Quote Originally Posted by Symmetric
Are you guys serious?
Listen, really listen to an MP3, even at 320kbps, and the original .wav on a GOOD system or headphones.
There's a difference. Compressed files are inferior to uncompressed. You can hear it in the hi-hats. Everything above 4KHz is brittle, even with the best codecs.
I'm not the only person on this forum with good enough ears to discern the difference, am I?
With today's technology, 16-bit 44.1KHz should be considered inferior, but unfortunately the consumer standard has gone backwards in quality. In what other industry has that been the case? Your DVD player in your living room has 24-bit 192KHz D/A converters, but you're playing shitty 320kbps files for your fans? If the music is the centerpiece of the experience, treat it as such. Don't skimp on quality for the sake of convenience.
like i already said. i play wavs.

but on a large system there is NO discernable differance.. anyone that says otherwise has obviously got steve austins ears. anyway its all irrelevant anyway because no two tunes end up sounding the same. be it vinyl, wav, mps, ogg whatever.. theres always gonna be tonel differances. for eg: i tend to go for a lot of gain on my hats, gives em a crunch. some people like them clean. so theres already a differance before the file is encoded.