Nothing new here, every studio used to have a pair of Horrortones (Auratone) speakers, crappy little boxes with small whizzer cone full range drivers. They tended to sound like crappy car or boom box systems, and most all pop music producers run the mix thru them to make sure it sounds decent on the low end systems. Substitute ear buds for Auratones...

But, many who seem to be turning their noses up at 256kbs VBR AAC files, I wonder how many of you have actually experienced a double blind listening opportunity with this and the original wav files? I suspect you might find it illuminating, but not in the way you might expect.

Jeff wrote:

But, many who seem to be turning their noses up at 256kbs VBR AAC files, I wonder how many of you have actually experienced a double blind listening opportunity with this and the original wav files? I suspect you might find it illuminating, but not in the way you might expect.

I may not ear the difference on my BL3's... But what's the plus from compressed AAC from iTunes when I can get :
- 320kbps aac (vs 256kbps aac on iTunes) for less €
- Lossless (ALAC or FLAC or even WAV) for approximately the same price, frequently less
when I buy at Qobuz? 

And who knows what the future will bring me : if a new improved codec comes, if I want to convert my iTunes AAC to this new codec, it will be lossy>>lossy=VERY poor sounding tracks. On the contrary, with a lossless track, I can re-convert it to whatever new compressed file without getting poor quality. Remember when iTunes made people RE-BUY their tracks just to improve from sh** 128 aac to cr** 26 aac? Second possibility : when I will buy BL5's, will I still struggle to hear differences on some tracks? I want to buy something futureproof, so I buy lossless.

With lossless you have the choice to buy only once (and with qobuz, if you want to go Studio Masters, a quality upgrade will just cost you the difference with the previously bought album), and recode your purchased music how you want. Not with iTunes.

Apple is good at marketing, but there are best (Apple-compatible) solutions out of their stores, just open your eyes (ears?). I'm eager to see their iTV, where they will find a way to make people buy TV shows that they used to view for free... 😐

Oh I agree completely about Apple being great at marketing and making people think they are the 2nd coming. I'm not an Apple fan boy by any stretch, I have some Apple products, and generally find iTunes an OK music server s/w, but am not in love with them.

I can also agree that given a choice, even if only for "I wanna have all the bits" uncompressessed/unaltered is great. But sonically I doubt 256kbs VBR AAC is audible to most people.

One man's ears, but: