sandt38

This is some funny shit. Like a comment posted at YT, I don't know if she'll get any turkeys to come, but I almost did!!!

Really, you can't make the first statement, then follow it up with the second statement. The quality of the test and methodology has everything to do with the results. If the test and/or methodology are invalid, so are the results. From what he briefly mentioned of his test methodology, I don't see where any real meaningful conclusions could be drawn. A story for another day.....but I would disagree. I agree to a certain extent. I would have used better methods for the test, but his conclusions still were the same. My point was, no matter how poor the gear there still is a discernible difference. I knew the amplifier class differences would be noted by someone. But a decent full range AB sounds better to my ears than a full range class D. Even my class AB on my Brahma sounded more lively than the class D i replaced it with for a brief time.

Apparently you didn't read the whole post. This was based on MP3 compression, so who cares about .wma at 1106? So you conclude that you notice differences in some instruments and that there is a loss of dynamics? You notice it doesn't sound as clear? You notice sparkling highs are not there? OK, so you agree that the emotion or harmonics as i refer to them in this post are gone, and that it doesn't sound the same. So you are saying that this is correct, yet you are still arguing? You say it's not worth it if you don't have good equipment? I guess you missed the part where I stated just that. i also mention that if you use compressed formats that lower end components will be a better choice for you. So why argue when you just stated that in your test, which you went into with a bias opposing my conclusions, the results were the same and you drew the same conclusions I did about equipment choices based on the quality of the source material? Should I have summarized this in a couple sentences? OK here goes for you... If you use MP3 formats like many do, don't buy high end gear. It will simply sound better on lower end gear. Why, because MP3s lose sound quality which is more apparent on high end systems than it is on low end systems. Better?

I do expect a deposit in my paypal account, of course

Uncompressed audio as stored on an audio-CD has a bit rate of 1,411.2 kbit/s, so the bitrates 128, 160, 192 and 320 kbit/s represent compression ratios of approximately 11:1, 9:1, 7:1 and 4.4:1 respectively. So you are hearing less than 1/4 of the information at 320. Still doubt that it is audible?

Are you using any pre or post work out supps for aid in recovery? I rest more between heavy sets to allow for better recovery. I have found that stretching my between set breaks to aid in recovery. I basically get 6 days recovery time and have no issue with that amount of downtime. I also feel like I could go sooner, but just based on principle I do not. I too try to keep it at 1 hour or less for my workouts. I found that the trumass immediately following the workout coupled with the shakes right before bed and immediately upon waking has helped. Also, a cinnamon and honey brew right after the shakes has helped. I make a cup of hot water and steep a teaspoon of cinnamon in it for 1/2 hour before bed. Then stir in local unpasteurized honey (pasteurization or adding the honey to hot water kills the benefits of it). Drink 1/2 cup before bed and put the other 1/2 cup in the fridge for the morning and drink it cold right after my shake. Cinnamon cleanses the body real well, allowing for better filtering and quicker recovery times. It will take a couple weeks, but it works. You will also drop a few pounds.

1 warm up, 2 to 12, and 3 to failure. My understanding has been that the 3 reps that matter most are the last 3 to failure, which is why i target 3-6 on my failure reps. On that premise, I have read about unloading and wish I had the people to help me with it. The goal is to find your failure weight first, then to unload the total weight during the exercise. For example, say my 5 rep failure weight was 200 pounds on the bench, do my 200 to failure, then have X amount of weight removed while I am parked (for the bench I am at my chest, for curls I am at the top of my curl, for military i am parked at my shoulder, etc.) from both sides at the same time. The reduction in that weight should allow me to continue with that set for 3-5 reps to failure, then remove more weight again for 3-5 reps to failure. According to my research, this keeps the muscle parked within that mass/strength region we actually target in our routine. You can do 1 or 2 sets this way, and achieve the same results as 3-6 sets. It also requires less recovery time, less time in the gym per workout, and the ability to lift less frequently.

Well then... remember when I said I needed to be careful about my abdomen? Guess who blew up their surgical site this weekend? Oddly it was not a muscular tear, the skin tore open about 1/2 an inch. Apparently there was some type of abscess. I have to go see a specialist this morning about it. I have been on antibiotics for a couple days and just keeping it covered. I had to take a week off working out when i had my port removed, and sadly it looks like I may have to take more time off. I am going to ask the doc if i can keep up with my upper body work, but core work and leg work will likely be off the slate for a while. Bummer

Most metal and death metal isn't mastered properly? Due to lower budgeting they tend to be less manipulated then mainstream music like Michael Jackson. IMO it is far better raw then it is overly manipulated. I prefer live recordings and older school recordings where "mastering" isn't total manipulation. See helotaxi's commentary above, which i agree with completely. I might suggest looking into Alice In Chains Unplugged in NY. Great staging, imaging, and because there is no real manipulation, it is very clean and realistic. Other discs worth looking into would be Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon (not a remastered version either), Norah Jones Come Away With Me You can be skeptical all you want. If you do some research yourself you can see how compression works yourself. There is very little to be skeptical about, it is just a fact. As i suggested in the article, if you have average gear, you might not hear much at all. If you have nice gear in a nice install, it will be apparent.

Do you think i should keep up the 1-3-2 on large muscle and compounds and 4-1 on small muscle and isolations, or should I vary that? My thoughts (on compounds) were possibly eliminate the 2 sets super heavy to failure and maybe go with 1 warm up and 4 sets of 20 @ ~75-80% of failure weight. On small muscle and isolation lifts was to go to 1 warm up and 3 sets of 20@ 75-80% of failure. Both of these done with quick movement (yes, I do watch form) and short breaks... similar to a circuit training. When I was young, soooooo many years ago, I played football and for that time I was huge, at 6'1" 220. It was muscle too, not fat, on a big frame. I was never able to cut I could only bulk. But back in those days it was a common understanding that you lifted heavy low rep, skinny sets with long breaks (2-3 minutes between sets) and lots of rest (muscle groups being hit only once a week, 6 days recovery). Protein out the ying-tang. I bet i ate 3 cans of JIF a week. The mindset for cutting was high reps, high sets, skinny on the breaks (1 minute max) and doing 3 days a week full body workout and drink LOTS of milk for the whey. So a big concern for me is the set/rep and weight as well as the downtime. I have been looking for why I couldn't get a good cut, and found several sites, but everyone seems to vary. I have also found the vast majority of BB forums have members who feel you have to be a professional BB or you simply aren't doing it right. Like you can't just want to be in shape, you HAVE to compete and you HAVE to do it their way. Annoying.

I think you bring up some very valid points. My wife likes Enrique Iglesias, she thinks his voice is so great. I told her it was engineered, you can hear it. Of course, she get's bent. But you are right. Even lossless it sounds like ass. 1000kbps? Sorry, this is not a real level of MP3. Some mp3 generators may claim high bit rates, but that is greatly exaggerated. Non-standard bit rates up to 640 kbit/s can be achieved with the LAME encoder and the freeformat option, although few MP3 players can play those files. According to the ISO standard, decoders are only required to be able to decode streams up to 320 kbit/s I am not usually burning CDs, I use HDDs, but yes I can burn them properly. I use only high quality optical media (Taiyo Yuden), and i use only quality ripping and burning programs on a solid Lite-On burner. I am an avid burner (I have almost 2000 DVDs) and I also design and print all my own labels and covers. People here who know me will tel you, I don't do anything 1/2 way. Anyways, as i mentioned, I placed both a 320MP3 and a .wav on the same media, same song, and played it blind for my wife... read above. I listen to everything just about. From old school blues, to classical, to R&B, rock, metal, death metal, alternative, you name it. I can say though, outside of TOOL, APC and maybe Norah Jones, I have no music that I personally listen to from this decade.

Ironic you would specify psychoacoustics... that is exactly what MP3 plays on.

I did a blind test with my wife in my car. I made 2 copies of the same track, same media, 1 in 44.1khz .wav and the other in 320VBR MP3. She perceived a difference between the .wav and MP3, but she couldn't really pinpoint the difference. I didn't offer any thoughts on the matter at first, just asked her which sounded better and why. Her preference was for the .wav file. I asked her after she made her observation if she just felt more emotion in one rather than the other. She replied that the .wav just felt more "alive". My wife is no audiophile by any means, but she does have a lot of nice gear around her. She even has a killer system in her vehicle, and of course my home system and car systems are no slouches either, so she knows what sounds good. I agree that most of today's music is bloated during mastering. I hate those "remasters" that sound like ass. If I want it louder, I will turn up my stereo, I don't need some studio engineer to bloat the sound and call it better. But alas, I listen to older music, so it isn't really an issue for me. Aside from TOOL or APC I don't listen any music from this decade unless someone else wants to hear it. IMO, not only is the music tainted by poor recording technique and mastering, but it just plain sucks bawls.

Then your ears are Godlike. Human perception is simply not that keen.

It has been debated rather hotly for years, and now it has become pretty much accepted that MP3 and sound quality do not mix. But why is it? Why do some people hear so much loss in their systems and others don’t? Are my old ears really better then someone 30 years my junior? Someone who still has a large amount of their hearing range left, while mine has deteriorated over the years should be able to hear these losses better then I! I started with home tower speakers in the back seat of my old Delta88 back in the days when we had no real systems, and we still had post mounted tape decks and 8-tracks. Then times changed, and we started putting in tape decks with trunk mounted CD cartridge changers with $60 coaxials and $50 amplifiers and maybe a bazooka tube subwoofer for those of us with “discriminating” tastes. Eventually I wanted to just go boom and spent money on several thousand watts and some monster excursion subs. Then we learned about XBL2 and how these high output subwoofers could be very accurate. Finally I finished my journey with $1200 component speakers and $1000 amplifiers, all filled in at the bottom with very capable sound quality based subs dialed way back. My journey started out as just wanting to get some sounds, to wanting to get loud, to wanting to sound good. Now that I have found a really nice sound quality install, my music seemed to really lack. I have been using MP3 for years, but eventually I started looking for higher bit-rate MP3s, and now I am at a level where only .flac or .wav or other lossless files suit my tastes. I have listened very critically to how the advancement of definition brought about by higher quality speakers and amplification, and source caused my MP3 listening experience, no matter the bit-rate to become bland, and I really felt more of the emotion brought out in music by using lossless formats in my car. But then I asked myself, “Why does my lossless not only sound better, but seem to bring about a more emotional experience?” So I started to learn about how lossy formats work, and how they can stick so much information in such a small space. Let’s discuss music reproduction first, so we can get an understanding of what we are listening to. All we are listening to is really a reproduction of an instrument or a voice, and to simplify this writing I will include the vocals as the instrument as well. Musical reproduction is usually characterized as fundamentals, harmonics (and as I will discuss below, low fundamentals can be included in this grouping), and finally overblow, breath, or air. The very heart of these sounds are called fundamentals. The fundamentals, are what I call meat and potatoes or music, are the essentials of the reproduction. They are what the instrument actually delivers, directly. But then we have carry over, which are termed harmonics. These are not as much a base of the delivery of the instrument, as they are an extension of it. You might also see the lower frequency carry overs dubbed as a “low fundamental”, as they are more apparent in low frequencies, where they tend to be less noticed in higher pitches. I like to call this the emotion of the music. Finally you have overblow, which is usually only noticed in wind instruments and vocals. I personally like to classify this as emotion as well, and therefore will include them as a group when I say emotion or harmonics. While it takes a trained ear to listen for image and stage presentation, younger people with a naturally better range can hear losses in the “emotional” frequencies or the harmonics of the sound easier than us old fogies. So why is it that those of us who are older tend to hear these losses better then the young folks? I would dare to venture that it is simply because we tend to have more money invested in our component systems (and when I say system, I mean everything from source material, source equipment, sound processing, amplifiers, speakers, and installation techniques) with a higher definition then the younger folks who are running a simple inexpensive component system install. This is not to say our systems are better for all purposes, as I will discuss in this writing. In fact, for the vast majority of folks, a lower definition system makes more sense, as many are more concerned with the ease of storage media and they tend to use MP3 or other lossy formats. When we have these high definition systems, many of the weaknesses inherent in lossy encoding really jump out glaringly. So, sandt38, what is it that we really listen to? Well, the human brain perceives and retains everything it sees, hears, thinks, etc. It is actually an amazing organ that captures far more then we are able to drag out of it. We simply do not have all the doorways opened up in the brain, so we forget, or don’t notice many of the things that we actually perceive. The mind actually only directly notices the loudest things we hear. So while there may be several instruments may be reproducing the same frequency at the same time, we only perceive the loudest of this information we actually hear. We ignore the other lower volumes of the same frequencies, but we still hear it. Our mind processes this information but determines that it is not that important so it will file it away in that subconscious part of the brain we do not actually consciously notice. So let’s look at how these MP3 encoders work. In order to save space, an MP3 encoder usually selects certain information to discard, and other information to retain. The most common method of MP3 encoding functions similarly to how we perceive the music. Just like our brain, it ignores the lower volumes of the same frequencies, and all it retains it the higher volume material at that frequency. We fill in the rest subconsciously. Please be aware that many encoders eliminate only certain lower frequencies altogether, but they variably retain the higher volume information up to a certain point. For example, the encoder may retain ½ of the information at a certain frequency. But it will retain the higher volumes at a greater rate. While these are not the only methods of encoding MP3s, they are the most common. So you see, by considering the way the encoder works we can get an idea of what happens to the music we listen to. The fundamentals tend to get retained, while the harmonics tend to be lost. So we lose the emotion, which is why MP3s sound so bland on systems with very high quality components. Now, there are other things to consider when it comes to MP3 compression. Bit-rates, and not only the rate, but variable or constant bit-rates, are the biggest consideration here. Very quickly, the higher the listed bit-rate, the more information that is saved, and therefore the better the quality. But to be frank, these don’t alter what occurs with the music. Yes, these higher bitrates do sound much better, but there is still something that is lost. So what can we gather about speaker selection from our source material? Well, we can help decide whether it is really worth it for us to spend $1000 on components, or if a $200 set will suffice. I am not trying to say that if you spend a grand on a set of components it will automatically be a better set then a $500 set. My mention of pricing basically assumes a basic cost/quality ratio. Clearly a $200 set of Sony Xplod coaxial speakers is nowhere near as good as a $180 Image Dynamics CTX65CS component set. So take these generalizations to assume a similar cost/quality ratio. The high dollar sets that you see out there are far more true to source then the lower priced units. This is a good thing if the source material is pristine. But if your source is not that great, these more accurate speakers will start to sound like crap. It isn’t the speakers that suck, it is the material you are putting through it. But when we get down into the lower dollar sets, these weaknesses are not quite so apparent. I do want to point out this article, no matter how poorly the whole test was conducted the results still prove my point. The guy used some of the most awful source and speaker combinations. Why you would ask people to listen for nuances using a $200 receiver and a $200 subwoofer and satellite set using 5 3.5 inch full range units is beyond me. Sheer idiocy. But the end results are very significant, the differences between MP3s and lossless were detected by all listeners in the test. All this considered, please keep a few other things in mind. I cannot stress the importance the rest of your signal chain has on the final product. The higher end speakers will also show off weaknesses in them as well. Be prepared to make some really high dollar signal chain investments when you decide to buy these high end components. I also think it should be noted that while amplifiers of the same class may sound different while sitting still with little ambient noise, but once we get moving these nuances really disappear. I do feel that differing class amplifiers can have a different overall sound, and can be distinguished while moving.

In this case: Audibly, No. Measurably, on a meter...Maybe. How much is hard to predict, but it won't be a large increase by any stretch of the imagination. It's not about the absolute value of the wattage increase. It's about the amount of the increase relative to the starting point, and relative to the behavior of the subwoofers both thermally and mechanically. As Bangin' pointed out above, a 2kw increase from 500w is much different than a 2kw increase from 7kw. If you say it'll maybe gain on the meter, then I have to say it'll maybe have a audible difference. You can't give a 100% correct answer cause you have no properly tested the setup on hand. Everybody lately has been saying you don't ever need extra power. 2500 watts is as good as 3500, so why does all the people buy bigger instead of smaller? For no gain? I think not. Like I said above you, 3db is a theoretical audible difference. But 1.1 will not really be noticed. Your ears are not as sensitive as a meter, i assure you.

Like imp said above, not really. This is based on the nominal power gains overall, but a theoretical 1.1db gain is inaudible. 3db is considered "audible" and for 3db you need to roughly double the power, this is assuming no other changes are made, aside from providing ample power to the amps to aid in their increased demand.

Ha! No, that is the family lap table. Sometimes it winds up there, but it is usually next to one of the couches.

I'm just givin you shit, bro. I think the new Stangs look sweet... in my rearview mirror.

No worries. I also own a porn forum \ And the wife flips about 120 gb of porn?? How does this make sense? J I guess because it wasn't on my CPU... and she doesn't know about the porn section of the forum

No worries. I also own a porn forum

Mustangs don't go fast Sorry, I had to.

At 193: None more recent. I'll get the wife to take some shots in a few weeks. I just took a week off to recuperate, so I am down a bit, but in a few weeks i will be back up to snuff. Take care of yourself. I was invincible... until proven otherwise. Thanks for the kind words though.

Much-ass Grass-ass... but you are Sir, I am sandt

DOT slicks at the track, stock rear with Hotchkiss trailing arms. My gearing was too low (390s) to top out at the track. I ran out of gear. I have 373s in it now and expect better ETs and slower traps.