plain and simple. play 320 mp3s and you’re fine. all the top djs in the world do it. if it’s good enough for them. it’s good enough for you. some people will say, “oh well if you play on a very good sound system you’ll here the difference.” NO! i’ve played on funktion 1 systems as well as some of the other top systems in the world and EVERYONE plays 320 mp3s on them. all promo material that i’ve ever received are 320 mp3s. the fact is, 99% of the professional djs out there play 320.
A lot of the time, I think Tony Andrews is full of shit. But he’s definitely right about some things and obviously passionate about sound and music. I honestly think his downfall (more precisely, the reason I haven’t respected him very much up until now) is that he’s just a horrible, horrible speaker. He confuses words and isn’t very well composed. But there’s some truth in there.
In the thread xone linked, a few pages in I posted a 45-minute mp3 vs wav ABX test. Only a few people replied, but if you want to PM me answers, I’ll give you your results.
The song clips are kind of boring (all intros) and certainly don’t show the effects on different styles. It’s not perfect. But it’s better than a lot of them that I’ve seen.
I’ll go ahead and say that my results show that I can detect the difference fairly readily but that I was in a very small minority. If you want a simple life, don’t teach yourself what good sound is…it gets expensive.