Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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> Having taste makes you require more dollars to get the same level of satisfaction

I have carefully avoided trying excessively high quality things because once I've experienced something truly luxury then it becomes an ongoing expense to keep up that level of experience. The irritating part is that before I was perfectly happy in my ignorance of something better being available out there, but aftewards I feel like I'm "ruined" because I'm constantly disappointed and frustrated if I can't keep up the level of quality.

I have had headphones ruined for me because I tried the Sennheiser HD 800 once and then there was no going back to cheap plastic cans.

I've had monitors ruined for me a long time ago because I got Dell PremierColor 4K display.

Food as per my previous post. I've had such great food in so many fantastic restaurants that I'm upset with mere "pub food" that used to make me perfectly happy before. I am now incapable of eating certain fast food unless literally starving to death.

Etc...

Thankfully, I'm still okay for wine. I believe it comes in two or is it three colours? Whatever, I'm still happy with a random $10 bottle. My boss for comparison now has to buy the $250 bottles at company dinners. Ouch.

>I have had headphones ruined for me because I tried the Sennheiser HD 800 once and then there was no going back to cheap plastic cans.

It's not really the same as being unable to appreciate anything but a glass of Petrus or DRC. For a one time payment of $1k the HD800s will easily serve you for the rest of your life. If you prefer fine food and wine that $1k might not even get you a single meal.

I've had the HD 800 for about ten years, but it's starting to fall apart. To put things into perspective, I've had to replace both the cable and the padding twice, and each of those spare parts cost the same as a typical pair of "decent" headphones. Then I had to get a dedicated headphone amp PCI-e card, because it turned out that "regular" soundcards are not good enough.

I've easily spent over $2K so far. When I replace it, I'll have difficulty resisting the temptation to upgrade to the "next level". Planar magnetic or planar electrostatic headphones are the next logical step. Those start at $2K and go up from there.

I'll be lucky to escape this with less than $10K spent...

For me it was music. Till this day I cannot stand MP3 audio, and can detect when it's played on the radio, because of one bored afternoon in 2002 experimenting with MP3 and CD audio quality.

Sure, you _could_ rip an MP3 with near-undetectable quality loss for most types of music (The Wall, yes. The Downward Spiral, no). But nobody does that, as apparently it was not the default on anything back then and today Youtube and Spotify and all others still use those horrible quality settings as people have gotten used to them.

I’m curious, have you done an ABX test recently? My wife swore up and down she could hear the difference too. An ABX test with expensive headphones in a quiet room across a few different genres and bitrates showed that she couldn’t.

I tested only with the headphones that I had at the time, with the types of music that I listen to. I'd actually be interested in trying again, but with my normal headphones (typical Sony over-ear), not something expensive.

For reference, I listen to mostly Pantera, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, early Nine Inch Nails, Led Zep. It's not too diverse, but there is a short period from about 1990 to 2005 where music recorded in that period does not transfer to MP3 well. Maybe because the digital artifacts that we cannot hear in the published recordings are amplified in the compressed MP3 - but after that period producers began to optimize their recordings to account for that.

How old were the MP3 files you were using? Early mp3 encoders were generally Not Very Good.

They were brand new, ripped myself and compared with the CD still in the drawer. Using different bitrates and other settings, whatever was documented for the CLI tools at the time. I was using some Red Hat variant, but this was before Fedora. In 2002 I believe.

Though I'm sure that the encoders got better, really, the quality of the common rip has not.

Yeah, the out-of-box encoders included with Linux distros in 2002 would likely not have been great. If you were lucky you might have gotten an early version of LAME. If you do the experiment again, it may be worth using either the likes of Spotify/Apple Music (okay, strictly speaking neither are mp3, but same general idea, and they'll put effort into encoding properly), or using a decent modern encoder (LAME, the Apple one, etc).

Yes, now that you mention it, it was in fact LAME. I'll try again sometime with abcde in its default settings.

By the way, I once made a GUI for abcde called abcdefg (A Better CD Encoder For Gnome) but never did anything with it - it was really just an exercise to learn the GTK libraries because Zim Wiki used them too. But I now regret not publishing it just because it had such a cool name.

Makes me glad to be a simple person with simple tastes - sometimes I taste a more expensive wine, and it's good, but then I ask myself "is this really worth paying 3x or 10x more than for a regular glass of wine?", and most of the time the answer I give myself is no...

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