> I think this race towards owning as much stuff as possible is driving western society to destruction.
I agree except it is only through ownership that you are free of others' (e.g. your rentors') control. When that control is used almost universally to expand the financial relationship between rentor and rentee, or to enrich the rentor at the further expense of the rentee, it is imperative for individuals to remove themselves from its influence.
Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.
There are good and bad subscription services, it has always been like that.
>Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.
Do you listen with your eyes? A spectrogram can't tell you what your ears will hear.
The only way to know, is to do a proper double blind ABX test on files you encode yourself from known original files. You can use Foobar2000 with the ABX Comparator plugin for this purpose. I think you'll be surprised at just how low you can take the bitrate even on an ancient format like MP3, before you can tell a difference.
I agree except it is only through ownership that you are free of others' (e.g. your rentors') control. When that control is used almost universally to expand the financial relationship between rentor and rentee, or to enrich the rentor at the further expense of the rentee, it is imperative for individuals to remove themselves from its influence.
Also, if you load 320kbps MP3 and 14.4khz WAV into a spectral analyzer you will find differences, which will be detectable to anyone with the right critical listening skills.