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Originally Posted by SteveC
Can we build anything approaching a Stradivarius or Guarneri violin?
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The only thing a Stradivarius has is a sense of mystique. They're not special.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptiveca...pick-the-strad
Your response about imaging either completely misses the point, or is a willful misinterpretation. And anyway, achieving "real imaging" would require incredible trickery to achieve in a vehicle, because you have nearly everything going against you -- a very small room, offset listening position, weird shaped cabinets, huge relativistic distances between drivers, and many sources of reflections.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveC
Suffice to say that to these experienced ears, the HK sound systems in BMWs take a considerable time to sound their best ... Given some hours, the system loses the harshness, becoming sweeter and more natural and the bass becomes a lot more musical, accurate and agile, propelling the music with a greater sense of rhythm and drive.
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Yet somehow these massive differences can't be measured.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveC
By the way, there is a major difference between compressed MP3 and lossless WAV files
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Double-blind tests have shown that LAME MP3 encodings as low as ~175 kbps VBR produce results that are nominally considered transparent. Sadly the MP3 codec has some fatal flaws that mean certain exceptionally rare artifacts can remain regardless how high the bitrate is. With AAC support pretty much universal now, nobody should be encoding as MP3 any more except for compatibility reasons.
If you are encoding for listening on the move (in your car or with portable headphones) then you don't need anything more than 128kbps AAC, which is indistinguishable to the original for all but the most careful listening. If you want uncompromising quality with a reasonable file size, 256kbps AAC is completely and utterly transparent, even under the best listening conditions possible.