128 kbps vs. 256 kbps

I’ve started moving my stuff from camp to home and after 2 hours of lugging I settled in to enter 2 months worth of Pepsi Stuff points I’d picked up off the ground.  I purchased a song that’d be stuck in my head and as I listened to it I realized I’d downloaded previously after it’d gotten stuck in my head about a year prior, one was 128 kbps while the other was 256 kbps.  I’d always assumed the two were identical until the 2nd movement when I noted the tell-tale gurgle of a cluster-fuck of algorithms trying to make sense of 15 instruments in small groups playing across a four octave dynamic range.

This changes everything.  I’ve spent years borrowing albums from the library copying them at 128 kbps and returning them and compared to the clarity of a slightly better sampling rate everytime I listen to the string part of “Cantus In Memory of Benjamin Britte” I may as well be listening to an infant gurgling peas while playing with a blender full of carbonated AstroGlide.  Gha…. There goes my vacation.