Which player is the best in sound quality ?

[The DarkSide]

Originally Posted by dfkt

It's easy to find out what differences various encoder qualities give: http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx

Uh-oh!!! ABX Comparator ahoy!!!

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by The DarkSide

Uh-oh!!! ABX Comparator ahoy!!!

And someone besides Enigmatic brought it up, too! lol

[JK98]

I have a feeling he might be in India. 6,000 Rs= $130 US.

I guess some might call it ambiance, while others will call it frequencies over 14,000 hz, which many people can't hear that well anyway unless they are at a very high volume. All this talk that human hearing is 20-20,000hz is deceptive.

[Enigmatic]

Originally Posted by JK98

I guess some might call it ambiance, while others will call it frequencies over 14,000 hz, which many people can't hear that well anyway unless they are at a very high volume.

A bit rate of 192 kbps is rather high for compression artefacts to be detectable with typical music by most listeners, assuming, of course, it is from a good encoder.

All this talk that human hearing is 20-20,000hz is deceptive.

Why? For lossy encoders, Brandenburg seems to think that 16 kHz is enough.

http://www.telos-systems.com/techtal...rg_mp3_aac.pdf, pages 9 and 10:

However, contrary to popular belief, the author is not aware of any scientific experiment which showed beyond doubt that there is any listener (trained or not) able to detect the difference between a (complex) musical signal with content up to 20 kHz and the same signal, but bandlimited to around 16 kHz. To make it clear, there are some hints to the fact that there are listeners with such capabilities, but the full scientific proof has not yet been given. As a corollary to this (for a lot of people unexpected) theorem, it is a good encoding strategy to limit the frequency response of an MP3 or AAC encoder to 16 kHz (or below if necessary).

[saratoga]

Usually if you can't quite figure out whats wrong with an encoded file, its because theres nothing wrong and you're getting fooled by placebo. Every single time I've passed a blind test I've been able to say exactly what was wrong. Usually when I thought something was off but wasn't sure, I ended up failing the test.

[Lagoo56]

In this day and age there is no DAP with the best sound quality,but its easy to find the worst ones lol

[TexasRockbox]

There's quality and then there's capability. The perceived sound quality can be affected (in part) by poor impedance matching, sensitivity of ear device and output current. The trick is to get a good match between player and ear device.

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by TexasRockbox

There's quality and then there's capability. The perceived sound quality can be affected (in part) by poor impedance matching, sensitivity of ear device and output current. The trick is to get a good match between player and ear device.

I get what you're saying, but its worth remembering that headphones are not (and should not) be impedance matched. You want much lower impedance on the device then the headphones, which is why low impedance headphones tend to be harder to drive.