[KozmoNau7]

A good way to determine the point of transparency of lossy encoding for yourself, is to ABX test on your own equipment, with files you've converted yourself. A good way to do this is with Foobar2000's ABX plugin, which lets you compare back and forth and on whole tracks or short snippets if you want.

In my experience, headphones always yield the best results, and surprisingly it doesn't matter if I use the stock earbuds from my phone or a nice set of AKG over-ear headphones. It's not a matter of absolute sound quality, just the fact that you cut out room interactions and get the sound straight to your ears makes a big difference.

MP3 has some built-in flaws that no encoder can completely cover up, short sharp sounds like castanets really expose the pre-echo, harpsichord shows similar issues. It also has a tendency to make cymbals sound "washy" or "underwater", which all lossy codecs do to some degree, but MP3 is especially bad.

Still, at 192kbps I have to really focus to hear it in normal listening, but it's more or less always there even at 320kbps in problem tracks, if I really focus in on short sections. It just sounds subtly "off". But I hope no one actually listens to music like that, in short repeated sub-1 second sections to narrow in on a specific castanet snap ;-)

As for more modern codecs like Opus and AAC, it's generally completely transparent for me at 128kbps, and that's with a bit of playing it safe, I'm pretty sure I could drop Opus down to 96kbps. Modern codecs are really impressive.

I keep my music library in FLAC, both because I know it's CD quality and because it's an archive. I want to be able to convert the tracks to any new codec that may come along, if I need to.

My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap :-)

[em500]

> I keep my music library in FLAC, both because I know it's CD quality and because it's an archive. I want to be able to convert the tracks to any new codec that may come along, if I need to.

I understand the sentiment. But the reality is, if the re-encoding is not likely going to happen within the next 10 years, your hearing will probably have deteriorated so much that you probably won't hear the difference anymore anyway (assuming you can hear a difference today, which is a big assumption).

[smichel17]

I got the start of my music collection from my parents (as .wav's, or rather, I helped rip the cds). I intend to do the same. So it's not just one but several decades we're talking about.

[motohagiography]

> It also has a tendency to make cymbals sound "washy" or "underwater", which all lossy codecs do to some degree, but MP3 is especially bad.

Thank you for confirming this! I record my analog synths that I play through headphones off an old mixing board, however when it comes through my ADC->iPad, stuff seems to get lost and I spend time adjusting the mix and ADSR for recording. Have been seriously mulling a reel to reel, but many others have had the same idea and the market prices are astronomical.

[KozmoNau7]

It's not inherent to straight uncompressed PCM audio, it's strictly an artifact of lossy compression. A reel-to-reel tape deck will be noisier and extremely cumbersome compared to proper digital recording.

Recording should be done at 96kHz 24-bit or higher, to not have to meticulously optimize recording levels and to allow room for mixing and effects, without raising the noise floor to noticable levels.

Convert to normal CD quality as the last step before distribution.

[layoutIfNeeded]

>My library is 280GB currently, and storage is cheap

That’s around ¾ the amount of music I carry on my iPhone :-)

[KozmoNau7]

I don't collect music just to collect it, I only keep artists and albums around that I really like, or if it's something special and hard to find. Everything else is on YouTube or whatever for the rare occasion I need to listen to Metallica or AC/DC or something.

[layoutIfNeeded]

Yeah, same for me! I only keep albums that I really like. And from those I only keep that few thousand on my phone that I deem “essential”.