mp3/aac/flac/ %#$!

Over a club sound system, which is probably (unless you are DJing in one of the most prestigious clubs in your country – so Minstry of Sound here in the UK for example) not perfectly setup, you will not be able to hear the difference playing a 256kbps AAC file (iTunes quality) or a 3000kbps FLAC file. Even so called “Audiophiles” would be hard pushed to hear the difference unless using their £1000 headphones with super hi-def DAC chips.

Many people even get it wrong in a back to back test between lossless files and compressed files.

So yes, you can use them. I DJ with files that I have bought from iTunes (as do most DJ’s on here I would guess) and no one has ever complained about sound quality.

Simply put – when playing at the volume that DJ’s tend to play it in clubs, your ear probably can’t tell between a 128kbps MP3 and a lossless file that has come straight from the mastering studio. Let alone a 320kbps MP3. (This does not mean that I recommend playing anything lower than 256kbps AAC or 320kbps MP3 though – that should be the minimum..)

bob6397

There should be no VOLUME difference on the dance floor between a corrctly gained WAV and a correctly gained MP3 file. SO I reckon that your friend who was playing WAV’s simply had his autogain set a little high. Or he had his master higher. And, as louder sounds nearly always sound better to our ears than quieter ones, whether they are actully better or not, this may have tricked your ears a bit..

Try this – let us know how many you get right. http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

As a sound engineer and DJ – I would say that I would struggle hear the difference between someone using 320kbps MP3’s and WAVs unless actually in a recording studio. And it is impossible (unless you are superhuman) to hear the difference in a club environment. PA speakers will never have the quality required to compete with even half-decent studio monitors when comparing this stuff. They are, after all, designed to do a completely different task.

bob6397

As this will be a discussion that will go on forever, even with clear empirical and theoretical evidence piled sky high, I’d like to throw in my two cents.

The ONLY way to compare quality of tracks is the way Terry did it (and I did this many, many years ago too with 8 DJ, sound engineer and layman friends in a club with even more samples), namely blind comparison of samples from the same source.

Most commercial dance music today suffers from over-compression (loudness war anyone?) and there are dance concentrated music stations that will play their tracks with even a tad more compression and 2-3% more speed just to get the last drop of (perceive) energy out of them and beat the competition.

The example Luke had about one friend being a producer, who probably made and mastered his own tracks , is a good one. It would be deceptively simple to master and mix a track of your own in such a way that it will sound way different from the stuff you hear in clubs/on radio (and which is the better one I’ll leave to everyone’s personal taste).

I’ve played once in a place where the sound engineer started mouthing me as soon as I got in an hooked up my MacBook to his precious CDJ-2000s to use with Mixvibes Cross. He had lousy MP3 quality in his mouth before I even started playing. As it happened I had a few CDs in my bag as well. And when he wasn’t looking I took the CDs and stuck them in. I played for 25 minutes with original, commercial CDs while he walked around shaking his head and even came up to the booth saying I really shouldn’t do this anymore because the sound was awful.

I invited him for a close look at the players and pointed out I was playing CDs and had been for nearly half an hour. This silenced him (and made me an enemey for life probably), but it does prove a point about some sound engineers wanting to prove their own self-worth by claiming they can hear “huge” differences between one source of music and the other.

Imho, the biggest sound difference come from the source (i.e. recording quality, mixing and EQ-ing and/or mastering). The conversion/compression issue comes after that. But I personally believe that a good source will yield an 256AAC/320MP3 that is totally suitable for use in club environments and frankly all environments bar perhaps the most discerning audiophile system (and even then …).

Just my two cents as usual.

When you record something it’s always good to use a lossless copy (FLAC, ALAC) because at some point the recording will be encoded to a mp3 or aac. Never transcode lossy to lossy because you can actually hear the difference.

For playback V0, 256AAC or 320 is all fine. It’s transparent to the lossless master. People will tell you that they have better equipment or golden ears and can hear a difference. The same people who claim they can hear 24Bit or 96khz.
It’s all rubbish and all of them fail in ABX tests
So iTunes tracks are perfectly fine on any(!) system as long as you don’t reencode them in a recording.

Don’t play 128 Soundcloud or Youtube rips though.

What do you mean by DJ friendly? I had no problems so far…

Hmm not really. There almost always in my experience is a single or EP with each track that has at least 3 versions on it. But that is Top40 house and trance that I am looking at…

The difference really only appears when you try to mix 2 wildly different bitrates together, e.g. 128 – 320; Consistency with bitrates matter much more.

Truth of the matter is few people who go to party actually have the ability to determine if a track is playing at what quality. I bet those who do are at home listening to music on their audiophile set up instead!

Volume does not determine the quality of the track, I’ve heard loud 32kb tracks sound normal in a club setting, even when it sounded terrible on my prosumer grade headphones. Please don’t try that unless in desperate circumstances of course. I personally think strictly in average club settings 256 should be sufficient, can’t say for big world-renown clubs.