Taking the Long Way Home - Favorite Drive, Favorite Tunes

JoeVermont said:

I have six large USB sticks that I keep in my vehicle. Rock / Prog&Metal / POP-R&B-Soul / Jazz / Country / Classical
Each one will hold a few hundred LPs. Even with an MP3 bit rate of a paltry 192 kB, they sound just fine.... I mean, five months of the year my auto background noise is snow tires. I go for quantity over audio purism. On the way to a company meeting a few years ago one of my coworkers asked... "You got any, like... Deep Purple, or Zep, or Pink Floyd?" I said yes, and they asked which albums. My answer was... all of them!

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I thought 192 was the top of the MP3 quality, I have not been keeping up with the stats of the different formats but anyway. MP3 was created because someone realized that our capacity to hear frequencies is limited so they decided to delete the parts that we can't hear to reduce file sizes. then someone decided to compress the files in order to be able to add more songs to a player or a home recorded cd. Then other formats came along that touted lossless (they don't lose fidelity* when compressed) *Fidelity = How close to the original recording they can get.
Back in the day it mattered because in order for a computer to digitize analog audio files, it had to do several passes, each pass meant more processing but also meant higher fidelity so MP3s gave you like... I believe 3 choices from lower quality to higher, but this again was before all those lossless formats came along.
Now (present time) the crappiest computer can handle processing any of those formats no problem. (I mean when recording not when playing them).
I used to have an old Ipod 160Gb with about 60000 songs just because I could, (the military was worse than Napster since we all had hard drives full of music that we exchanged....then I realized that I don't listen to 3/4 of them because I don't care for country or rap or similar so I deleted most them and kept 14000 songs which I still have plus a few thousand that I have added since back in 2005.
I don't listen to radio because I can't stand commercials and also that they keep playing the same 12 songs every hour... plus I don't like for someone (the music execs) to tell me what I should like and then attempting to drill it into my head by constantly playing it. No, I stopped listening to radio some 42 years ago.

My favorite drive is the 2 hour trip from where I live (Wilson NC) to my hometown(s) at the coast, Morehead City / Atlantic Beach. My least favorite drive is the return trip. My favorite country road trip is from Morehead to Oriental NC, which involves a beautiful drive and includes a ferry ride across the Neuse river between Havelock (home of Cherry Point Marine Corps base) and Minnesot Beach. Close behind that one is the drive from Wilson or nearby Greenville up to the Hampton Roads VA area, through some small NC towns and into Suffolk VA, avoiding the new bypass.

In either case, I don't have particular favorite road trip tunes/artists. My wife and I decide to listen to artists' entire catalogues chronologically (fairly recently: 311, Pearl Jam, Led Zep, Dave Matthews Band, and currently Better Than Ezra), or we'll take turns picking songs on YouTube.

doggyd69b said:

I thought 192 was the top of the MP3 quality

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I still occasionally use mp3s via downloading or file sharing. 256 is the top bitrate; I've found 128 acceptable- supposedly that's the lowest where the human ear can't tell the difference from the original- because I don't have an audiophile stereo system. My personal preference when storage space isn't a concern is a variable bitrate, that's higher whenever there's more musical data and lower when not.

Wide open highway at night…Pink Floyd. Meddle, Dark Side, Wish You Were Here and Animals.

Driving through hills/mountains…Jethro Tull. Stand Up, Benefit, Aqualung and TAAB

Rush hour traffic in Chicago…Pantera. Just one song, “F***ing Hostile” on a loop. “War Ensemble” by Slayer would also be appropriate in a pinch.

MisterGroove said:

My favorite drive is in NY’s Adirondack Mountains, Route 73 heading towards Lake Placid. Perfect mountain country roads. And for my listening pleasure along that stretch I will often put on Hendrix’s Axis Bold As Love as well as some 70’s fusion.

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Been There, Done that !! Beautiful Upstate NY area!! Since My wife and I have a wide difference in Music Tastes... The Music Played in a long (being retired now, not too frequently as we both are somewhat Physically limited to take major trips), varied with a healthy dose of Folk Rock, Folk, broad spectrum of Rock /Pop, and the occassional, Andrea Bocelli tunes
If it were just me.... From A-Z , Rock, Country Rock, and yes Booker T & The MGs too! Favs include: Eric Clapton with Steve Winwood LIVE is terrific, Lots of Paul Simon's Graceland, Marc Cohn's 1st LP, and so much more too. But No Hip Hop, No Arena Rock, or Metal for the most part.

cbphoto said:

Twice per year I take a 2-day drive out of state for work. I listen to podcasts if there's good topics. For music I use Apple Music "mixes", usually in the "classic country" genre 'cuz I can easily understand the lyrics. Hard rock ain't good when I'm stuck in stand-still traffic while going through, say, Columbus, OH, or Indianapolis.

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In my Acura MDX (2025), I have Alexa available. It is Google based InfoT. system so Hey Google is there too. But I will use Alexa to play Streamers Like Amazon Music, TIDAL, etc. I can ask Alexa (or Google for that matter) for a specific Genre or artist or ask Alexa: Play something soothing or relaxing on Amazon Music. Usually the selection is good, or I can move on. Note that to Play Alexa in my car you need to have Mobile WiFi - like AT&T' servi ce which was offered for 90 days a ttrial which I turned into an annual contract for $200 Unlimited.

timmdrum said:

I still occasionally use mp3s via downloading or file sharing. 256 is the top bitrate; I've found 128 acceptable- supposedly that's the lowest where the human ear can't tell the difference from the original- because I don't have an audiophile stereo system. My personal preference when storage space isn't a concern is a variable bitrate, that's higher whenever there's more musical data and lower when not.

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You (or any other human) will be able to tell the difference if you A-B the lowest bit rate vs the highest or in between. It does sound better when more passes (samples) are taken. And, you don't need an audiophile system to do that.

Croatian Man said:

In my Acura MDX (2025), I have Alexa available. It is Google based InfoT. system so Hey Google is there too. But I will use Alexa to play Streamers Like Amazon Music, TIDAL, etc. I can ask Alexa (or Google for that matter) for a specific Genre or artist or ask Alexa: Play something soothing or relaxing on Amazon Music. Usually the selection is good, or I can move on. Note that to Play Alexa in my car you need to have Mobile WiFi - like AT&T' servi ce which was offered for 90 days a ttrial which I turned into an annual contract for $200 Unlimited.

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If your vehicle is capable of Apple Carplay or Android Auto (which most vehicles are now). You can use Siri or Alexa to play what you want no subscription needed. I use Waze (Navigation), but all my other phone apps are available when my phone is connected via Carplay.

doggyd69b said:

You (or any other human) will be able to tell the difference if you A-B the lowest bit rate vs the highest or in between. It does sound better when more passes (samples) are taken. And, you don't need an audiophile system to do that.

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Yes, the difference between the lowest bit rate vs. the highest will be a stark contrast. 128 isn't the lowest. I've encoded stuff at 128, 256, and VBR, and can't tell the difference on my equipment. I recall reading that the data that 128 leaves out isn't audible to the ear anyway. But, that may depend on the hardware & software doing the encoding. I'm not an expert; I only know my experiences.

timmdrum said:

Yes, the difference between the lowest bit rate vs. the highest will be a stark contrast. 128 isn't the lowest. I've encoded stuff at 128, 256, and VBR, and can't tell the difference on my equipment. I recall reading that the data that 128 leaves out isn't audible to the ear anyway. But, that may depend on the hardware & software doing the encoding. I'm not an expert; I only know my experiences.

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I encode at 192 kb/s ... halfway between 128 and 256 .
Generally, 128 sounds good enough for listening in my SUV with the windows open and noisy snow tires on bad Vermont roads.
I upped encoding to 192 because of one Deep Purple song, The Aviator (from the Purpendicular LP). It has a soft guitar intro (maybe an electric 12 string?) and at 128 kb I could hear a slight swirling sound to the audio. It kind of drove me nuts so I experimented with bit rates.... 192 sounded better so it was good enough.

That's what it really comes down to with any media that is compressed, Blue Ray / DVD discs, MP3's, Sirius XM, Spotify or Amazon streaming, even JPG's .... someone, somewhere along the way had to make a decision as to what was good enough. In the case of MP3s that we make, that us!

Great thread topic, @JoeVermont! I bet you have some really pretty drives in your neck of the woods. I live in a small rural town an hour’s drive north of Bakersfield. It’s technically southern CA but I’m in the agricultural heartland of the state. Most of my work is in Bakersfield so I have a hour commute each way, through orange groves, olive trees, and rolling hills, on a two-lane/55mph speed limit highway.

My go to music for those commutes are anything by Don Williams, or one of my newest musical passions, lo-fi chill music. Usually instrumental with very sparse, repetitive arrangements and elemental grooves. Very trance-y stuff. It’s the musical equivalent of those pictures that you have to look at lazy-eyed to see the “real” image embedded in the larger picture.