True. There's something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.
It's a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
Yeah they do, although CBR performs noticeably worse than VBR with Lame MP3. As I mentioned elsewhere, MP3 @ V0 or V1 VBR sounds just as good as the above. I just personally haven't used MP3 for years because the newer codecs are more efficient.
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it's just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to "CD quality" FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I'm personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
I see what you're getting at, but that's a flawed analogy.
Firstly, public roads are paid for collectively through taxes but everyone can benefit from them, not just large multinational corporations. That's not currently how user data is used in the context we are discussing, since the users themselves do not benefit materially from the data they produce.
A more accurate use of a road analogy would be to say that, at the moment, the users build the roads themselves (generate their data), and the private companies say to the users "Thanks very much for building the roads, we're now going to charge anyone who wants to use them and keep 100%. Oh, and you have no ownership rights, so we can restrict access to these roads as we see fit."
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn't the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why, there's a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while "hi-res" audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren't capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say "the placebo effect is a helluva drug."
Aye, there's the rub. If you can't prove it was discriminatory then you're SOL.
Seriously. Can't we just ignore this cherub-faced oik? His personal views on anything are utterly irrelevant.
I thought this whole thought exercise was based on the assumption that Gore became president in 2000 instead of Bush?
On the assumption that you weren't being sarcastic, no, don't be just like USA please.
The US economy is buoyed by a >$20 trillion dollar debt, which accounts for just over 30% of all global debt. For the past decade, that debt has even outgrown the US' GDP.
And that's not even getting into a discussion of how the US actually spends all that money.