ToKrCZ

joined 1 year ago
[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

In absolute numbers they will only be a drop compared to Chinese pirates, trust me.

[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hopefully you checked the local laws first. I have heard that in some countries there are SWAT teams ready to go to your house once you start torrenting xDDD.

[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Folks, this game is based on Unreal Engine 5. It will run even on a potato PC. That engine is impressive - any moderately capable GPU will deliver great performance in this game.

[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago

This is the way.

 
[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It is not about the price. You can buy great stuff for $500 altogether, and you can only splash $500 for one piece of a sound chain, which was not really necessary in the first place (often people buy super expensive headphones and then listen on a cheap Android phone some 128 kbps MP3s - amazing, really!). It is all about balance. Personally, I do not aim for hi-end sound equipment, but I have also heard enough of the spectrum that I know I will not be satisfied with low-end devices.

That's why I settled for mid-tier offerings, and I am happy with my setup, knowing fully well that if anything goes bad, at least I will be able to replace it without taking a loan. After all, if you want to go hi-end, then you better have the cash to stay hi-end when necessary, and I have plenty of other hobbies to splash too much on sound.

[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Don’t believe anyone trying to sell you on the idea that FLAC sounds better than an appropriately compressed (read: transparent) lossy format: Opus ~128-160kbps, MP3 ‘V0’ (~215kbps), MP3 320kbps, AAC ~150kbps.

Only partly true. If the rest of the chain is of decent quality (hi-res sound card, proper cables, quality headphones/speakers/monitors), then the difference between lossless and lossy is apparent to a trained ear. Especially the lack of dynamics and space is typical of lossy formats.

Personally, I never understood why I would want to listen to anything but lossless in the first place. I never really had to worry about storage space too much for my music to consider converting it to a lossy format. I am more of a user who likes to archive stuff; therefore, lossless and FLAC are the only future-proof ways if you want to listen to your files in the next 25 years or so.

[–] ToKrCZ@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Many people I talked to said that CD's just use mp3 codecs in the first place.

That may be partly true for non-original CDs made out of MP3 files via CD burner, but original CDs should not be "crippled" like that.

I think this debate is kind of late, at least a decade late. FLAC has clearly won; it is available everywhere and shall stay that way thanks to its open-source nature. With increasingly cheaper physical storage (SSD, HDD) and more affordable cloud storage, I think FLAC's longevity aspect just beats everything, even though there may be other codecs such as Opus which may provide a better compression/quality ratio.

But if you only care about lossless, just go with FLAC and enjoy your tunes. ;-)