16-bit limit from CD, 24 bit needs better source?

[hellosailor]

Technically biased forum....Yes, by longstanding choice. The psychoacoustics and other "gray matter" weren't my concern here.(G)

Steve-
My Nak has been a most embarrassing paperweight in a box for a long time now. After a long period of not being used, it developed the famous "won't play, only rewinds" syndrome. Sent it out for repair, two years later it did that again. And given the infuriating fact that it must be "something simple stupid!" like a belt, which I can't seem to access despite having the repair manual somewhere, I've left it to sulk until and unless I find a Nak genius who doesn't live on caviar.
But whatever the numbers are for dynamic range, I used to A/B that with a decent set of headphones or a good stereo (Sansui AU-919 driving Yamahopper NS-500's) and I have to say, whether it was the Telearc 1812 (where the canon fire can and did shake my kitchen dishes) or the Berlin Philharmonic doing Grand Canyon Suite (and there's a very clean and precise triangle "ding" after the storms) the metal tapes were always able to totally duplicate the source, analog or CD, to the best of my ears. Which used to hear ultrasonic gizmos, no problem with highs or lows.
If human ears are capable of hearing larger ranges, the human perception system is capable of pretending it can deal with that.

Which kinda comes back to what Koz was saying.

I've been mainly listening to VBR-2 MP3's. When I was getting everything digital, I went for three libraries figuring I'd need backup anyway. FLAC, WAV, and VBR-2 because as much as I strained, I couldn't be sure *if* I could hear anything wrong with VBR-4. So I figured, if I can't be sure that -4 is any real loss, I can settle for VBR-2 as a tradeoff against lossless file size. Which was a bigger issue ten years ago. (No really, who had a terabyte postage stamp? Let alone hard drive?)

Gotta say, to my aging ears (I've got some loss over 13,000 Hz) the VBR-2 MP3s still sound damn good in the real world, with real background noise and other issues. I'm wondering if it makes sense to use the FLAC, because in reality...you know, those MP3's may be as golden, but if I'm condemned to the 16-bit source material, the FLAC files don't seem to really be bringing a lot into the game.

My SONY cans may be a POS (high end consumer is still not high end) and my Sure 215 earbuds are the low end of their line. The Eponymous we won't talk about either...except to say they beat all hell out of $10 smartphone buds or the old Phillips CarryCorder.(G) They serve a purpose. But I can't help wondering...Maybe it is time to say the VBR-2 MP3's are better than what's left of my ears?

[steve]

I'm wondering if it makes sense to use the FLAC, because in reality...you know, those MP3's may be as golden

It absolutely makes sense to keep a backup copy in a lossless format (such as WAV, FLAC or AIFF), in case you ever need to edit or process the files in the future. The FLAC format has the advantages that it has good, fully specified support for metadata, and FLAC files are about half the size of equivalent WAV or AIFF files.

Lossy compressed formats (such as MP3, AC3 or Ogg) can have excellent sound quality, but the encoding process always discards some of the information. Anything other than very basic editing requires that compressed formats are uncompressed first, so editing an MP3 file in Audacity and exporting as MP3 loses information twice - once when the MP3 was first encoded, and again when it is exported from Audacity. This is a bit like making a photocopy of a photocopy; the first photocopy may look identical to the original, but after a few copies of copies, the quality progressively deteriorates.

If you have a backup / archive copy in a lossless format, then if you ever need to edit or processes the recording, you can use that copy each time (don't overwrite the archive copy), so there will only ever be encoding losses once.

FLAC was originally developed as a format for archiving audio recordings, and is well suited to the task.

[hellosailor]

Agreed on all points. What I meant abusing "use the FLAC" was to use them in a *player*, as opposed to listening to the MP3's, because the sound of either is so close. (VBR-2/vs/FLAC/vs ambient noises). I had originally made both FLAC and WAV as dual archives, since FLAC support used to be kinda scarce, and I figured wtf, I'll keep the dual archives in two formats just in case, down the line.

Now I'm wondering if I should just make that two FLAC archives. I *have* noticed that even when one CD is ripped to multiple formats (using dbPoweramp typically) that the metadata it tags the audio files with differs. Sometimes, even the simple things like artist title, album title, vary from one to the other, indicating something is being handled differently with the metadata.

I've seen "Grateful Dead, The" and "The Grateful Dead" come off the same CD, just depending on which doorway it walked through. Never had that problem with Audacity!

[steve]

Audio CDs do not usually contain metadata, as it is not part of the orange book specification. Information about the contents of audio CDs is usually drawn from the Internet, based on a unique ID for the disk. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB)

It is possible for audio CDs to contain text information, but it is a departure from the original standards. In the case of CD-Rs, it is in the form of "CD-Text" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-Text