Music Compression

[armandkhambatta]

Ive been seeing a lot of new audio formats off late and I wanted to know what major difference there really is between them.
Explain this; Apple lossless and,say, WMA lossless are both formats that seek to keep the audio quality of the disc contents unchanged; yet on the same song, WMA encodes at 300-400kbps, while Apple does it at 700-800kbps.Thus the bitrate, as well as the size of the music folder ,is totally different, and both supposedly have the same output.
Also, lossless formats use upto 10 times the space on my ipod, and frankly, after 320 kbps I cant tell the difference. And I dont see any major major lax in quality at 256kbps mp3. Is there a real audibile difference.Does it only tell on mega expensive audio equipment? Also,correct me if I'm wrong, I think after a point the human ear can't tell the difference. Is there any such "swarchzchild radius" for the ears beyond which the nuinces make no difference? I'm puzzled.

[Fritz]

oh, and: I can easily hear it on my JBL Control 5's(only300each), even with an old reciever and an integrated computer sound card.

[Fritz]

A couple interesting things you can try:
First, you might be able to hear changes if you have very accurate speakers turned up a lot.
Also you should try reversing the polarity of one channel and mixing it with the other channel, I think this is how voice reduction is sometimes done because vocals are almost always centered between left and right. The result is a mono signal where you can only hear things that were not centered, but with compressed files, you can hear ...wierd things--try it.

[noddin0ff]

Ive been seeing a lot of new audio formats off late and I wanted to know what major difference there really is between them....

déja vu?