192 kbps AAC vs. Lossless Audio

[Z.A.C.]

Hey everyone,

I was just curious if there really that much of a difference in quality between these 2.

I used to compress some of my favorite album's losslessly on my previous iPod's, however I think this might have had something to do with their hard drives breaking, cause it happened to all of the 3 iPods.

Is this possible? And now that the new 80GB iPod (which I have) features gapless playback, would that fix this problem?

So would lossless be worth the space (factoring in it may have caused damage to my previous ipods), or is 192 kbps really all you need?

 

[sursuciofla]

Well I do 128k mp3...You see how much I really care. Sounds all the same to me. 192 seems to be the standard to me.

 

[Z.A.C.]

I can deal with 128 MP3's, they don't sound bad to me but I'd say there is a slight loss.
I use AAC's cause they compress more into the same size files, (I believe)

But I did hear some differece in 192 seemed considerably better than 128.

Maybe it depends on what you are listening to, style of music, production of the album, etc.

 

[lifeafter2am]

I can deal with 128 MP3's, they don't sound bad to me but I'd say there is a slight loss.
I use AAC's cause they compress more into the same size files, (I believe)

But I did hear some differece in 192 seemed considerably better than 128.

Maybe it depends on what you are listening to, style of music, production of the album, etc.

What it depends on the most is the quality of the system you are putting it in to. In my studio I can tell a major difference in songs encoded at 128 vs 192 and higher. We mostly work with WAV's obviously, but when I encode for my iPod, I dont use lower than 192, and sometimes higher. I also have a high end system in my car and you can tell a difference in there too.

--lifeafter2am