Quality.

[Tweek]

Now I know many of you download music, and yet a lot of you still buy CDs.

How many of you care about the quality of your music?

My internet is pretty slow even by shitty Australian standards so I generally just go for whatever quality I can get and if I have options available to me I'll usually go for the lower bitrate so I can get the music quicker.

That said, I would probably download everything in lossless if I had decent speeds and no cap.

[Ziggy St. Valentine]

I buy an album if I really like it and would like to fully apprieciate it through my stereo instead of my computer (or if it's a local Aus band I usually will to support Aus metal). If I can score the album on vinyl for a decent price, then even better, because we all know vinyl is the king of quality sound. That being said, I'll download an album in whatever quality I can find before buying it 90% of the time.

[Chocoholic]

As long as the song doesn't sound like it has obviously been recorded from off of someone's computer or stereo with a $10 microphone I'm fine. With bands like Pink Floyd great quality is nice though. You can really appreciate all the different sounds within a song.

Sometimes I actually prefer lower quality stuff. Mainly with older bands/singers. I don't really want my Billie Holiday or Beatles sounding like P. Diddy produced their albums. It's nice to hear some album scratches and slight imperfections.

[Ziggy St. Valentine]

Chocoholic has a point, sometimes low-fi production can really help the atmosphere of an album. It also depends on the genre, like I wouldn't want to listen to a Darkthrone album with top-notched production, but a band like Opeth really works with the higher quality because of the atmosphere they put across.

[Soul]

I buy an album if I really like it and would like to fully apprieciate it through my stereo instead of my computer (or if it's a local Aus band I usually will to support Aus metal). If I can score the album on vinyl for a decent price, then even better, because we all know vinyl is the king of quality sound. That being said, I'll download an album in whatever quality I can find before buying it 90% of the time.

That is all based on personal preference.

I'm pretty picky when it comes to downloaded music quality, though not to the point that I download lossless music. I'm so picky that I actually took time to learn about v0 and other shit like that so I could get an invite to what.cd to get all music in v0 quality. But I do also buy cd's whenever I have cash or go to a concert since they're pretty cheap to just buy directly from the artist.

[Tweek]

Oh yeah, I totally agree. A lot of the punk shit I listen to would not be nearly as good if it wasn't a lo-fi recording.

[Chocoholic]

Yeah. That's exactly what I mean. The simpler the music, the simpler I like the production. But if I'm going to be hearing 5 different tempo changes within a song, random sounds in the background, 4 different guitars, and a bunch of other stuff I'm going to want it to be a fairly nice quality.

Plus there's just some genres/bands that shouldn't be touched by "restoration" or a bunch of studio gimmicks. The Ramones would not be the same, as would many punk bands. Neither would Louis Armstrong.

[hollywood_maggot]

I rarely find it that easy to hear any real difference between downloads and CDs. If I had better speakers or headphones, there would probably be a difference, but since I used standard iPod earphones, and old stereo...I don't notice much.

Unless it's really shitty quality, but that's fairly rare.

[Laurence]

Unless it's appalling quality I don't notice. Generally the music should be good enough to transcend minute differences in quality.

[opn4bzns]

I went through a phase of downloading lossless files, but then I realised I was wasting time and effort since I couldn't tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and a FLAC.

[exetra]

If I can score the album on vinyl for a decent price, then even better, because we all know vinyl is the king of quality sound.

This is where I rant about how all vinyl does is colour the sound of the recording in a certain way unless the entire recording process was analogue and if it's a recent release it almost certainly wasn't. Even then you still get the same noticable warmth on a CD with the upside of almost double the dynamic range. Not that it matters anymore because all metal is mastered to -8dB RMS these days anyway which, in comparison to the standard -15dB RMS of a decade or so ago, is obnoxiously, stupidly loud.

[Heksen]

Obviously, I like high quality production. But I'm a fan of extreme/underground metal, so most of the time I listen to lo-fi recordings. In fact my ears are 'trained' for it and when my iPod is on shuffle and a Children of Bodom song begins, I somewhat freak out because it's obnoxiously louder than Burzum or Darkthrone.

[Idioteque]

It seems like there are two seperate discussions here.

Regarding bit-rate, I try for the highest possible, which usually ends up being around 320 kbps. Otherwise I find the music fairly unlistenable. When I rip CDs to my computer I do it in Windows lossless since my Zune supports it.

As for recording quality, I love lo-fi. In fact, I'd take an album sounding like Slanted and Enchanted or Confusion is Sex over any highly produced and slick album.

I absolutely cannot stand any album made to compete in the so-called "loudness" wars. I cannot listen to Californication by the 'Chili Peppers because of how badly mixed and distorted it is.

[Desssert]

I have a firefox addon that takes youtube videos and turns them into mp3's. I go for the highest quality, and it's usually CD quality from youtube. (You know, people just add a song to a slideshow or something.)

That being said, I love listening to an old Who or Zeppelin album in my record player, even if it's shitty quality.

[ThatCoolGuy1]

High Definition quality-like.

[hollywood_maggot]

Well, I'm at odds here. While I like the occasional low-fi stuff, I really do enjoy a polished production. Not polished in the sense that depth is lost and it's just glossy, but so that it's crisper and fuller.

[Heksen]

Genre matters. I like my oldschool death metal, black metal, (crossover) thrash and traditional doom metal low-fi. But I prefer high quality for techdeath, melodeath, black ambient and viking metal.

[Jeftris]

I can barely tell the difference, and I'm too lazy to buy CD's. I usually only ever download the what-seems-to-be-quicker download.

[Raxo]

I download at the highest kbps available because it all downloads super fast to me but I don't really care. I don't download lossless because I just can't tell the difference.

Also I only buy CDs if I really really like the artist because I don't have much money.

[BmphP]

I need good quality sounding stuff. Illegal downloads are usually (9.9999/10 times) good quality.

[The_Solipsist]

I usually download loseless so I have control over the file, but anything over 256 is fine with me.

[PineappleHead]

Most of the time you can hear a difference. MOST of the time. So if I do download anything I try to download the highest quality possible. Also, if we're going to talk about quality, isn't it odd how some albums can only be fully appreciated through headphones, and others through an actual stereo?

[Casalen]

Your entire audio chain matters. Most people will get picky on file quality and load it on an MP3 player with the cheapest headphones they can get. Most, not all. I want it to sound good, but I'm not too picky because I'm listening to the musician's efforts, not the digital encoding. At higher bitrates you start to get extremely diminishing returns, I opt for more rather than bigger files.

[exetra]

You really only start noticing the compression artifacts at 192 and even then it isn't that bad until 128.

I actually kind of enjoy the smokey character of 96Kbit mp3s (myspace format) in electronic music. The artifacts that get injected into whitenoise-based sounds add a lot of depth to the mix overall.

[opn4bzns]

In about 10 years people on forums will talk about how they exclusively listen to 96kbps rips because the sound is so rich and imperfect.

[Sieda]

Usually, anything under 192kbps really bothers me... and I'll only listen to it that way if I absolutely have no other option.

It's not as noticeable at low volume levels, but when you start cranking your stereo up (like I do when I'm alone) I find that sometimes even things under 320kbps can sound incredibly limited.

[Momanmomananam]

It actually depends on the genre for me. I use heavy-bass Skull Candy headphones and they give great quality sound. That being said, with a genre like Classic Rock, I don't mind the song being a bit less then perfect when it comes to quality. However, when I listen to metal and the like, I have an absolute requirement to hear the double-kick that's in the song. It makes the listening experience so much better.

[Pieman]

Quality only ever bothers me when the volumes are screwed up, but that's about it. Might change when I decide to get good quality headphones so I can actually tell the difference between FLACs and MP3s.

[timbot]

It seems like there are two seperate discussions here.

Regarding bit-rate, I try for the highest possible, which usually ends up being around 320 kbps. Otherwise I find the music fairly unlistenable. When I rip CDs to my computer I do it in Windows lossless since my Zune supports it.

As for recording quality, I love lo-fi. In fact, I'd take an album sounding like Slanted and Enchanted or Confusion is Sex over any highly produced and slick album.

I absolutely cannot stand any album made to compete in the so-called "loudness" wars. I cannot listen to Californication by the 'Chili Peppers because of how badly mixed and distorted it is.

I'm glad you brought this up because it was bugging me. I like lo-fi music, but I wouldn't listen to Slanted and Enchanted on 96kbps.
However, I haven't downloaded anything illicitly since college. Back then the rates most of you are talking about weren't available. (Well, I can't say that too authoritatively, but they certainly weren't common) The only downloading I do now is from eMusic and occasionally iTunes. eMusic encodes using VBR and claims their average is 192kbps. That seems good enough to me.

[Cyan]

I always go for the highest quality, but I haven't really tested if I can hear a difference. Higher quality should be better anyway.

Right?

[RatchetSly]

When it comes to bitrate on my MP3s, I go for 128 to 196. Why? Because anything bigger than that takes up a hell of a lot more room than it should on both the computer and my PSP, and to be honest, I don't hear that much difference between 128 and 320 at the volumes I use. (I don't usually blare my stereo or headphones.)

As for the quality of the recordings, I'm going to agree with most of the folks in this thread; if it's simple music, or old music, lo-fi is the best idea for it. More complex music needs more quality, so one can hear all the layers. I've only heard one or two artists pull of doing multi-layered music in lo-fi well, and few who've done simple music in hi-fi without sounding out of place.

[rockitmarty]

I dl music mp3s and then buy vinyl...no more cds for me. so 90s

[Profane Methane]

Lo-fi works well with hardcore, gets more of a gritty sound, though I couldn't see a band like Converge going lo-fi.

[Splas]

Until a couple weeks ago, I never thought quality made that much of a difference for me. I changed my mind when my sister got her 100 dollar audio technica headphones in the mail :)
I borrowed them to listen to an album, and I enjoyed the album much more than I usually would.
I'm with most of the other people in this thread though, it depends on the type of music. If i'm listening to punk, ska, or rock, I usually don't really care what the quality of my music is. But when I'm listening to an entire album, or something progressive, I feel like it makes a big difference for me.

[Hats of!]

I think quality is quite important. There's quite allot of lo-fi people around, but lo-fi is crap. About half a year ago I bought the Genesis 1970-75 box set (which quite hurt my wallet), now, the box set has all the tracks remixed. Not even remastered, but remixed. Each individual track have been taken care of. Each layer. Now, reading reviews of the box set there's some people complaining. They prefer the vinyl sound. Even though the vinyl (or early CD reissues) sounds awful. You can't hear the lyrics, the drums sounds like hands banging on tables, and the keyboards just sounds like beeps.

The idea of lo-fi is some kind of nostalgia. At least for some people. They remember listening to the vinyl and feel all warm inside. Of course there are some people who like lo-fi that doesn't like vinyl, these people generally just want their music to feel more unique and experimental. But at least for my kind of music, hi-fi is needed with all the sounds going on. I would kill myself having to listen to Yes's Siberian Kathru in lo-fi.