Optimal-Effective t1_jcagct9 wrote on March 15, 2023 at 1:22 PM

Reply to comment by trunks56 in Replacing my Beats Studio 3 Wireless for AKG K371 Wired. What should I expect? by trunks56

going from bluetooth to wired will be the biggest difference. but you need to make sure your audio source is high quality too. if you are listening to low quality audio files then going to wired wont help much

trunks56 OP t1_jcagt15 wrote on March 15, 2023 at 1:26 PM

I’ll primarily listen from my MacBook and phone. I also plan to rip my CDs too and convert them to FLAC

szakee t1_jcah8dv wrote on March 15, 2023 at 1:29 PM

there's minimal diff between flac and 320mp3

stu556 t1_jcko5tu wrote on March 17, 2023 at 3:07 PM

one thing to keep in mind when ripping CDs is the compression levels that the engineers used when mastering the original recordings for CD releases

for the majority of the CDs' popularity (90s - 2010s), CD mixes (and the corresponding digital releases later) tended to be mixed st very high volumes and compression levels leading to what was literally called the "Loudness War"

basically, the songs on many CD releases will peak really easily and sound pretty distorted, especially with even decent audio setups (you may have noticed this already)

a good place to check if a CD release was affected by this madtering methodology is the Loudness War database

interestingly, vinyl releases are often mastered separately, so the vinyl releases and subsequent digital rips will not have this problem, sounding totally different

(this is not true for vinyl releases that are based off of the CD releases, which happens if the vinyl release is made way after the original album release)

A good example is when you compare the vinyl releases of The White Stripes' Icky Thump (2007) with the CD releases, the difference in the peaking and distortion is very clear (and this is considering Jack White's preference for lofi recording methods already)

edit: nowadays this is not much of a problem since streaming services like spotify or apple music use volume normalization to sidestep this problem somewhat

trunks56 OP t1_jckoec8 wrote on March 17, 2023 at 3:09 PM

That’s really interesting. Never knew this was a thing. Thank you