History of the Nautilus loudspeaker
Never heard these myself, but I remember that Nautilus speakers were used in an MP3 listening test by the German c&#x27;t magazine in 2000[1]. Conclusion:<p>&gt; In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they
took the original CD samples themselves.<p>This article made me (1) never worry about &quot;lossy audio encoding&quot; again and (2) ignore everyone starting about &quot;better equipment&quot; wrt compressed audio.<p>Granted, they used the cheaper Nautilus 803 rather than the 801 in the test. But they also had Sennheiser Orpheus available in the listening test.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hydrogenaud.io&#x2F;index.php?topic=27324.0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hydrogenaud.io&#x2F;index.php?topic=27324.0</a>