Lose the pejorative 'Low Quality' for MP3 and similar

I have converted MP3 to FLAC. Then it’s no longer Low Quality lol it is what it is. This is for Audiobooks recorded from cassette.
As for Music, the brain does a lot of work in the background to create your experience. I find lossless music through quality equipment is an effortless experience. I’m not convinced what throwing data away would bring to the experience? It certainly cannot improve things.
The sporting analogy is that having the best equipment doesn’t give you an advantage but it assures your not at a disadvantage.

Thoughts, I must get out more… Chris

This is not a realistic solution to this issue .

@Malcolm_Percival’s problem is that Roon’s SUBJECTIVE coloring/labeling is not something he agrees with. He has no problem with the signal path items, just the coloring/labeling of each.

we have:

yellowishorange/green/purple/blue

  • blue == you did something to change the sound on purpose, probably because you felt it enhanced the sound
  • purple == bitperfect
  • green == not bit perfect, and not something you chose to do for enhancement, but something that was done for you and the Roon Team felt that it was for compatibility of playback and done in a way that was “good enough” for the situation at hand
  • yellow == not bit perfect and not one of the above

the problem is that we label “source” material with the above categories, and the only 2 that make sense are “lossy” or “bit perfect”. Obviously some things we are unable to detect, such as audio compression or a bitperfect encoding of a previously lossy compressed stream. We went ahead and made bitperfect purple here (flacs, alacs, wavs, aiffs, etc…) and made the rest yellow.

You might disagree with them being yellow, but as @brian pointed out, we would like the world to stop throwing away content when bandwidth/storage is so cheap. It doesn’t matter if you can’t hear the difference – we just feel it’s not a wise thing to do. It’s one of the reasons we support TIDAL, and not one of the lossy services we supported in previous iterates of Roon (at Sooloos and HP).

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i gave up long ago trying to hear objective differences between formats. I have found that on an emotional level I enjoy music more via lossless. It just engages me more, draws me in. Likewise between DACs and sources, eg pc out, phone out, Mojo, Ifi, i find the Mojo the most engaging hands down, but listening a/b always has me tripping up. Weird.

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I think the OP makes a good point even if the audiophile attack detracts from the message. I will take a well-mastered iTunes AAC album over a saturated high-res FLAC album any day. In that case the AAC is a higher quality than the FLAC. Of course the difference in quality in such a case can’t be attributed to the codec. But, I can see how the “low quality” label Roon assigns, for such a case, does not work.

It’s also true that well-mastered AAC is very hard to distinguish from lossless versions. A good example is King Crimson’s Lizard “Mastered for iTunes” compared to 40th anniversary version on DVD-A.

If the intent is to nudge the user to improve sound quality then a more targeted, and accurate, label like “low quality codec” would be better.

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I still can’t see how removing data from a music file no matter how good or bad the mastering helps. A great master is exactly that and you may as well have it lossless from now on.
If you already own Lossy files, then all you can do is enjoy them.

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First, MP3 comes in different levels of quality. I won’t argue your point in principle. If you’re convinced you’ll never under any circumstances hear the difference between lossily compressed and uncompressed music, audio snobbery is a poor motivation for going with the uncompressed. I wouldn’t claim to be able to hear the difference consistently under all conditions with all program material. But for those of us interested in the best possible quality, and in an era when mass market PC’s typically come with terabyte sized hard drives, sticking with uncompressed offers pretty good bang for the buck. $10,000 speaker cables, interconnect cables or AC line cords, not so much.

While I agree with your sentiment, compression is good as long as it isn’t lossy.

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I agree “low quality” and “high quality” can be fairly objective. “MP3 compressed at 320 MBPS” is far more descriptive, but far more verbose. Ambiguous because it is relative–by some standards Red Book CD is low quality. But no more pejorative than low quality motor fuel or video displays or anything else. If you need the quality you pay, otherwise not.

Sometimes spending a little more can get you significantly more quality, and that was my original point. 6TB drives for my NAS are running just over $200 these days. Right now I’m using two in parallel RAID. My FLAC library barely makes a dent in the space compared to video files (movies, operas, etc.) For me, using MP3 instead of FLAC would be false economy. The only disadvantage is the extent to which it is swimming upstream. Apple still doesn’t acknowledge it, most popular software like iTunes defaults to MP3, etc.

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Agreed this is a flawed methodology. You would no more expect people on the street to detect the difference between uncompressed and lossily compressed recordings than the difference between a piano tuned in Wecrkmeister II and modern equal temperament.

I haven’t played MP3 in a while, and I saw “Low quality” in my signal path. Nice to see someone already raised this issue. “Low quality” is not the correct term here; that would be “Lossy”. Apparently I’m the only voter, so I guess I’ll have to live with this utter and contemptuous mischaracterization of my MP3s.

It’s honest, I have a lot of MP3 audiobooks, yes they are low quality from an audiophile perspective, but they don’t need to be anything more and I enjoy them.

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i was having a great day until i stumbled upon this old thread, and now I am OUTRAGED

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Ditto here as well!

The zombie thread, resurrected.

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There is a nice utility called “Fakin’ The Funk?” that quickly analyzes each file and shows the real, actual and true quality of each file, no matter the container it has. I’ve experienced many surprises with bit-perfect CD rips that actually have been burnt @96 or even 64. This is by no means an expensive software (has not been upgraded for a long time) but the concept is so interesting that might even be a great idea and plus if Roon licenses the algorithm and adds that real value along the colored dot. I am sure many Roon users (count me) would be glad to easily chose which version they want to hear or keep, as many -let’s say- FLAC versions might really contain lossy, cheap data inside. Also this would break some paradigms where lower bit versions sometimes might sound a lot better than higher bit!

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You have a good point, but I don’t think “real, actual and true quality” is a thing. How would a distorted electric guitar fare? Or artificially degraded sections of some tracks for creative purposes (e.g. the muffled start of Daft Punk’s “Around the World”)? Or 8-bit synth? If I think about it, I’m not even sure “lossy” vs. “lossless” is a correct distinction. In theory, streaming MP3 without any conversions or DSP is just as lossless as streaming FLAC or WAV, since one can argue that once encoded, there’s only one correct and deterministic way to decode and no bits are lost in the process.

Completely agree, but as an x-ray tool might help a lot with duplicates, compilations, etc. That is why I mention that the highest bitrate not necessarily sounds always best as a rule; there will always be several ingredients to consider and a number normally is more meaningful than a color.

Lose the pejoritive ‘Audiophile Snobbery’ for enthusiasts and similar.

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Where is that displayed in Roon?

After reading through this zombie thread, I can see that a few things about lossy versus lossless audio file compression need to be repeated yet again.

In spite of what some people write in high audio magazines or on audiophile internet forums not all high bit rate MP3s sound worse than FLAC or WAV files. For something like 95% of the music/time one cannot hear a difference between a high bit rate MP3 and a FLAC file made from the same source file. Notice that I wrote “high bit rate MP3” since a low bit rate MP3 does indeed sound worse. For the other 5% of the music there may be some noticeable differences in the sound between a high bit rate MP3 and a FLAC file but these differences will be very slight.

I’m not saying to use MP3s instead of FLAC files, what I am saying is to listen with your own ears and to not believe the audiophile nonsense that often appears in high audio magazines or on audiophile internet forums. While I read with my eyes, I listen with my ears.

[Moderated]

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