According to whom? Your hearing?
Than that is your entirely your assumption based on nothing to go on and your prerogative. If you can't hear the difference, then that's great for you. I wouldn't waste disk space on a limited-capacity iPod and MBP if that wasn't my experience. On the Shure E4Cs the difference between 228 and 320 is clear to me on a wide range of source material... which is why I never buy downloads... I hate the term audiophile; your poor choice of words, not mine.
Ah,
Blue, that's why I enjoy sparring with you...its impossible to lose when you battle the dictionary.
Let's settle this with some education, shall we?
There is a physiologic limit to hearing. It is not disputed. The human ear can hear tones across a spectrum from 20Hz to 20,000Hz. Generally sounds lower than 20Hz are vibrations are
felt as opposed to "heard", by mechanoreceptors called Pacinian Corpuscles not the acoustic apparatus. Frequencies higher than 20K can be heard by very few people and virtually no one can hear above 25KHz. Thus, the tonal range of human hearing is quite finite.
How hearing actually works is quite remarkable. The vibrations from the environment are transmitted via the tympanic membrane (Ear Drum) through three very small bones to the cochlea. The cochlea is a spiral shaped apparatus in the middle ear that has three fluid filled compartments, the middle of which contains special "hairs" that react to specific vibrations (directly correlating with vibratory frequencies). These "hairs" convert the sound we hear into neuronal impulses that are transmitted to the auditory centers of the brain. Interestingly, these auditory neurons were found to send impulses at the frequency that the "hairs" were vibrating.
A very interesting experiment revealed that if electrodes were placed on these neurons, it was possible to "play" the sounds that the organism was hearing through a speaker...! I mention all this to lay the groundwork for another very interesting experiment, this one in the realm of music theory and cognition. It was possible to play a song that was purposely missing particular elements of cord to a model organism and, using the electrode to speaker setup, be able to hear the completed cords being interpreted by the organism (which had no education in music theory). The concept can be approximated visually by any of a number of
visual phantoms where your "mind fills in the blanks".
Essentially you can train yourself to unconciously fill in the blanks with sounds. Its a form of auditory hallucination and is entirely psychological. Now we could wax all philosophical at this point and say, for example, that according to Immanuel Kant we don't necessarily know that our surroundings exist except for the notion that we think that they exist and others agree with us (Thought experiment: How do you define the color red? Is the color red that I see the same color red that you see?)...etc. That's running so far from the topic that it changes the discussion to you having to convince us that you hear something.
From a practical standpoint about audio compression ("lossy" formats and such), the strongest argument for higher resolution (bitrate) audio is the fact that compression algorithms can leave behind audio artifacts such as hisses, crackles, ringing, or warbling. The "bit-rate" of a audio file is the number of bits that are taken for each sample. Almost all CD music (which I will use at the standard for this response) is sampled at 44.1K samples per second. At 128 kbps you are getting 3 bits of data for each sample of sound (which lasts ~0.00002 seconds).
If you remember back to the threshold of human hearing being 20-25K cycles per second (hertz) and those frequencies being directly inputted to the brain via hairs reacting to those frequencies: you can see that getting 2x the number of samples per-second than you can oscillate per second means you will be filtering out audio information even at the "very low" bit rate of 128 kbps. Now I guess your argument could be that things sound better at 320 kbps than 192, but you would be arguing then that you could you hear a lower percentage of the actual transmitted sounds...but you could hear that lower percentage better. Right?
The logic is similar to video frames per second: You can watch a movie showing 60 fps, but you will only see 25 of those frames every second due to the physiology of your eye. Beyond that, it is ENTIRELY subjective because it is all psychological. Basically, its an argument to justify liking things of "apparently higher value". That's great if you like it, but saying its better is
quite subjective.
On a final note: Regarding my "poor choice of words", whether or not you like the term "audiophile" is your perogative, but you demonstrate being an audiophile :
American Heritage 2006: A person having an ardent interest in stereo or high-fidelity sound reproduction.
or
Random House 2006:
a person who is especially interested in high-fidelity sound reproduction.
However, if you feel that being a audiophile has negative connotations, perhaps you shouldn't feel guilty for engaging in music snobbery (or stop being a music snob if you feel so sorely about it).
i'm kinda a noob
