Screens keep getting faster. Can you even tell? | CES saw the launch of several 360Hz and even 480Hz OLED monitors. Are manufacturers stuck in a questionable spec war, or are we one day going to wo…::CES saw the launch of several 360Hz and even 480Hz OLED monitors. Are manufacturers stuck in a questionable spec war, or are we one day going to wonder how we ever put up with ‘only’ 240Hz displays?
I’ve bought pretty expensive equipment, tube amplifier, many fancy headphones, optical DACs. A library full of FLAC files. I even purchased a $500 portable DAP. I’ve never been able to reliably tell a difference between FLAC and 320k MP3 files. At this point, it really doesn’t concern me anymore either, but I at least like to see my fancy tube amp light up.
I will say, though, $300 seems to be the sweet-spot for headphones for me.
I just keep FLAC around so I can transcode them to new lossy formats as they improve. And so I can transcode aggressively for my mobile when I’m streaming from home, and don’t need full transparency.
Yeah there’s a clear difference between a pair of $25 or $50 headphones and a pair that cost a few hundred. When I first got my Sony WH1000-XM3s I let my coworker try them and he said “Wow, I didn’t know music could sound this good!”. When I upgraded to the XM4s a few years later I let my brother try them and he was similarly impressed.
Beyond a few hundred and the thousand dollar range you hit diminishing returns.
diminishing returnssnake oilBlackmail – Evon. That’s the one song where I ever heard a difference, though that was ogg, dunno what bitrate I used back then but it was sufficient for everything else. Listening on youtube yep that’s mushy. The noisy goodness that kicks in at 0:30, it’s crisp as fuck on CD.
…just not the kind of thing those codecs are optimised for I’d say. Also it still sounds fine, just a bit disappointing if you ever heard the uncompressed thing. Which is also why you should never try electrostatic headphones.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Blackmail – Evon
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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