A variation on "can you hear the difference"

visionary:

I was visiting a friend recently who we don't see often

He has, like many here, quite definite views on sound quality but he came up with a new one I'd not heard and I was lost for words......

He WON'T listen to music that has been compressed, AAC MP3 etc etc, because he insists the quality is not good enough - OK so far? -

BUT he will happily listen to internet radio channels which might be streamed at a low bit rate like 40Kbps (hope I've got that right)

40kbps sounds a little low, unless it's purely a talk radio show, in which case it should be acceptable.

Is it me? or have I missed something here?

I can understand it, if he's ripping his own stuff then he can choose to use lossless audio, why shouldn't he? You don't get that choice with radio you just have to go with whatever they're offering.  Doesn't mean you can't tell the difference.

I agree with the_lhc.

Your friend is either satisfied with lower quality via the radio or he is mixing up codecs with bit rates. Sky Songs streams at about 48kbps (fourty eight, really) yet in a comparison test some preferred it to Spotify at its free rate of 160kbps.

http://crave.cnet.co.uk/digitalmusic/0,39029432,49303980,00.htm

Note that Sky Songs streams with AAC and Spotify with Ogg Vorbis. In comparison tests MP3 often comes out as the worst lossy codec. So, maybe your friend is hearing the difference between codecs and not bit rates as some codecs are better at retaining sound quality in lossy files than others.