What are you listening to at the moment?

[Ace]

Very nice Webwit. I'm currently using a pair of standard Apple headphones (the kind that come with the iPhone 5 and onwards), so I didn't expect to do that great.

To be honest, I didn't know that MP3 "has a bad rep". I thought the knowledge of MP3's shortcomings was guarded by Cowon and Walkman users, as well as the rest of the world's audiophiles. I had no idea there are so many streaming services that are offering lossless tracks.

However, I'm still curious about Soundcloud's rate of compression. I'd be surprised if they were using poor rates.

[cinnamoncider]

[davkol]

You might find this interesting:
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2 ... io-quality

Triple choice, terrible pick of samples, fixed-length replay, unknown encoding config,…

Much better: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

In regards to formats: well-encoded lossy compression (e.g., 192+ kb/s MP3 from post-2009/2011 LAME) is basically transparent to human hearing, unless you have golden ears and/or are specifically looking for artifacts. Thus, there's no point in using lossless stuff for the purpose of listening; mp3s can be played by nearly any device, and over 30 albums in 320kb/s MP3 can fit on an almost free 4GB storage card, while it's only about 1/3 of that in case of the usual FLAC. Mastering has much higher impact anyway.

[Ace]

Remember this?

[derzemel]

To not fear the bass.
Let the bass flow through you, around you, inside you.
The bass will make you weak, the bass will make you strong.

[Muirium]

Mm, mm. Really like this one. Those flutes!

[fifted]

Speaker blowout from Dimlite:

ETA:

Re: ABX test

Much better: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

Loved that this player has default keybindings for Dvorak layout. Thanks for sharing! (I probably can't tell, by the way -- I suspect my bottleneck is in my $15 Koss KSC75 headphones, but they sound so good for the price that I'm inclined not to swap them out!)

[photekq]

[Redmaus]

JUST HEARD THIS ITS AMAZING

[derzemel]

JUST HEARD THIS ITS AMAZING

Spoiler:

I have been listening to the Near Dark album a lot in past few months. It's the type of music that fills me up with energy. Here is the full album

And to keep it in the same retroelectro/80's/retrosynth style of music:

[davkol]

Cough, the best two songs on the album, cough…

[derzemel]

From the best soundtrack ever:

[SL89]

@hj-s SICK

@webwit, that sounds about right, the audiophile circlejerk is SO strong. but 320 and 128 are different enough to differentiate.

also this is what im waking up to:

[derzemel]

also this is what im waking up to:

Interesting, didn't really listened to these guys carefully until now as I always dismissed them as a generic post-punk/hardcore band.

Now, some Ambient-electro-industrial-IDM-glitch, produced by a friend of mine (good concentration music):

http://raumklangmusic.bandcamp.com/album/polymath

[SL89]

Ah I'm just in to work. Thanks for the hookup, it may be my morning music.

[mr_a500]

James Horner died in a plane crash yesterday.

He did some great films - Star Trek II, Brainstorm, Aliens, Titanic, Apollo 13.
(though Troy was a half-assed effort and he might have been slipping a bit)

It's sad that most of the good composers are dead. There are only a couple left. Most movies these days have absolute crap music. There are "music supervisors" who just slot in the latest hit songs and a few bits of simplistic plunky piano bits. It's like the iTunes of movie music.

[Muirium]

Constant soundtrack is what annoys me. It is to movie viewing what learning wheels are to bike riding. Gimme silence. Let me read the actors themselves.

A recent film with a nice, low key, soundtrack is Ex Machina. I love that film. Almost perfect in so many ways. The occasional music becomes less so at the climax, which annoys me a bit, but they are using the Cimbalom, so I'll forgive that. The industrial stuff is in perfect keeping with the Google / machine rule narrative when it strikes.

[mr_a500]

I say there should be no singing in the soundtrack - ever! (...unless it's a movie about singing) If I want to hear people singing, I'll go to a musical. But I don't, so I won't.

Rap (or "Hip Hop") in a movie just makes me want to vomit in anger.

[Muirium]

Yeah, I generally agree. No singing in the Ex Machina soundtrack, for instance. Although some movies I like do use popular songs very well. Goodfellas is a superb example. The Sopranos learned a lot from that film. And Tarantino knows how to do it right as well.

Trouble is most movies are sloppy, and get matters of taste badly wrong. Sturgeon's Law and all. But technically, things have really improved. So the directing and acting are what seem to have gotten worse, where technology is no more assistance now than it was decades ago.

[Muirium]

Meanwhile, to answer the eternal question:

[Muirium]

And now…

Why wasn't maths class like this?

[derzemel]

And now…

Spoiler:

Why wasn't maths class like this?

Smoked hashish once in Tunisia... everything looked like this afterwards

....

anyway, 4 years later, new song and video from Disturbed:

[sth]

maybe the first rapper i really listened to as a youthen sth

[Muirium]

A Southern youth? Mercy!

[SL89]

Listen to the bass:

Edit: Also the bongo solo

[SL89]

Good morning:

I'm not sure if the solo is Frank or Kennealy but its sick either way.

[mr_a500]

And now…

Why wasn't maths class like this?

Damn you. I couldn't stop thinking about that dumb song. Throughout the day, "123..4.5...678..9.10...1112!"

[Tyrosh22]

League of Legends NA LCS.

[fifted]

Pretty new track from 20syl:

Thanks Mu for the number count; here's an article I found on it that shed some light on its mysterious origins: http://daddytypes.com/2008/03/19/recove ... _count.php

[davkol]

I'm exploring music outside my comfort zone…