In article , dave
wrote:

there certainly isn't an audible difference on headphones or with the
built-in speakers of a device.

I would not put headphones in the same category as built-in speakers.

they're in the same category in that neither is particularly good and
they aren't used in situations where perfect sound matters, such as
jogging, walking or riding on a train or airplane.

Perhaps the average schmuck in a test can't tell, maybe I can't tell,
but in 10 years I will still have clean copies of my music, and my
hearing, which is fine. If you do MP3 at 256k or 320k why not just
record the PCM as a .wav? What is the advantage of using MPEG
compression? H264 aac? Or Apple aac?

the reason to use compressed audio is because it's significantly
smaller than uncompressed audio, with no audible difference.

typically, one can get around 5-10x as much music in the same space or
have the same amount of music with plenty of room to spare for other
stuff, such as apps, photos, videos and whatever else you might want.

why waste the space on something that can't be heard?

and aac is not apple's. it's an industry standard that's better than
mp3.

"Space" is cheap, hearing is not.

space is cheap for a desktop computer. it's not that cheap for a mobile
device in your pocket which has a hard upper limit (typically 32-64 gig
internal), and for devices that accept cards, it becomes a nightmare
swapping them and keeping track of which one has what on it.

Perceptual coding is audible to lots
of people who listen for a living. These include musicians and audio
engineers.

no it isn't.

people *think* they can hear a difference but in countless double-blind
tests, they consistently do no better than chance. they are *guessing*
at which is which.

there's a famous test where audiophiles, who claim they can hear subtle
differences, could not tell the difference between monster cable and
ordinary coat hangers (and they didn't even know that a coat hanger was
being used).

FLAC is free lossless audio codec.

as is alac, apple's open source lossless compression.

however, both are a complete waste of space on a mobile device where
one typically listens to music on headphones or the internal speakers
and in environments where any differences if they did exist, would not
matter and could not be heard. nobody is going to notice artifacts
while jogging or listening on a train.

you *might* have a point if it was hooked to a high end audio system,
but it isn't (and even then, you couldn't tell a difference - see above
for double-blind tests).

Compression and lossy
compression are 2 different things.

nobody said otherwise.

however, there's no *audible* difference.

this has been proven time and time again.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/f...dd000110.shtml

Apple is where I was first exposed to aac. Sorry if I upset you.

you didn't upset me. a lot of people mistakenly think aac is an apple
proprietary codec and it is not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 and
MPEG-4 specifications. Part of the AAC known as High Efficiency
Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) which is part of MPEG-4 Audio is also
adopted into digital radio standards like DAB+ and Digital Radio
Mondiale, as well as mobile television standards DVB-H and ATSC-M/H.
....
AAC is the default or standard audio format for YouTube, iPhone,
iPod, iPad, Nintendo DSi, Nintendo 3DS, iTunes, DivX Plus Web Player
and PlayStation 3. It is supported on PlayStation Vita, Wii (with the
Photo Channel 1.1 update installed), Sony Walkman MP3 series and
later, Sony Ericsson; Nokia, Android, BlackBerry, and webOS-based
mobile phones, with the use of a converter. AAC also continues to
enjoy increasing adoption by manufacturers of in-dash car audio
systems.

And you
have obviously never listened to a pair of Grados so I don't know what
to think about your opinions regarding listening to hifi.

this isn't about grados versus cheap $2 headphones included with a
device. obviously there would be a difference between those.

this is about mp3/aac versus uncompressed, a difference which is
inaudible.

and this isn't a matter of my opinion or anyone elses opinion. once
again, in double-blind tests, people consistently *can't* tell which is
which. set up your own double-blind test and you'll get the same
results everyone else who has done so. they do no better than chance.