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I went to school to be an audio engineer and audiophiles amuse me. While it is true that expensive speakers and FLAC and so on will make music sound better than it would on the cheapest stuff- we mix so it will sound decent on the cheapest stuff. We never mixed with you guys in mind. When I was doing it, we were keeping mp3 players in mind. These days, most music is mixed with streaming in mind.
My professor told us to take our mix out to our cars and drive around somewhere noisy and listen to it and then go and remix it after that based on what you heard.
Sure, there are exceptions. Not very many of them. Because companies want to make money from albums and they know most of the people listening to the music aren't going to be listening to lossless audio on $4000 speakers.
I find it especially amusing because, until the digital era, all the greatest music that was recorded since multitrack recording started in the 1960s was on bits of magnetic tape held together with bits of scotch tape and the engineer prayed that nothing would go wrong when it they were making the final two-track mix. It is highly unlikely that "what will this sound like on super expensive equipment?" was given consideration.
Audiophiles are flat earthers for music.
They really obsessed over something and need to feel superior about it. They're harmless at least.
Unless of course you're googling about speakers for a TV, in which case you're about to get some terrible advice from some middle aged dude who's really pissed about soundbars existing.
As a middle aged man who bought a sound bar once, planned obsolescence sucks.
What's the equivalent of people that buy ultra high-end stuff to trick themselves into getting high and orgasming from "binaural beats"?
soundbars existing is annoying, why would someone spend more for something with fewer wires?
Christopher Nolan certainly does not mix his movies for the cheap stuff...
I think people get a little silly about it when you get above maybe 192kbps, but there 1000% is a huge difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a 192kbps mp3, and I would take a blind test every day of the week to prove it.
128kbps mp3s sound like aural garbage. It's like when you go to a wedding, and you can tell that the DJ just downloaded "Pachelbel's Canon" from KaZaa because when played over the PA, it sounds like someone farting into a microphone.
Are we talking about movies or music? Movies are mixed to sound good in theatres and then they are later remixed to sound good on at least cheap surround systems, but, again, they aren't generally doing it thinking about the people who spent $4000 on their system. And, again, the chief concern outside of the theater these days is audio for streaming.
I am not denying that a $4000 home audio system will sound better than a $100 one just by virtue of at least some of the components not being cheap Chinese crap, but I doubt even Christopher Nolan is ensuring his Blu-ray releases (or whatever) sound best on expensive audiophile systems. There's a point of diminishing returns here.
Aside from the Christopher Nolan thing, I was referring to music.
What I am saying is there's a point of diminishing returns. That point might be a 192kbps mp3, but there is still a point where 99% of people or more will not know the difference and there's no money in marketing to that 1% who will.
I honestly agree with you quite a bit here. I would say the cutoff for what most people stop noticing is after 160kbps though. There's a huge quality difference between 128 and 160, and 192's a nice standard to preserve the subtleties without eating up space for no reason, but I don't think most people can tell the difference after 160.
Yeah for sure... I would say even maybe 160kpbs for most music.
But I've encountered people (and in the past, blog posts/news articles etc) about how the human ear can't discern the difference between 128kbps mp3 and a lossless format, and that's just absurd.
When I was in a band, we had our albums professionally recorded, mixed, and mastered, but we had a pretty decent set-up in the studio. After every practice, I'd do some rough mixing and burn us each a CD to listen to in our own cars and email MP3s for those of us who used devices. We'd take that and decide what needed to be fuller, what was getting lost, etc. and change any arrangement as necessary. Of course we might do more layers in the album itself than we could do live (well, without sampling machines going constantly and whatnot), but we still wanted to make sure we had at least the basics of where we thought people would listen to us.
Some editions are edited with audiophiles in mind but youre correct, most aren't and since about 30ish years the mixing is made to be less requiring.