What @Mike said, precisely. Only averages are shown here. Exceptionally good ears are completely disregarded, as are exceptionally bad ears. > even dogs won't be able to hear the difference between 192kbps VBR MP3 tracks and the original CD Well, I did. I admit it would have taken me more than the 15 seconds of listening to distingish the 320kbps from the flac, but 192kps was significantly unpleasant to listen to. But I had the two top-quality clips right within mere seconds of listening. Without a shred of doubt. I'm absolutely convinced that if you did an actual test to see how much more accurate some people would classify this than others, you'd find that there are a lot of better-than-dogs persons. Regardless, this _was_ very enlightening, because I would have guessed everybody would spot the quality differences without a hitch. Wow.

@Romulo Did you consider that the poll was out of general interest? Perhaps the poll shows that people clearly prefer a specific version - regardless of technical quality. Perhaps on average, people would think a 128kpbs is superior to a 256kpbs? Who knows. Of course, that is not what we expect. The test, however, is _clearly_ not designed to identify individuals with perfect ears. It is therefore a poll, not a test.

@Roman I can only venture to guess that audio equipment is actually better able to smooth out the aliasing and samplefrequency distortions at 44.1kHz than at 192kHz... I wouldn't be surprised that driving the conus with sample 'steps' at 192kHz actually doesn't work out that nicely (forcing the exact curve from hardware that just doesn't allow for that?) Anyways, you could follow the link to the research quoted

I think this audio quality experience poll is nice: Well, except that it presupposes electrical music sources and (re)mastered originals, so it is rather hard (for me) to tell which artefacts were (deliberately) introduced in the original studio, and which ones were added/amplified by compression I spent less than 15 seconds listening to the five different versions of the tracks and there were two clear winners (that I could listen to). I'm absolutely convinced I have picked the ones with the least compression (e.g. raw PCM and 320kps, allthough it is entirely possible the 'second pick' is in fact flac -- I didn't spend so much time vetting it) Listened with puny Phillips in-ear buds and crappy work PC SoundMAX integrated audio... :)

What @Sigivald said: > Good for you. Not my problem as a user, however. I don't care about making your life easier (nothing personal!); I care about mine, and "magical browser-based just works once you give a browser your master super-password" is BAD +1 (mamy times)

Shades of gray 48 GB is for people who haven't heard of algorithms 12 GB is for people who know how to avoid writing algorithms some of the time 8 GB is for people who know how _not_ to write algorithms 4 GB is for people who know how to _use_ algorithms (you write them on paper, not memory). 2 GB is for marketing people who write required specs that they know would not work smoothly 32 Mb is for people who know how to write algorithms, operating systems and generally rock In case you wondered: Jeff is in a class of his own :)

> I'm so enamored of this one-two punch combo, in fact, I might even say it represents the future It has been for some time with a range of manufactures, so that is a safe bet! I mean, using the GPL sources the vendors are obligated to share it, and the community has pretty much 'forced' the issue by providing forked versions of the firmware. By now, vendors are beginning to understand.

@Rob O'Daniell: I showed up unannounced on my Moms doorstep 3 months ago (screw-driver in hand) and swapped out here OS drive for a SSD (cheap one, 30Gb). She has been thanking me ever since for making her (old) machine fly and she noted that it had become so much quieter (because the data disk is allowed to spin down most of the time). So as far as 'justifying the expense' is concerned, my Mom will not have to consider upgrading her PC for the next 2 years, while she had been fed up with it for some time before the SSD...

@Ruben: and who needs swap in a workstation? As soon as it needs swap, it ought to die! I have 8Gb of RAM and it ought to suffice, IMHO. Badly written applications can go wreck another PC if they really need to :)

> (yes, you can get by with 64 GB, but at least with my Windows installs I find that I have to think about disk space with 64 GB, whereas with 128 GB I don't have to worry -- ever. Don't make me think, man!) Which is why I run linux all the time. I have a Lucid (32 bit), Maverick beta (64 bit) and Gentoo (64bit) installation all on one raid0 set of SSDs (2x60Gb thank you very much). I have currently 25Gb dedicated for /home[1], and beyond currently allocated backup snapshots I have 56Gb free space. I mean, I had to look that up, or I wouldn't have known. That is my definition of not having to think. Besides, having free space on SSD allows for best wear leveling success in the controller. I was in shock when I found out on third attempt that Win7 _really_ requires over 10Gb *just* for WinSxS cache on a fresh install. That _does make me think_. I love Win7 for the most part, but I'm just not willing to throw away my performance / resources at that price. Of course, I have a largish NAS running opensolaris with 5 1.5Tb disks in two mirrored pools giving me all the storage I need; e.g. iscsi volumes for my virtual machines, my CD collection, pictures and more backupey stuff. [1] which is more than enough to build all of opensolaris (RIP) in, develop several ASP.Net MVC2 applications in monodevelop and do other important stuff :)