Entries tagged as audiophiles

Over the weekend, I had a chance to read some articles about really high-priced mp3 players. We're talking about $600-$800 players. So it basically led to the title of this entry--is there really a market for these kinds of players?

Obviously the manufacturers of these units think so. These kinds of high-ticket players have been around for about five years now. There are no publicly available sales figures for these kinds of units so it's a bit hard to gauge their success. So to give myself an idea for how owners of such units feel about their investments, I went snooping around a bit and some of their reactions was a bit of an eye-opener.

No, lossless compression has nothing to do with liposuction as someone asked me just recently. Obviously this person was just being cheeky. Lossless compression is a process quite similar to what people who enjoy listening to digital music do when they encode their favorite songs into compressed format.

The difference lies in how much data is kept intact. When you encode a song from a compact disc into mp3 or Windows Media Audio (WMA) or AAC, about 90% of all the data from the original track is thrown away in order to compress the file down to a fraction of the original size. This is lossy compression.

Lossless compression on the other hand, compresses the original file size down to only about 60-75%. Quite bulky still as compared to the significantly pared down mp3's or WMA's. But nothing is thrown away. Yes, no data is lost. This is lossless compression. And if you'd like to store your original music in smaller files but without losing any of the original data, then this is the format for you.

Recently an entertainment article asked the question "has the day of the audiophile come to an end?" I didn't even need to read the article. The answer is a big... "no".

Look at the numbers in music download statistics, whether legal or otherwise, and you see undisputed proof of how popular digital music is. These files are compressed to a fraction of the original file size and easily stored in personal music players, cellular phones or whatever gadget the user prefers. I refer to these as "castrated" files for lack of a better term, because simply put, it's not all there. But obviously, millions of digital music aficionados love their music castrated. Are they the new audiophiles?