Originally Posted by edwardc77

Unfortunately good turntables can be expensive....what's your budget ?

Originally Posted by edwardc77

mmh I understand,well in any case it would be best to hear the system before you purchase it...shop around and see if you can find that system in a "physical store" and ask if you can listen to it.

Originally Posted by Freebase Dali

Hmmm...

Ok.

First off, no matter the bitrate of their MP3s or otherwise, if they're listening on laptop speakers, they'll still be highly limited by the range of frequencies those speakers can produce. If listening solely via that method, bitrate is not really going to matter much... so I guess the rest of this will be assuming that the listener has listening equipment that can accurately translate what's going on in their audio.

1. You're assuming that everyone buying MP3s are buying 128 kbps versions. This would be a colossal mistake. 320 kbps is generally the bitrate any digital download is now offering for sale. While there is a measure of compression involved in any MP3 compression, I challenge you to offer up a 320 kbps vs. WAV format of the same material in a blind test and see if anyone can tell the difference. If you can, I challenge you to be challenged to the same test where you don't know the outcome.
I also challenge you to coming up with a self-test that compares a flac version of an original WAV file compared to a 320 kbps MP3 file and tell the difference over multiple iterations. Please let us know how that works out for you.

2. While you may be correct in some cases, you are not correct in all. And until you can provide evidence that you've heard every remastered album ever existing, I will assume your statement is based on the bad experience you've perceived yourself to have, while completely disregarding any positive experiences you've chosen to forget. Not to mention all the experiences you've never had.

3. While I agree that consumer-level listening equipment tends to be over-hyped, sonically inflated garbage, I think it's more than fallacious to assume that because your listening goals are your own, that everyone else's should be the same. Some folks just like to hear their music extra bassy and extra screechy. If that wasn't the case, every listening solution out there would present a dead flat response. The job as audio engineers is not to put them down for their preferences. The job is to make the audio they listen to translate well no matter what their preferences.

Part 2:

I don't know why you're recommending flash memory cards. There is a such thing as hard drives. This is completely capable of storing audio files no matter what format or bitrate, and probably has more capacity than a flash card. The memory card recommendation you made is completely asinine.

Secondly, you mention a certain pair of headphones as situationally optimum. If you knew anything about stereo field and true reproduction of such, you wouldn't be recommending headphones at all. But since you're obviously talking about a portable solution, I will let this slide, even though your solution is largely dictated by your own preference, since if you were the authoritative individual on the subject, I'd probably have read your publication, or you would have posted it.

Finally, you mention a specific player to obtain optimal results for this portable solution, but I've yet to see any evidence provided by you that one player can translate a standard audio file better than the next. When you're ready with that dissertation, let me know.

Part 3:

You basically provided an arbitrary, expensive solution to listening to music on laptop speakers. If anyone follows your advice, they will notice an increase in sound quality via the mere fact that they are no longer listening to the music on laptop speakers. I could probably achieve the same effect, unnoticable by them to any degree, simply offering a headphone solution plugged straight into their laptop.
What you THINK you're doing, is incorrect.
And I THINK that if you're unwilling to acknowledge that fact, then you should keep your absurd and unnecessary directives to yourself, so you don't have people making unnecessary purchases just to adhere to your perspective of how audio should be enjoyed.

Thanks, and have a nice day.

Originally Posted by Ponzio

Noob here, coming from an audiophile background. To be honest I haven't read the whole thread in great detail but the gist seems to be whether MP3 files are up to h-fi standards? Is that correct?

From an audio quality perspective in a nutshell a SACD disc track is better than a standard CD, a CD track is better than a WAV file, a WAV file is better than a FLAC file and a FLAC file is better than a MP3 file.

Having said that, a high-bit 320kb CBR MP3 file copied from a standard CD, using good conversion software like EAC (Exact Audio Copy) would be indistinguishable from the original to 96% of listeners ... provided it's being fed to high-end headphones/receiver with a good DAC on a laptop/low quality sound card/audio I/O on a MB, on a PC. The best option is a good MB (Asus/Gigabyte, etc.) audio I/O outputted to a receiver/amp/AVR (Yamaha/Denon/Marantz, etc.) with a built-in DAC processor chip (Burr-Brown, Sabre 32).

Personally I'm using my audio I/O port out from a PC with a Asus Sabretooth X58 MotherBoard fed to a Yamaha RX-V2700 AVR (Burr-Brown DAC chip built-in) to a pair of KEF LS50 speaker's in my office or I stream my files (both MP3 & FLAC) thru a DNLA server to a Oppo BDP-105 (Sabre 32 DAC chip) in my living room and to date not one person has been able to distinguish the difference between a high-bit MP3 file and a standard CD track. I had a fellow audiophile who stated that it was impossible that a MP3 file would be as good as the CD track. So we set up a blind listening test with the same track. Guess what? He couldn't tell the difference till I pointed out certain passages in the song where the CD was ever so slightly more detailed than the MP3 file and it's even harder to detect when you use FLAC or WAV files.

So to summarize a high-bit MP3 file can sound just as good as a standard CD track to most people.

Originally Posted by Freebase Dali

I agree with the emphasized most of all.

The concept that most "audiophiles" tend to ignore is the concept of diminishing returns in reference to audio reproduction. Most often, the very best everything they put into their systems is either hampered by reality, or misconstrued by placebo effect, if you will. "Better" is often a highly subjective term in that world, and I would use nothing more than an average consensus as evidence to suggest a listening medium upon which an average listener would find preferable.