FLAC VS MP3? Well, here's my "take it with a grain of salt" answer.

iShad · December 10, 2015

Sigh, this is what happens when people treat very subjective things as "facts" and try to push them onto others, etc.

Why I steer clear of this community, despite preferring hi-fi listening equipment, FLAC music, etc.

What are you blabbering on about? No one here is forcing anyone to use FLAC or mp3 or whatever format they deemed "superior" based on their own or others' experience; placebo or not. It's just the usual discussion of source and gear, agree or disagree, there's nothing odd about that on an AUDIO subsection. It's more refreshing than seeing "gaming headphones under 100" recommendation threads every few hours with the same usual suggestions.

Also... brah, so much for steering clear when you're the one that necroed the thread.

SSL · December 11, 2015

Sigh, this is what happens when people treat very subjective things as "facts" and try to push them onto others, etc.

Oh please. No one is holding you at gun-point. If you want to load up multi-teribyte hard drives with more FLAC than you could listen to in a lifetime, that's your perogative. There mere existance of a discussion should have no bearing on how you enjoy your music. Framing that as some kind of alarmist "pushing ideas on others" notion is just silly.

WangKe · December 11, 2015

Not that I want to further necro this thread, but I have to say that based on how MP3 has been improved overtime, one could argue that the psychological effects of placebo towards something that was, on paper or word of mouth, considered superior. In practice, I believe you can bring as much math and science as you want, but even the right calculations can lead to other factors that weren't taken into account. And even if you do, who's to say one is truly superior over the other? At best, all I can say is that FLAC is negligibly better than MP3 at 320kbps or even as low as 192kbps for the sake of one feeling like there's not much to be missed out, which is entirely subjective and obviously not concrete. I'll stick to 320kbps MP3s because I want more music in my DAP. Some of you guys tend to forget that things like HDD's aren't the only form of storage for music out there.

No one's forcing one another on which format to use, albeit there are some in other threads that justify FLAC and even things like 16 VS 24 bit, but at the end of the day, I think we also forgot that the improvements on file-formats are in our favor, and those who keep forgetting it are rather persistent with their beliefs.