I will be the first to admit I am no hardcore audiophile, but I was having a discussion today with a co-worker about compressed audio and uncompressed audio.

He claims there is no noticable difference between the two when played on 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound home theater systems.

Is this true?

If there are obvious differences, care to elaborate?

Thanks in advance.

Unless you have the sort of kit that can take advantage of the higher quality sound then you will prolly never know the difference.

It's like the difference between MP3 and CD. Most CD players don't do CDs justice and so in comparison MP3s sound pretty good, but if you listen to a Naim CD/amp/speaker setup it makes you realise how shockingly bad they really are.

Well I am not sure exactly what kit I would need to tell the difference, but when I upgrade my old surround sound setup to my Sony DAV-HDX500 5.1 setup and popped in a Bluray I was pretty sure it sounded alot better. MGS4 sounds amazing on it as well compared to my parents surround sound system.

What else would I require at this point to notice it for sure?

How much do you want to spend?

Would I need to buy a whole new sound system?

If so, right now I am poor. What would a noticable setup cost?

It also depends largely on the compression, there are lossless formats that can still compress the audio quite a bit.

Obvious differences? Probably not.

what about vinyl vs. CD?

Vinyl all the way.

lossless compression vs uncompressed you won't notice a difference on even the highest tier systems.

lossy vs uncompressed/lossless it depends on your individual system and the bitrate of the audio along with many other things. It's kind of funny some of the supposed audiophiles and the double blind tests they do on AVS forum. You would be shocked at some of the results of what these people claim are better and what their tests actually show.