Philosophy of Everything

The meaning of music is hard to capture in words. Let's try some ideas anyway! The brain bug The brain has a natural ability to extract patterns from all the stimulus. It's a fact that we like the music that has some patterns: that is not very monotonic (boring) but not very random either, so we can continuously learn some new patterns. Somehow the brain has the illusion that it continuously learns in an accelerated rate by listening music. So music could be considered a small addiction at the first analysis.

I am passionate about sound quality lately. Here are my early conclusions from the research and experiments I did. This is the order of sound optimizations that you could try in order to improve the music experience. 1. Live music sounds better than recorded music 2. Un-amplified live music sounds better than amplified music 3. Recorded music sounds better on loud speakers than on headphones 4. Expensive headphones (>100$) sounds better than cheap ones 5. Open-air headphones sounds better than closed enclosure ones 6. Loss-less music (like FLAC) sounds better than MP3 7. High bitrate MP3 (>128kbps) sounds better than low bitrate 8. A professional DAC (or sound card) sounds better than a cheap one 9. High sample rate music (>44KHz) could sound better than 44KHz (or not) 10. Music encoded at 24bits could sound better than 16bits music (or not)  I will say a few words about each, from my limited experience and research: