Goot equipment for huge FLAC files? Options

[kylegreer1996]

Hello all, I'm new to hydrogen audio and all
I was wondering, I'm not the best expert on audio, but I do like as high quality as I can get, recently I've been really occupied with a certain artist and managed to get one of his recent albums from vinyl, first time I've listened to 24 bit - 4608kbps - 96khz, can't fault the audio quality either, but I don't really have anything along the lines of audiophile grade listing equipment.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good headphones? Also, does it make a difference that I'm using a stock basic sound card? I care more about processing power and gpu power than sound cards.

Thanks for any help!

-Kyle

[GeSomeone]

[..] managed to get one of his recent albums from vinyl, first time I've listened to 24 bit - 4608kbps - 96khz, can't fault the audio quality [..]
does it make a difference that I'm using a stock basic sound card? I care more about processing power and gpu power than sound cards.

I think you should check whether your sound card supports 24bit and 96kHz and is set to use those values while playing this.
To find out if it makes a difference to you, you could compare that with setting the output to 48kHz or 44.1kHz. (To do this scientifically you should go a step further, if you really want, and find out about resampling correctly and use a double blind test like ABX).

A simple answer is that vinyl doesn't have as much dynamic range as digital and in this case a lot of those bits are probably used to reproduce the surface noise as accurately as possible. However you may like it more anyway.

This post has been edited by GeSomeone: Jul 25 2012, 12:45