I was a flac snob when I was younger, and I can say with certainty: 320kbps mp3s or even VBR are indistinguishable from opus or even lossless except when listening very very very closely on high end hardware. I’m very into audio still and production etc. That’s not to say opus isn’t better or higher quality, but the difference it makes is decidedly negligible to the vast majority of listeners. I guarantee that almost everyone would fail to do better than a coin flip a/b testing these technologies on the same audio recording.
192kbps opus will allow you to achieve roughly the same quality as 320kbps mp3. If you stream your music from any device or have a larger collection this difference can matter a lot.
As a music producer, you notice 192k MP3. The next jumps you probably don’t notice. I’m still a flac snob because I have to work a lot with original quality files, but for the average users there’s probably not even a difference between MP3 192k+ and flac or wav or opus or whatever.
I was a flac snob when I was younger, and I can say with certainty: 320kbps mp3s or even VBR are indistinguishable from opus or even lossless except when listening very very very closely on high end hardware. I’m very into audio still and production etc. That’s not to say opus isn’t better or higher quality, but the difference it makes is decidedly negligible to the vast majority of listeners. I guarantee that almost everyone would fail to do better than a coin flip a/b testing these technologies on the same audio recording.
192kbps opus will allow you to achieve roughly the same quality as 320kbps mp3. If you stream your music from any device or have a larger collection this difference can matter a lot.
I guess my collection’s just not big enough for this to have become an issue.
192 VBR OPUS and 320 VBR LAME MP3 are equally transparent. The quality depends more on mastering than bitrate, beyond 160k on MP3.
As a music producer, you notice 192k MP3. The next jumps you probably don’t notice. I’m still a flac snob because I have to work a lot with original quality files, but for the average users there’s probably not even a difference between MP3 192k+ and flac or wav or opus or whatever.