Quote Originally Posted by theone999 View Post
Hey stan, before the crash I think I read somewhere that someone said that he noticed an improvement in his mp3s when played back on the 7520.

I had a thought of "how can he tell that the 7520 is specifically making mp3s sound good because it could be making mp3s sound good because it makes anything sound good"?

I just thought that would be hard to distinguish which one it is?
That was one of my posts - I will attempt to recreate and update my review over the weekend.
The 7520 *does* make everything sound better.
However, the treatment it gives to low bitrate files seems different (to my ear) than the general goodness it imparts to high bitrate files. Most of my source material is ALAC (lossless), some is AAC (256-bit), and there is the usual smattering of odd and old .mp3 files which I haven't replaced yet. The .mp3 files are between 64 and 128 bit for the most part. The 7520 seems to obscure the compression artefacts on all but the very worst of these. They sound smoother, and when you come across one the difference between it and a high quality file is less jarring. It is not magic - you can still tell the lower quality files for the most part, but they are more enjoyable to listen to, and don't stick out like sore thumbs any more.
I'm generally listening on ATH-M50 cans. These are very revealing and unforgiving of poor rips and over-compression to the point where I would usually skip over a LQ .mp3 file because it was grating to listen to. I don't seem to do that any more.