i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps. same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems, or my laptop's shitty 3.5mm stereo jack and a $30 usb dac.
once you get into stuff like $1K iems or dacs it's mostly bullshit (aside from brand/aesthetics, and things unrelated to audio fidelity). same with anyone claiming they can hear a difference between FLAC and Opus 160; trust me, you can't.
> i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps.
That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
> same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems
When luxury earbuds became a fad, every major company pulled their high quality cheap ones off the market, and marked everything up. It caused me to panic because I loved a cheap ($15) Sony line that I would usually have to replace yearly, and when I went to replace them, they were gone. Every cheap good earbud was gone. I managed to find a case of the Sonys on Ebay shipped from Mexico, and have only gone through half the case since. I can compare, so I know how good (not $1K good, but good) they were. Most people can't.
> That's not the question, everyone can. The question is whether you can tell the difference between a 320kb/s, or even a 192kb/s mp3 and a flac. People might say they can, but they'll fail when you test them.
you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who can tell a 320 apart from flac, except on some specially-crafted killer samples. a well-encoded 192 is often near transparent, but much more dependent on the genre / sample. pre-opus, 256 VBR was my go-to.
> that I would usually have to replace yearly
this is a foreign concept to me; i usually buy stuff that's designed to last, and dont mind paying for it.
With all products there are diminishing returns and there are connoisseurs who thrive on pushing past those and straight into veblen land.
Wine is similar. Most can tell a $5 bottle from a $20 bottle but $100 or $1000 is unlikely to be as discernible. Even the alleged experts fail blind tests. Some can even confuse some reds & whites in true blind tests.
Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.
But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.
i would not call myself an audiophile, per se, but i can hear the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and Opus 96kbps. same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems, or my laptop's shitty 3.5mm stereo jack and a $30 usb dac.
once you get into stuff like $1K iems or dacs it's mostly bullshit (aside from brand/aesthetics, and things unrelated to audio fidelity). same with anyone claiming they can hear a difference between FLAC and Opus 160; trust me, you can't.