Here are the facts as I have read them:
- Most humans cannot hear the difference beyond ~192Kbps (a full, scientific study would be great)
- CD audio is encoded at 1378.125Kbps
Okay, so the latter makes it sound like there is plenty of data available, so you can rip at 256Kbps or 320Kbps without interpolating (let alone downloading a song from an e-store which has access to the original sources at even higher than CD fidelity).
However, if most people cannot detect any difference between something sampled at 192Kbps and the same thing sampled at 224Kbps, then why do I keep seeing so many people ripping things at 256Kbps and 320Kbps? (I’m not talking about “audiophiles” who say that they can hear dog-whistles and can detect the difference between 320Kbps and 321Kbps; I mean most, normal people.) Yes, 128Kbps is noticeably different than 192Kbps, but I find that beyond 192Kbps, the speakers/earphones play a much bigger role in the sound than the bitrate.
Whenever I rip one of my CDs, I usually just rip it at 192Kbps (CBR). (Personally speaking, I consider downloading on the other hand to be different. I would download the highest bitrate that the music store offers since it would be my “master” copy, the next closest thing to the CD, and then down-sample it to 192Kbps if I need to save space—or maybe even regardless.)
Is there any tangible reason to bother going higher?
Best Answer
Is there a reason? No, not really.
However, I've had a few CDs with a few songs in the industrial genre (a remix by Nine Inch Nails) which have very rapid, rhythmic sounds overlaid by very chaotic sounds like an electric guitar. There is one particular section of a song which features this type of music. Unless the encoder is set to a very high bitrate the music will skip beats or stretch them out, both of which are jarring to the listener. This may be due more to the sample rate being to low rather than the encoding bitrate, but I found that it would only work well on very high lossy or lossless encoding. That said, this particular song is fairly unusual, and most people would probably consider the song indistinguishable from noise.
The outro to this song beginning shortly after 5:10 is a good indication of the type of sound which codecs seem to handle poorly. It's not exactly what I'm thinking of, but I can't remember the name of the other song. Even this YouTube video seems off to my ears, though, and it's a copy of the studio album.