic range to bootlegs and old radio programs. FLACs offer a true source for conversion to various types of mp3s for the stuff I give to friends and post in forums with full quality control of the output. I also used FLAC to back up all my CDs and stored the originals in a closet, gaining lots of shelf space in the living room.

While spectrum analysis shows a clear loss in high frequencies between FLACs and MP3s, I’m sure only dogs or aliens can notice this difference most of the time. So if you do this kind of geeky music manipulation, like to recreate perfect copies of CDs, fancy yourself an audiophile or simply wanna be a snob, FLAC is the way to go. I would guess this desire for perfection applies to less than 5% of the world’s music-listening population – the rest just want their tunes to sound good!

The price to pay for FLACs is storage – over there on the book shelf, I have six 1 Tb Passport drives that hold my FLAC backups and have started filling number seven. Converted to V0, which I listen to most of the time, all of them fit on a single 500 Mb Passport with room for plenty more.

[P2PDog]

I download all my music in FLAC format now. I honestly can't tell the difference with the equipment I have, but since disc space isn't an issue for me, I figure why not have the best quality file available.

[dontknow]

I only downloaded flac rips since get a Pedros. And I think flac is better than mp3.

[Quarterquack]

To be honest, it all comes down to the audio setup one has. A few years ago I was content listening to 128kbps rips of metallica from youtube. Sure, they sounded like absolute crap, but the novely of not having to run through a whole disc inserting ordeal in order to listen to that one track I had a hankering for had me beat.

Fast forward a few years later, and I sincerely can't listen to 128kbps MP3 without hurting my ears. It's all garbage, to be honest. With any pair of decent headphones you can also easily tell the difference between a 320/V0/V2 to be honest. Between 320kbps MP3's and FLAC's, the difference is more subtle, but still very much existent, especially when it comes to a good number of instruments playing at the same time, and a 320kbps MP3 encode suddenly sounds "crowded". This difference is incredibly noticeable with metal songs that rely heavily on cymbals for example, where they are always washed away by other instruments in crappy encodes.