iTunes 128Kbits vs iTunes Plus 256Kbits

Apple has been in the news all week thanks to their iTunes Plus release, which offers both DRM-free songs and also at a higher bitrate, of 256Kbit. You might believe that double the bitrate means double the clarity, and it was one thing that Maximum PC was set to find out.

So we decided to test a random sample of our colleagues to see if they could detect any audible difference between a song ripped from a CD and encoded in Apple’s lossy AAC format at 128K/s, and the same song ripped and encoded in lossy AAC at 256Kb/s.

In their tests, they found that the $30 earbuds that came with the iPod didn’t show off the subtle differences in the songs, while the majority of their testers did notice a difference with the Shure ($400) earbuds. So, if you want to hear music in better clarity, it may just depend on your headphones.

Source: Maximum PC