Wow, I am truly NOT an audiophile. I was working on audio proxies in Sony Vegas and on a whim decided to see what variety of sample rates I have in my own music collection. Nearly all of it is 44.1 kHz (not a surprise at all, since most of my collection is ripped from my own CDs).
But I was very surprised to see that some of my music is 32 kbps, 22 kHz mono MP3. I must have been messing with encoding settings and forgot to change them back. Collectively, I’ve played those 44 songs about 500 times and I never noticed the supposedly terrible audio quality…
Maybe it’s like reading text without vowels… those songs are so familiar your brain just fills in the missing phase space. 🙂
Have you tried re-ripping a few songs at higher settings to see if you notice the difference?
Matt Haffner , not yet but I was planning to do exactly that this weekend. These particular songs, I’ve never listened to “raw” — they went straight from CD to computer and I filed the CDs away.
Clearly you weren’t using the Monster XP RCA double-plus cables made from Unicorn hair and dreams.