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1/3 of People Can't Tell 48Kbps Audio From 160Kbps
An anonymous reader writes "Results of a blind listening test show that a third of people can't tell the difference between music encoded at 48Kbps and the same music encoded at 160Kbps. The test was conducted by CNet to find out whether streaming music service Spotify sounded better than new rival Sky Songs. Spotify uses 160Kbps OGG compression for its free service, whereas Sky Songs uses 48Kbps AAC+ compression. Over a third of participants thought the lower bit rate sounded better."
If they used the "mosquito" - then lots of people would just randomly pick something :-) Or just say things like "Hey! What's that ringing in my ear!"
Are these the same people who prefer MP3 Sizzle?
Remember RFC 873!
(although not as low as 46kbps) and reached the same conclusion. Most people vastly overestimate their ability to distinguish tracks encoded at different bitrates. And I've seen study after study that backs this up. This includes self-professed audiophiles, the original authors of particular tracks of music, and so forth.
Mr. Wizard... why is this place called the Cave of Hopelessness?
on how long they've been cranking their music up to 11.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
More likely 1/3 are either somewhat deaf, or just dont care enough about music quality to be able to tell the difference.
:P
I really doubt it's a functional issue, more that they just can't be bothered.
OR 1/3 of people are functional retards
Did you have to close your eyes during the test. Why is it called a blind listening test?
So, 1/3 of people eh? Hardly a damning assessment when your sampling size is 16 people. Besides, most people I know including myself have some sort of hearing damage from the past or don't really know what to listen for when presented with different types of sound.
I don't care if 99% of the population cant tell the difference between the two, I can and I want all my audio to be 320Kbps
I would be more impressed if the same encoding format was used. I think both samples should have been ogg or aac and not a mix. If comparing aac at 48 and 160 are the results different? Same goes for ogg at 48 and 160?
People who can't tell the difference have a 50-50 chance of getting it right. Therefore we can deduce that over *two-thirds* of the population can't tell the difference, by adding in the inferred members who couldn't tell, but guessed right.
If 1/3 thought the lower quality was superior, but 1/2 of people who can't tell still guess correctly, then that means 2/3 of people can't tell
Do it with 48kbps AAC vs. 160kbps AAC, or 48kbps OGG vs. 160kbps OGG, and you might have something meaningful.
Or, 48kbps AAC vs. 48kbps OGG, and 160kbps AAC vs. 160kbps OGG, if you want a flamewar...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
In a deaf listening test, 100% couldn't tell the difference between a 160Kbps OGG file and a cannon. Though 3% noted the smell of gunpowder.
If the higher compression audio had simply used this $500 Denon ethernet cable, the results would have been different:
http://www.usa.denon.com/ProductDetails/3429.asp
But seriously, can you make a sweeping statement like "People can't tell 48k audio from 160k" if you're also switching compression technologies? OGG vs. AAC is a whole article on it's own, you just muddy the waters by making this about the compression rate.
This is just a new version of the old megahertz myth of the CPU wars. Two different 2GHZ processors from different manufacturers are not equal, we all finally figured that out for the most part, right? Now we've moved onwards... to the Kbps myth?
As long as the sound is clean and there is no static, no pops, crackles, or hissing, I could care less what it is encoded at. To my ear there really is no difference.
...it turns out that at least 1/3 of all people are over the age of 25.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yeah, but they weren't listening through Monster Cable, you can't tell the difference between anything without Monster equipment...
Jan
>> 1/3 of People Can't Tell 48Kbps Audio From 160Kbps
Correction: Over a third of participants thought the lower bit rate sounded better.
Those are not the same thing. To find out how many people thought they sounded exactly the same, I would have to RTFA.
There are a lot of things to mention in this article. They are using VERY high end hardware that can interpolate the sound and cause sound clipping (which makes things sound metallic) to be minimized. They also didn't mention what songs were chosen. A lot of music is mastered to sound good on poor quality speakers and thus the 48 Kbps may actually not be the limiting factor.
At least there going to be a new reason to sell audio snake oil now.
From the article: "We dragged 16 people", I'm no stats engineer but isn't that far too low ?
int main() { while(1) fork(); }
They are using two completely different codecs. Try 48kbps mp3 vs 160kbps mp3 and see.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
OGG isn't a audio codec.
CNET isn't a tech news site.
new Quality. What we want is cheap crap, and lots of it. For reference: Wal-Mart, current fast-food portion sizes, mini-mansions filled with Ikea furniture.
Thats strange, I find it trivial to identify differing qualities of compression when listening to my music files.
You look down at the UI, and it tells you what the bitrate is.
(Joking aside, I have advocated 128 kbps for years, not because of sound quality issues, but rather because most people own cheap computer speakers and/or headphones. You only get quality as good as the weakest link in the system.)
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They're entirely different compression schemes, the numbers may as well be different units. "Participants couldn't tell the difference between of 10 miles per hour and 50,000 feet per hour!"
The summary is quite misleading.
It sounds like 100% of the participants could tell the difference between the two encodings, just 1/3 of the people thought the more simple, clean, highly compressed version sounded better. 2/3 of people thought the high bitrate version sounded better.
When choosing compression, the better way to go is to shoot for transparency versus the uncompressed source, not which audio sounds better to your ears.
That's why ABX is the industry standard for compression comparison, not a simple AB test as in this experiment.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I say the only valid comparison is listening to the live music, vs the digital format. This way you compare to the original and your not just saying which sounds better (which is subjective). I once worked with a audio system designer and everything was tested using analogue formats with various types of music preferably classical because of it's range in sound.
"Of the 16 people tested"
Good-bye.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Title of article should be: 2/3 of people CAN tell the difference...
AccountKiller
One reason lower quality playback often sounds better is it smooths out some of the shortcomings in the original recording. A lot of people prefer lo-def for casual listening because the most authentic sound isn't always the easiest on the ears. NYT article on this a while back, but couldn't find it immediately...
Based on TFS, 33% answered that the 48kbps sounded better than 160kbps. I have a assume that some percentage of the people who said that the 160kbps were guessing and got lucky to pick the "right" answer.
Also, it may be because they are using a music sample that actually sounds pretty good with 48kbps instead of (for example) spoken word which makes a bigger difference when you compress the hell out of it.
There is no magic bullet... for many people lower bitrates are just as good as high-fidelity.
All of the people I know that appreciate the quality of their music and acknowledge when I play a good quality flac recording of a particular song for them are over 30. I think it could be an age dependent thing, with regards to the mix quality of music put out today and how young people listen to it. In my personal opinion, the advent of limewire and such have supported the spreading of lower quality mp3s, and teens these days seem to accept that as the "standard" of music quality. As a little anecdotal evidence supporting my theory, my 17 year old sister is constantly downloading and playing low quality music and throwing it on her iPod. She doesn't seem to care about the quality, as long as she can listen to her hits and what ever volume she cares (even if I can hear it coming from her headphones from all the way across the room.).
Most people only really have broad demands on how their music sounds. Give them fairly deep bass, no obvious crackle at the high end, and they'll pretty much be happy with anything in between. If they're used to a "lower-end" listening experience to begin with (cheap headphones, laptop speakers, low-end stereos), then they'll be even less picky overall.
It also wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of the participants just picked one arbitrarily, just for the sake of giving an answer.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
this summary is misleading. they were asked to choose which they thought sounded better. the listeners DID notice a difference between the two, and for some reason 1/3 of the participants enjoyed the lower bitrate version better. perhaps it had less harsh high tones or something about it was more pleasurable to them... that doesn't mean that the higher bitrate didn't honestly sound more accurate to the source material. Perhaps uncompressed audio should have also been incorporated into the test. If they still choose the lower bitrate over uncompressed, then it's clear that some listeners prefer the song with the changes inherent to compression.
this was a very unscientific study, with a very small sample size, and really shouldn't be front page on slashdot.
frog blast the vent core
i just felt sandvine stock go up!
besides cancustomers afford to have their connection become anymore comcastic than it already is!?
Good people go to bed earlier.
One third of the US population cant tell "shit from shineola".
* Carthago Delenda Est *
This wasn't a proper repeated ABX double-blind listening test, nor an ABC-HR, but just a single-trial single-blind AB for each person, with one track and no hidden reference. Pathetic and unscientific, and definitely shouldn't be presented as a valid listening test, given how susceptible audio research is to error.
Dear C|Net: If you're going to do a listening test, please don't just do something that'd get you laughed at on (then banned from) Hydrogenaudio. It's easy to do it properly - Hydrogenaudio have been doing it for years, and that's how the encoders are tuned. Doing it wrong tells you nothing of value.
Previous, proper ABX double-blind listening tests have proved that Vorbis -q5 (using AoTuV b5.5), which is what Spotify use, is perceptually transparent on almost all listeners on almost all audio. Meanwhile, 48kbps AAC-HE+SBR with a good encoder is best-in-class for its bitrate at the moment, but is very poor at some sounds which spectral band replication tends to make too prominent or artificial; electronic music encodes well, but classical most certainly does not. It almost always is distinguishable in ABX, although it ranks moderately highly in ABC-HR, especially for its bitrate, on untrained listeners. It's not even remotely a competitor to Vorbis -q5, though (or LAME 3.98 -V2 for that matter).
Want research sources? Hydrogenaudio listening tests, and/or peer-reviewed papers conducted using similar/the same methodologies. Want to contradict those? Do your tests properly first.
I used to sell audio equipment as a teenager and I recall different people had different ideas about what constituted quality audio. Some people liked deep muddy base, other people liked loud midranges, etc.. I think the study's conclusion is all wrong... it's not that people can't tell the difference, it's that people sometimes prefer the lower quality bitrate. Personally, I just want things to sound representative of the real-life equivalent. :)
This is why I only ask musicians who are good at what they do for advice on audio equipment. If you want to know what's good, you have to ask a musician who's passionate about music. Musicians know what the music is supposed to sound like because they've spent countless hours learning songs and practicing their craft. By listening to them, I have a setup that's so good it's made me turn and look behind me more than a few times because I swore the noise was made by something in the room.
KRK Rokit Studio monitors with a BBE Sonic Maximizer, in case you're wondering.
CNET - Owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Sky - Owned by Rupert Murdoch.
CBS, actually:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/15/why-cbs-bought-cnet-and-not-the-other-way-around/
If it'd been a Myspace survey or something from the Times, the Courier-Mail or the WSJ, you'd have had a point.
I think it's quite a bit about the quality of your speakers. I couldn't hear any difference between the qualities until I got my $200+ speakers.
Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC will be tomorrow's vinyl.
I firmly believe that you prefer what you're accustomed to hearing in the first place. Most kids today have grown up hearing nothing better than highly-compressed FM or low-bitrate MP3 music. They don't know anything better, and given the option of hearing better music, perhaps even uncompressed, with a much larger dynamic range and noise floor, they'll gravitate to what their ears and brain have been trained to appreciate.
Tomorrow's world will have "128Kbps MP3 Afficionado" publications extolling the virtues, "warmth", and "naturalness" of the low-bitrate MP3. And audiophiles will pay top-dollar for crippled hardware and overcompressed, undersampled music tracks.
"Spotify uses 160Kbps OGG compression for its free service, whereas Sky Songs uses 48Kbps AAC+ compression"
HOW do the compression efficiency of both compare and what royalties patent rights apply to either.
What's the big deal? Two thirds of the people can't even tell decent music from out of tune shit.
the dupe of the article, titled, "2/3 of People Can Tell 48Kps Audio From 160Kps"
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
My guess is this 1/3 is the same ones that listen to Dave Mathews and and Alice in Chains.
Do it with 48kbps AAC vs. 160kbps AAC, or 48kbps OGG vs. 160kbps OGG, and you might have something meaningful.
Or, 48kbps AAC vs. 48kbps OGG, and 160kbps AAC vs. 160kbps OGG, if you want a flamewar...
Tthe point of TFA was to compare two services, one of which is actually using 48kbps AAC, while the other is actually using 160kbps Ogg. Using any other codecs or bitrates would indeed be inciting a flamewar.
Some people hear things differently than others. Also in the 5 o'clock hour we'll talk about how some people see better than other people. And dont miss this week's special report on the varying ability of people to grasp sarcasm.
That means that 2/3 can tell. What's the problem, those 3rd are the ones that still like their little AM radio.
Why bother
Remember American Idol and Dancing With The Stars are top rated shows. Most people have no sense of quality programing in any form. It's like Laserdisk and Blu-Ray, quality will only appeal to a select few. I just hope they don't drop their standards to compete. I got very excited when I first heard about Digital TV until I found out they didn't mean HD just digital. Most of the higher quality formats didn't fail because they were inferior it was because the average person either couldn't tell the difference or didn't care.
"we tested with Billie Jean"
I don't hate that song.. but as a testing ground for music hardware/software, it sucks. And you should always test with different types of music.
Also, small sample size (16), only 1 song in 2 versions, presumably always in the same order, on hardware that has nothing to do with what everybody uses (does that lessen or worsen compression characteristics ?), no control group (wanna bet that with 2 exact same versions, song A or song B consistently comes out on top ? Coke and Pepsi worked that one out long ago). No indication how responses were collected (group ? interviewer ? biased ?).
made me chuckle. amateurs.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Through the '80's, people bought stereo components and understood good sound. Starting in the '90's people went for packaged systems that didn't have the ability to produce accurate sound. Now the majority is used to crappy headphones and earbuds that have more peaks and valleys than the Himalayas, and people are used to overequalized processing. I'll bet you that real stereophiles can tell the difference, but they're a dying breed.
The tests have to be very carefully set up: double blind, very carefully calibrated audio levels.
Even a 1/3 db difference makes the louder signal sound sharper / higher quality. It's difficult to run a test that won't run into criticism about how it is conducted.
Many technical considerations for this kind of testing but also is the question "Is the difference in quality perceivable?" or is it "Given how people listen, does any difference between the two matter?"
I realize the article mentioned they used high quality headphones and audio hardware, but for the rest of us audio kit is still the main limiting factor. I recently picked up a set of M-Audio (they make music gear) desktop monitors and gained a new appreciation for much of my existing music (specifically, my FLAC recordings).
Of course 1/3 is also a pretty significant group of people and given more time and a more comfortable setting this number would probably be somewhat higher. Good sound still sounds good and with decent headphones/monitors/etc you can pick out individual sounds much easier and the music gains layers and presence.
Quack, quack.
Wouldn't the number who can't tell the difference actually be higher?
If you have two choices, and you don't know the answer, you randomly choose between the two. That means that in a random sample, the number of people who don't know the answer should split evenly between the right and wrong answer. This would mean that as many as 2/3 of the sample couldn't tell the difference between the two services.
Of course, it wouldn't be that high because some people honestly prefer a lower quality sound. There are people who still prefer the sound of vinyl records to the sound of digitally "perfect" CDs, but even so, a substantial portion of the listening public cannot tell the difference. I'd also be willing to bet that a substantial number of the ones who can tell the difference wouldn't care all that much.
To me this suggests that it would be a better business plan to stream at the lower cost, lower bit rate and put your money into other features.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
How does this affect people that are only partially blind?
Over a third of the people tested thought the lower bit rate audio sounded BETTER.
OGG isn't a audio codec.
Nor is "Washington" the U.S. government. Anyone who knows the difference between Ogg and Vorbis would understand that while "Ogg" is a container, it is also related to the codecs designed for use in the container. The article uses a figure of speech called metonymy: "Ogg" in the context of lossy music encoding refers to the Ogg project's lossy music codec, and that's Vorbis.
I always conduct my tests on subject groups as large as 20 people. I find that group size large enough to speak for the entire population. Also, I happen to be related to 14 of these 20 people. So basically, I've just proven that I'm related to 70% of the worlds population. My research is undisputable. Also, this post might a partial lie.
It was a blind test. We all know that blind people have a heightened sense of hearing. If they used folks who are sighted, I'm sure there wouldn't be any difference noticed.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
When choosing compression, the better way to go is to shoot for transparency versus the uncompressed source, not which audio sounds better to your ears.
Unless you're trying to send the signal over such a low-speed link that transparency can't be achieved with available technology. In that case, you want the highest quality that can fit.
They ran the test on nice headphones and a nice processor. Both pieces of equipment designed to either reproduce exactly what you hear, or to make something crappy sound better. Try playing this through a neutral system like a set of studio monitors and i all but guarantee that they can tell the difference.
I used to be a concert-trained violinist. I don't have perfect pitch, but I can usually get close. I've got to say--I *can't* and have never been able to tell the difference.
I can't even hear the difference between a tape, LP, CD, or MP3--other than the fact that most LPs I've listened too tended to have poor wiring that resulted in sound problems going to the speakers--put on a pair of headphones and they all sound the same to me.
The *ONLY* exception, has been that I can hear the difference in some classical music between a cassette, and a high quality MP3. I'm not saying that it isn't there...but I suspect there's got to be some unusual...hearing differences involved. And honestly--the above doesn't even make sense to me--I'd expect a high quality MP3 to sound *worse* than a CD since it's lossless--but they sound the same to me. It really makes me wonder how much of sound is just a placebo effect...
I was all excited that my new car came with a satellite radio reciever, then bitterly disappointed with the sound quality and didn't subscribe. I'm considering replacing it with an HD reciever, once I hear one to find out what "HD" really means. Satellite radio is utter crap for sound quality.
CD quality mp3 is 320kbps.I can understand not being able to tell 48kbps from 160kbps (especially when a different codec is used for each, the quality of the codec and the configuration of it is key). It's hard to tell the difference between crap and sh*t. The test is only meaningful as a bitrate test if the same codec and encoding settings are used. Otherwise it's apples to oranges. The bitrate isn't nearly as important as how it's encoded unless both streams are done exactly the same way (except for bitrate).
This test smacks of Apple fanboism. Do a real bitrate test using the same codec and settings (outside of bitrate) and I guarantee you'll get better listener accuracy.
Why on earth would you do a bitrate test with two different codecs unless the test was really marketing propaganda for one of the codecs? /filed in the Apple marketing bullshit drawer
This is a codec test, not a bitrate test. As a "can a user tell the difference between these bitrates" test, the results are completely worthless. It's more like a "AAC rulez! look a 48k AAC stream sounds as good as a 160kbps Ogg stream!" /barf
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
1/3 of the participants liked the lower bitrate audio better. So they could indeed tell the difference. In fact, I'd bet the majority of the participants could tell the difference between the samples, but about 1/3 found the lower bitrate samples more enjoyable.
Of course, that 1/3 may have their reasons. For example, the lower the bitrate the greater the amount of low and high frequency muddyness... which can actually make the lyrics and hook more pronounced.
I compare low vs high bitrate as the difference between watching a DVD on a TV and on a decent home theater. Some people just want to watch the movie, and some consider film making an art and want to experience every nuance.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Randomly guessing should give them eight people preferring the higher bitrate. What we're talking about is a difference of 2-3 people from the expectation if no one could distinguish. (16 doesn't divide evenly into thirds)
When you conduct a blind test, you can't simply take the correct and incorrect responses as they come.
If there were people who said the lower bit-rate sounded better, and there is no factor to actually convince them of that (ie. the music is the same recording, played at same volume, in randomized order... and they were actually asked "which has the higher bit-rate" rather than "which do you find more pleasant to listen to"), then you must assume that these people arrived at a random guess (which they might not be aware of), which means they had a .5 probability of getting it wrong. For one third to randomly guess wrongly, another third would have to randomly guess right.
Conclusion: Assuming the data in the summary is right, the number of people who were unable to reliably tell the difference were likely closer to 2/3.
Based on the article, the testing seems to have very little in the way of meaningful results.
A single instance of a single song with two different encoders given to listeners who hear "more bass" as a quality where the results were so close to split (two people shy of 50/50).
To gather meaningful data: songs must be switched quickly: you should go through a variety of materials (it's worth noting that some compressions have more trouble with certain types of sounds than others), and (ideally) there should be a reference from which to work.
The goal of compression, in theory at least, is to maintain meaningful fedility. Yes, that means that "the part we notice most" is most important: but that's no excuse for causeing "a pleasent error" better than "correct reproduction".
Of course, I've never tested these encoders. It's possible that the lower bitrate encoder did a better job.
There is no disclaimer that nobody was harmed during the tests.
That said, I am sure there are multiple ways to divide 16 people in three equally sized groups.
but my friend, who has been deaf since childhood, does listen too music but from the point of how it feels. His tastes weren't very different from many others of the time period (album rock which has distinctive beats/etc).
Really didn't crank the base, but it was not loud enough that people around him would stop and point, let alone gesture.
I only asked after asking why he played his music so much and my level ignorance about deafness was high enough to ask.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
That headline is incredibly deceptive: this story isn't about bitrates, it's about codecs. AAC+ is a very good codec - my radio station streams to a Flash player using AAC+ at 64kbps. It sounds better than 128kbps MP3 stream it replaced. However, comparing these codecs is really apples and oranges. The way the sound degrades as MP3, OGG, or AAC+ degrades is incredibly different. MP3 is clearly the worst one - even and reasonable bitrates, it loses the clarity of the high end, with a muffled bass. AAC+ seems to degrade by sounding more brittle and harsh as the bitrate goes down. I haven't worked with Ogg enough to know how it compares, I've only used it at high bitrates. So, I'm sure that the responses to this test depend more on which kind of compression artifacts the listener prefers.
The comparison wasn't how the sound was generated. It was whether on server provided better sound than the other one for the data rate. In this case the resulting sound of the lower data rate was just a good if not better for 1/3 of the people.
Just because people prefer a particular rate doesn't mean its actually better. Many people are probably used to listening to crap and so tend to favor sound they're familiar with. Also, in my experience people seem to think that good quality audio means boomy bass. So I wouldn't be surprised that muddy audio, with the volume turned up, sounds good to people. Also, sometimes, if people don't know what to listen for they wont be able to pick up on the differences which otherwise would be obvious.
For me, 128Kbps sounds like crap. The best way to describe it is that music sounds muffled, there's isn't enough definition. It's kind of like a jpg with too much compression. I find it a joke that is considered high quality. 192Kbps is good; at this rate I find it acceptable. But when I rip CDs I always go to 256Kbps. I can't really find much to complain about at that rate except that on a 4GB iPod I run out of space fairly quickly.
Considering I can buy a 1TB drive for less than $100
Even in a size that fits in a pocket?
I see absolutely no reason to rip CD's at anything less than 320.
Because transcoding a file for use on your handheld device takes time. Or can newer PCs transcode audio fast enough to saturate a USB line?
In other news: most people can't tell the difference between sweetened and unsweetend substances!
To test this, we gave 16 people two drinks. One, a glass of water to which we added copious amounts of sugar. The other, a glass of pre-made hummingbird food, to which we added no additional sugar. Amazingly, a significant number couldn't tell the difference! Using this data, we drew the logical conclusion that 1/3 of people can't taste sugar.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Using Foobar, I was able to ABX test 128 vs 192 vs 256, vs 320kbps, cbr and vbr.... and I was right all of the time up until 256. I was able to pick 256 most of the time, but i would occasionally be wrong.
320kbs vs CD audio was very hard, but i did get it right once or twice.
This is stupid. As someone who deals with these all day long, and I get paid to do so, this is absolutely an invalid conclusion. Logically, if you tested ogg 48 vs ogg 160, or AAC 48 vs AAC 160, great. You have a scientific test. If you test a codec that really is DESIGNED to perform best at low rates, specifically AAC HEv2 @ 48k, you'll find that it's such a good codec that it's unsurprising that 1/3 of any group couldn't tell. The reason is that AAC @ 48 is full human-hearing spectrum, unlike many other codecs including the venerable mp3. It's just not fair. AAC HE at 48 is equivalent in quality roughly to solid FM radio, mostly through psycho-acoustic "tricks" with the way it handles channels and reconstructs the spectrum. It uses more CPU to decode, and makes some very good assumptions in recreating the sounds it is designed for. What would be interesting is if the same 1/3 couldn't tell the difference between 48k AAC and uncompressed 24-bit 48k sample (those 48's are different, I'm aware). My guess is that you would still have 1/4 of your people not able to tell. I love AAC audio, but this is just a fallacy.
In space, no one can hear your OGG
No matter what other people prefer, I'll stick with my WMA Lossless and FLAC anyday. I'm very sensitive, maybe it's just my set up (Zune 120 + Westone 3 earphones).
The worst of the worst lossy compression I've ever heard was with QuickTime/iTunes AAC encoder, it cuts all the low frequencies and leaves the bass really dull.
AAC+ uses ABR encoding as the default. The 48Kbps is not the peak bit rate and the difficult sections of the music are going to be compressed at a higher rate. More so if there are a lot of quiet passages that can offset the average. If the Vorbis audio was encoded with CBR the comparison in terms of bit rates isn't exactly valid.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
FTA: "Sky has launched a subscription-music service called Sky Songs, but its streaming-audio bit-rate is much lower than Spotify's free service. The question is, can anyone actually tell the difference? We put it to the test."
People can't hear codecs or bit rates, only sound and that is exactly what they were trying to find out, can people detect a difference in the product (sound), not the manufacturing (codecs and bit rates). Therefore they did test apples to apples.
The title wrongly assumes that anyone who prefers the lower quality recording can't tell the difference between the recordings. That's clearly not correct. Perhaps these one third can tell the difference but just prefer lossy recordings or AAC+ compression over OGG compression.
You can't ask people what their opinion is and then tell them they are either wrong or have no opinion because you don't share it.
I recommend listening to glitch-pop. It's inherently robust against lossy codecs and even some data corruption.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
See this
The test was conducted by CNet to find out whether streaming music service Spotify sounded better than new rival Sky Songs. Spotify uses 160Kbps OGG compression for its free service, whereas Sky Songs uses 48Kbps AAC+ compression.
So the tests give us results which are IMO actually interesting. However, Slashdot submitter and editors fucked it up to mean something entirely different. Just look at TFA's headline:
Spotify vs Sky Songs: Sound quality blind test - clear and simple. Describes the tests well. Then, for some idiotic reason, Slashdot uses 1/3 of People Can't Tell 48Kbps Audio From 160Kbps...
There's no news here. The HE AAC codec (called AAC+ in the Coding Technologies implementation, and now called Dolby Pulse after Dolby's acquisition) is a highly advanced spectral band replication codec, and can be pretty darn transparent down to around 48 Kbps. That there was about a 2:1 preference for the high bitrate Ogg in a highly nonscientific small sample size test like this is a yawner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HE_AAC
My video compression blog
Because even crap 48Kbps-encoded audio sounds great with Monster cables!
with single speaker mono there isn't much of a difference - but try the same test with multiple speakers and there is a clear difference
They don't sell things like that to professionals. They sell things like that to audiophiles, people who listen with their wallets.
You don't need $500 cable for Denon Link, it is just Cat-5 cable and Denon says as much in the manuals for the devices that have it. My guess is that audiophiles bitched about having to use "low grade" cable and Denon decided they'd gladly oblige them and take their money.
It is just keeping with the audiophile market. These people want to spend money on stupid shit, and there are plenty who will take their money.
I mean shit you can buy magic rocks (http://www.machinadynamica.com/machina31.htm) to "improve your sound."
Billie Jean is already highly compressed pop music.
They compared two different compression methods at two different bit-rates. While this is ok for saying "X people think Product A sounds better than Product B", it is not very scientific to say that people can't tell the difference from X bit-rate and Y bit-rate.
There's a huge difference between the "expectations for todays' pop music" and the "expectations for serious music (could be classical, could be jazz, could be many things as long as it cares for quality)." Back in the day, we dropped AM radio in favor of FM ... but AM was good enough as background noise and FM was where you bought serious equipment. People accept what they're used to until exposed to something much better.
I play 64kbps streams on Mythtv through the speakers on my old 27" TV and it sounds great. I play the same on my (rather spiffy) Cambridge setup on my gaming PC, and they sound like crap.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
And title would be better if it said "1/3 of 16 people cannot tell Vorbis from AAC". Duh!
Files encoded at 1kps and 160kps will contain differences nearly everyone could pick out.
Different compression codecs will encode differently, and at different bit rates those differences will be more or less present in the sound. At the extreme end, the sound will be affected heavily. Spoken words will be incomprehensible. Instruments will blend into one another. Low and high end will blur to a muddle. If you can't tell any of that, I suspect you are deaf.
have you ever seen the film Snatch?
I did not read through all of the responses so far so I may be duplicating some points.
What people think sounds better well... sounds better to them. You can't argue that. Try telling someone that there favorite color is not blue and it should be red. Comparison testing for sound quality is hard to do because it really comes down to just your own perception. People have a natural tendency to confuse sound quality with sound volume. Meaning, in most tests, the louder track will usually be considered the better sounding track. A more efficient speaker usually will always beat a less efficient speaker in tests unless the overall SPL can be made the same, every audio salesman from back in the day when they were relavent knew that and used that to their advantage. Sound quality takes a more scientific approach that is just not there at the store or at your computer when you pushing A/B buttons for speakers or comparing different codecs. I'm getting slightly off track here but the quality of the source material makes a huge difference as well. Highly compressed and high average level recordings that have been the norm for the last 10 years do not sound good anyway and never will so trying to compare the final product on different equipment is almost useless. Basically, the weak link is the source so it doesnt matter how good your equipment or codec is, it can not make it any better than the original. An example, Whole Lotta Love from Led Zeppelin, tune into around 3:10-3:25 of the song, the master recording track for the guitar/drum beats are distorted with drops crackles. I've listened to the remastered version and regular version of the CD, the original vinly and all have it there. You can never get rid of that and on a decent stereo, it stands out as a huge flaw and is very noticeable. With cheap headphones, stereo or crappy MP3 rip, you would probably never notice it making the cheap system sound as good as the nice system or even better.
Bottom line, I like reading and looking at sound test results but often, the do not reflect what I notice or what I like which is back to my first statement. What people think sounds better well... sounds better to them, you can't argue that.
When listening to audio in a car, there is a problem with background noise. The sound pressure level in an average car at 70 mph will be in the region of 70 dB. The threshold of pain is at a sound pressure level of about 120 dB. So in a car there is a maximum dynamic range of no more than 50 dB and in reality far less.
As CDs spread from homes to cars, CDs which made use of the full dynamic range available in the technology were difficult to hear clearly (and painlessly) as either the loud passages were too loud for most passengers or the quiet passages would be inaudible. So they adapted to the new common audio setup and began mastering CDs with a smaller dynamic range. Since in-car listeners are a major audience, many FM stations also gean using automatic dynamic range compression technology. Not all radio stations do -- BBC Radio 3 (in deference to its listeners' preference for better audio setups) does not use it in the evening.
As much as I enjoy my iPods, one of my greatest fears related to it was that an increasing dominance of portable, digital audio players with earbuds would ignite something akin to "Loudness Wars -- Round Two" in terms of selling audio pre-recorded at lower bit rates.
Given the quality at which a lot of music is engineered these days, I'm not surprised. Since heavy (sound) compression is widely used in modern recording, I would posit that with music such treated, 48k vs. 160k won't sound significantly different to anyone, leave alone the average listener.
Given the preponderance of crappy little "earbud" headphones and low quality MP3 recordings that comprise most if not all of what many people ever hear, it's no surprise that they have not acquired any ability to distinguish subtle (or not so subtle) differences in the quality of recordings. If you're never exposed to quality sound, it's quite possible you won't notice the difference when you do hear it.
On the other hand, with a little exposure to a decent sound system and/or good headphones and some quality recordings made by people like this guy, I have no doubts that most people who aren't already half deaf would quickly learn to distinguish and appreciate this difference.
I'm hardly an audiosnob, and I'm sure the equipment I use would horrify a real audiosnob, but these differences are enormous to me. I cannot distinguish, from personal testing on the equipment I use, between level 5 and level 6 of OGG compression (which correspond roughly to 256kbps and 320kbps, respectively, IIUC), but I can't hearing anything at 48kbps that doesn't sound like fingernails on a chalkboard for any length of time.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Ogg is also the default container for FLAC and Speex audio files.
The article talks about audio codecs used for music at data rates of 48 to 160 kbps. Speex is designed for speech and lower bitrates; FLAC is designed for higher bitrates. It's like referring to the U.S. Congress as "Washington" if the context makes it clear that a legislative body is meant (though "Capitol Hill" is more specific), even though two other branches of the U.S. government are located there.
So umm.. Billy Jean? I am not sure if it is in anyone's library of reference tracks for testing audio equipment.
In any case why is the /. article trying to draw a conclusion that the original article did not. They were not comparing peoples ability to distinguish bit rates, they were comparing two music services. Would be nice if the people submitting stories would RTFA, I imagine if they wanted to compare bit rates they would use a source where they would take a single source and encode at various bit rates and try to eliminate the 50 variables present in their existing methodology.
And since when is Billy Jean representative of music in general? It is a song with typical radio production and will not gain as much as music with higher production values might from higher bitrate.
Having conducted a double blind test with some friends I got wastly different results depending on the song.. Everyone could tell the difference between 128kbit mp3:s and 320 kbit mp3:s when listening to orchestral music, but noone could tell the difference between 320kbit and the actual CD. When listening to "Ace of Spades" with Motörhead noone could tell the difference between 128 and 320kbit.
As a sidenote, when we tested noone could tell the difference between the cheapest possible CD-player and a semi-expensive Marantz unit either. Or between cheap and expensive cables...
I often see people confuse sample rate with bit rate when discussing digital music. 48KHz is a very common sampling rate, and a 48KHz sampled bit of audio could then be streamed at any bit rate you want. In my experience, a 48Kbps stream sounds very noticeable worse than a 160Kbps stream, regardless of codec, etc. Can someone confirm that SkySongs shows up as 48Kbps when it is streamed to winamp, or some other mp3 player? I can't, as I am in the US.
True audiophiles know that it's only past 120kbps that Bob Dylan speaks coherent English.
I paid to get my TV ISF calibrated. It looks amazing. But if you brought it inside a Best Buy and sat it next to their other TVs your average Joe would think it looks like crap.
The TV manufacturers increase the amount of blue to make things appear brighter. People's faces turn green so they up the amount of Red. Then they over-sharpen which introduces artifacts and over-contrast which creates banding.
Encoding audio in a lossy format no doubtingly does the same thing. They make sure the music still "pop"s to the point where it is exaggerated causing the music to "sound" better.
The people who say that 48Kbps sounds better than 160 would probably say the same thing compared to the original.
In order to make the comparison valid, they should have used the same codec throughout, be that Ogg or AAC+ or whatever they could settle on using. Bitrate is not an objective measure of quality: in fact, the only thing it measures objectively is file size. What makes one codec better than another is how low the bitrate can go while still sounding good. Because different codecs perform differently at the Bitrate Limbo, you need to use the same codec throughout a study, or at least test each codec at all the bitrates you're working with, in order to get a valid set of data to examine the differences.
There is no doubt in my mind that the concept here happens to be correct: that all but the most egregious differences in compression are imperceptible to most people, and that many of those who claim they can tell the difference are experiencing nothing more than the placebo effect. But this study does nothing to establish or disprove that assertion, because its methodology was fundamentally flawed.
We're talking about an audience who can't distinguish between a piano and a harpsichord, an 808 and a 909.
For these people, highly compressed digital wizzbangery is the norm. "House, the way grandma used to make." It doesn't matter if it comes out of a big system, or a cell phone. The producers are retarded. The audience is retarded. Retards. One third of em.
This is priceless:
http://www.bradlinder.net/2009/03/testing-zoom-h4-h4n-and-sony-pcm-d50.html#comment-5287493306135152009
A bunch of audiophiles comment on the subtle (and vast!!) differences in quality between two devices, then somebody discovers that they had been listening to the SAME FILE.
Jesus I'd never seen those. Just for those of you at home, I'm a professional sound designer for films, and I use ethernet cables that I bought at Fry's for a couple bucks a piece.
I'm sure the cable will greatly improve the quality of your films; I use it for my work (I'm an academic who writes a lot of research studies), it is amazing how much improvement I see in the quality of my writing and the sophistication of my data thanks to the optimum signal transfer provided by this cable.
Lessee.. google up 'binomial distribution' with n=16 and m=5 and...
Yup, if we take the null hypothesis that no one could tell the difference, there's a 6% chance of null hypothesis giving this result. This isn't a study, it's some gossip. No meaningful statement can be made, other than 'it's pretty clear that the lower bitrate isn't likely to be PREFERABLE' which is not much of a conclusion.
>> They simply don't have the mental acuity to care.
In other words, the ipod users. The ones who just think how cool it looks, not how good it sounds.
e.g. iriver kicks ipod ass any time when it comes to sound quality. So does Sony (I hate them too, but this is my experience).
I bet if one looks at the demographics, that 1/3 of the people tested were born before 1980. Like myself this 1/3 also believes that vinyl sounds way better than any digital format even with all the pop, hisses and squeaks!
If this was done as a represenative sample then the majority of participants would be over 40. We all know that hearing degrades over time. Without the test broken up by age group there is an inherit bias in the sample group. The top 5k of that 15k to 20k is shot in most 40 year olds and if I remember rightly there is a pocket in the 8k-12k that goes early on too.
It is possible that an additional bias of Internet savvy users versus general population may also be present.
In addition musical tastes between age groups factors in since, both working for Audiologists (Miracle Ear, Sonus, National Hearing, Amplifon) and going through the training for the NOAH I was amazed to see the age groups, the very old and a growing number of youth. Loud Music = Damaged Ears but worse yet are those damn ear buds. A generational bias of people using "In the Ear" headphones has done quite a bit of damage to the range in which people hear and there is a considerable generation gap in that damage.
Since I am a big Post-Waters Floyd fan (the more blues influenced Gilmore days) and a Jazz\Industrial\Classical the damage to my ears would be very different then a R&B\Rap fan.
I would be very interested in a large scale, well done survey to see if this is more an issue of hearing damage segmented by Age, Music Tastes, and hobbies (No kidding, Hunters are one of the biggest demographics of hearing aid wearers due to gun fire but get this, Country fans have strong correlations to ear damage not from the music, but from hunting.) So various hobbies and lifestyles can correlate to hearing damage.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
that would sound better with 100% lossy compression.
Anyone ever hear of Nyquist theory? Anything at more than half the sampling rate will be aliased to a lower frequency unless it is filtered. Human hearing maxes at approximately 20khz. If you filter out 22khz you can sample at 44khz without aliasing. Usually when I work with a DSP i filter everything under 200 hz (DC Noise) and over 30 khz (outside our hearing range) and then I can sample it at 64k with no aliasing. There is no point to sampling music over 64 khz... it's pretty simple math and I thought common knowledge to anyone who has done any DSP. Apparently this company doesn't understand they're business very well... the results of this test are fairly predictable.
Headphones might be another story. I don't do enough listening to really say for certain, but my experience is that on even so-so headphones, I can tell the difference between crappy mp3s and good ones. But if we're essentially talking about people using their included ipod headphones, and using them to listen WAY too loud, I can totally see how there isn't much difference between the really bad files and even so-so ones.
This is precisely my a lot of my music for DJing purposes is just plain old 128k -- in a big room with speakers designed primarily for loudness, the quality of the source becomes nearly irrelevant.
This test isn't a complete experimental fiasco (like some of the Microsoft-sponsored listening tests that deem WMA to sound as good at 64k as MP3 at 128k).
But there are a couple of significant flaws with it, that make the results pretty useless:
If you want to know about some methodologically-better comparisons of audio codec quality, please see the Codec listening test page at Wikipedia. Full disclosure: I wrote most of this article, and have attempted to compile the results of all the carefully-conducted independent tests that I could find.
Finally, none of this is to say that we should all demand 160kbps streaming audio if 48kbps can be made to sound just as good. It's just that this study doesn't establish that, not by a long shot. The headline is also wrong in claiming that 1/3 of the participants couldn't distinguish 48k from 160k audio: in fact, they preferred the 48k audio. And preferring one format is very different from claiming that it is of a high-fidelity: for example, audio with a compressed dynamic range is by definition degraded, and yet it persists in commercial rock recordings because uniformly loud music grabs listeners' attention more easily.
My bicyles
48 vs 160 Kbps does not fully describe the difference of what went into their ears, it depends on the music as well. How about the actual frequency range/distribution of each of the samples for example? Other questions to ask: did the participants fly or experience any other drastic change in altitude (ear-popping) shortly before the test? Did they have their coffee yet?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
1/3 of those who could spot a difference in the audio clips also complained of hearing voices in their heads.
I can definitely tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio completely. 320kbps and Lossless can be a gray line sometimes, but I can definitely tell 256kbps and 192kbps between lossless.
I can tell the difference. That's all that matters.
That's a terrible headline. Not even the "study" authors claim this was in any way scientific, yet slashdot chooses to use a sweeping general statement as the headline. Besides not being newsworthy, the statement is also blatantly false. The actual outcome of this unrepresentative study is that 5 of 16 people liked a song encoded at a lower bitrate and using a completely different codec "better". If that's in any way noteworthy it must be an awfully slow news day.
- illuminaut, arbiter elegantiarum.
There appears to be confusion in some of the postings. In summary,
64kbps AAC does not equal 64kbps OGG does not equal 64kbps MP3 (CBR) or does that equal 64kbps MP3 (VBR).
If you're talking about good old vanialla MP3, you'd have to be tone deaf not to recognise MP3 at 128kbps (CBR) or even MP3 at 164kbps (CBR) even on cheap speakers. Of the formats listed, MP3 is certaintly the lowest quality. I get a headache listening to anything MP3 (CBR) at lower than 192kbps - and i'm no golden eared audio-phile. However, I usually can't tell the difference at 224kbps MP3 (CBR) or higher.
Going back about eight years ago, I converted several different songs at 128, 164, 192, 224, 256, 320 kbps (CBR) - and played them back using my US$100 computer speakers for a friend of mine who is a sound engineer. The test results were consistent for him, regardless of the type track I used (instrumental, rock, ballad, or classical). He could pick up-to and including 256kbps (CBR) on each of the tracks, although he said each time "it just doesn't quite sound right" when at 224kpbs but couldn't put a finger on it. I randomised the order in which I named and played the tracks.
To this day, I am still staggered why people consider 128kbps MP3 (CBR) acceptable for any sort of music, but this quality of encoding rules the p2p networks.
As one other poster previously said, hard drives are so cheap these days that I keep my collection in FLAC.
AC
At some point the signal is cancelled. Those frequencies you can't hear overlap with other frequencies you can't hear and with frequencies that you can hear and the sound is changed.
Are you trying to tell me that if two 18khz signals from separate sources interact with each other, that the resulting signal will suddenly become 16khz and thus be audible? Because that sure sounds like what you are saying.
you would have a better chance of selling me on that sort of silliness if you insisted that audio red shifting was occurring. Are you listening to your music via ambulance siren?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Absolutely.
Slashdot loves this topic, people with shitty speakers, crappy equipment, tone deaf, and with no musical background, likely almost never going to hear a real live orchestra in their life loves anything that puts the audiophiles back in their places.
I used to be in the following camp, I cleaned out the earwax, now I go to orchestras and hear what I'm missing, it only took a 70 dollar investment in some Grado headphones to listen to stuff and go... This sounds really bad, it sounds really weird... (You can't see bitrates on mp3 players, so when I went home I discovered why all my Beatles sounded awful, 128kbps while most everything else is 192 or higher. I could also hear stuff I ripped back in the late ninties with compression artificats ripped at 320, just from advances in technology, the software has improved so much as well
128 to 320kbps doesn't make the vocals or big pounding bass sound better, it makes all the little background sounds and notes become something other than fuzz, it makes the vibrato sharp and crisp, it allows you to distinguish every background vocalist individualy instead of one merged unison. The 'unimportant' bits return.
1/3rd can't tell audio bitrates, *Gasp, Shock* and Half the US population doesn't believe in evolution. The majority of Americans eat predominantly con-agra and kraft chemicals for breakfast lunch and dinner and haven't tasted a fresh vegetable in years and see no problem with it. So this is proof bitrates are garbage? Hell look at the Musical Tastes of the majority of people... Of course you can't hear a difference. Just because mainstream NFL halftime hip-hop and crap-soulless-corp-rock sells better than classical music doesn't make it better music or make me value their opinion.
Hell, lets do a study, 1/3rd of people likely can't tell the difference between IE6 and recent anything else, does that mean browsers are crap? Of course not.
Audiophiles win this round, just because most people have become deaf and numb to quality doesn't mean I have to. This applies to food, knowledge, media, sweeteners, music, video, furniture, computers, operating systems, etc.
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
I mean even at bit rates multiple times what this article tested storage space and bandwidth is unlikely to be an issue. At this point one should not have to worry about which codec sounds better, rather I would have expected codec's to be competing based on which is cheaper/easier to implement in embedded devices assuming that the parameters like bit-rate have already been set so they are indistinguishable from the original recording even using the best hi-fi systems out there.
So basically, when used at a "high" bit-rate (not $300 cable "high" , but "Mozart probably wouldn't tell the difference" high ), which codec has the lowest processing requirements?
Btw, using typical bitrates found on say iTunes or Amazon, how does lossless codecs like FLAC compare to the lossy ones in processing requirements? Are they in general quicker / slower to encode and decode or does it depend completely on the codec?
They need to try more samples.
Some sounds really suck at low bit rates, like cymbals. All the info is in the higher frequencies.
One of the worst cases is voice over white noise. Humans are good at pulling voice out of white noise, but most codecs use too many bits trying to replicate the white noise.
would have been a relevant survey if it was the same audio codec.
Pop music is engineered to be played on cheap equipment. After all, that's what most people have. Practically nobody has ever heard Michael Jackson without a ton of electronics between them. You want a real comparison, use classical or jazz, where folks know what a *real* live performance sounds like.
It's also notable that the people who liked the lower bit rate recording said "more bass == better". "More bass" has been the "gold standard" in pop music for a good number of years -- the harder it punches you in the stomach, the "better" it is.
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
sound reproduction is not a chain, it's a relay race. Any particular member of that race can single handedly improve or worsen the reproduction.
Incorrect. If I take a crappy Power amp and crank it until it is fuzzy, $10k professional studio monitors will not fix the problem.
Everything between the singers mouth and your ears is can only degrade the signal. Every time signal is lost, it cannot be recovered. It can be altered, and possibly in ways that are aesthetically pleasing (compression, reverb, etc.), but it is always a downhill ride.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
no seriously, i couldn't hear you, can you speak a little louder?
I recall reading an article about the quantifiable (brain chem) satisfaction derived from listening to higher quality music... why else would people spend hundreds of thousands on audiophile gear?
Higher-bitrate video or audio is more likely to have hiccups in a live stream when using a slow connection or internet traffic is high. When I view online videos at a site that gives a range of resolutions, sometimes the lower-resolution one looks better because the higher-resolution version gets pixelated as it struggles to maintain the higher data rate.
For this to be a valid comparison, they should have the listeners completely download each track, then listen, so bandwidth hiccups don't influence the result.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
This goes a long way in explaining how Creed sold 10 million albums.
"But this one goes to 11!"
.... if you are premium user. (ok not for all songs yet I think but on many, many, many)
1/3 of people is fuckin deaf!
1/3 OF PEOPLE IS FUCKIN DEAF I SAID!!!
Note to the filter. I know that using caps is like yelling, but I want the 1/3 people to hear me. I WAS TALKING WITH THE FILTER!
When using fAAC with settings "quality 100%" and "no cutoff under 22khz", I get 160kbit/s output. I also get noticeable cpu load during its playback. OGG uses less cpu intensive algorithms and thus loses in size/quality comparisons. Replace all occurences of OGG in the article with MP3 and it would still be true.
We have an original recording R, and two renditions A and B.
People are asked whether they like A or B better (without giving them access to R at all).
67% like A better, 33% like B better.
The article concludes that this means that those 33% can't distinguish A and B, and the other can.
This is such a load of horse hockey. Why would they say they prefer a version if they can't distinguish them?
If we make the hypothesis that those that can't distinguish the versions pick a random one, then we have 33%
who randomly picked B, and thus likely about an equal 33% who randomly picked A. Which would mean that
actually only 34% made a qualified choice of A.
Now this is under the hypothesis that those who were able to distinguish the versions picked the one that is closer
to R. But people never got to listen to R! With good compression, most of the predictable, _musical_ content is kept
and most of the data loss occurs with high entropy data, noise. Thus the compressed material tends to be warmer in sound, though less faithful.
In short: the experimenters get the experiment wrong because of wrong premises, and even accepting their totally idiotic premises, they interpret the numbers utterly wrong.
This is not merely garbage in, garbage out: with their intellectual capacities, they would produce garbage out even from useful data in.
On a related note, does anyone know what encoder digitally imported are using? Somehow their free 24kbps AAC+ stream sounds about as good as the premium (256kbps?) mp3.
(For an idea of how good my ears / speakers are, ABX testing shows that I can tell the difference between 128kbps and 160kbps ogg, but everything higher than that sounds the same -- not great, but good enough that I think the above "sounds about as good as" is worth investigating)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Re: Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC will be tomorrow's vinyl I sell ultra high performance two channel home audio systems, including turntables. I also sell the highest performance digital, but at the end of the day vinyl is the better format -- at least that's what my clients say. Compared to the best digital sources available, vinyl still outperforms digital: it simply sounds more real. Yes, cleaning records can be a chore. Yes, you get some surface clicks and pops. But when it comes down to what sounds more like the real thing to most people without prejudices, vinyl wins. The contest is over in seconds. If you think records are just a retro thing, think again. They might be a niche market, but that market is going strong and growing...market statistics prove it. Today's low-bitrate MP3/AAC is more akin to yesterday's 8-track tapes or prerecorded cassettes.
If one third choses the supposedly inferior codec, then you could say that about 2 thirds simply doesn't know the difference and just choses randomly.
However, If I read things correctly, they tested one codec at 48k against another codec at 160k. This test shows that "the other codec at 160k" is pretty bad: It gets beaten (for a lot of people) by 48k on the other codec. Not that 1/3rd (or 2/3rds) of the people don't know what they are talking about.
And this a surprise? Even audio nerds are under the illusion that vinyl records sound better than CD's. Some people just get it in their heads that the distorted sound is closer to what it should really sound like.
My favorite codec (for my psp) 64kbps ATRACplus3 MP3 128kps
2/3 of all people prefer 160kps audio over 48? Who would have guessed.
I'm not about to wade through 450 comments to find out. I wonder if this has any correlation with the finding that some people actually ended up preferring the sound of MP3-compressed, artefacted music than the original, lossless copy? Something about compression artefacts, for whatever reason, seems to be defining music as we know it today.
That's not to say that 48kbps AACplusv2 doesn't sound damned good for the bitrate (depending on the music type), mind you. It's absolutely awesome for low-bandwidth connections for streaming audio. But I do find it incredibly interesting that this is the case - It means that in essence, it's not a question of accurate reproduction of the source material in these cases, but rather what people seem to be finding more "natural", as far as what they're used to hearing. Or maybe there's just something about lossy compression artefacts that sound good to some people. Certainly, it bugs me to no end, but I'm not most people.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
This is misleading. As an audio producer, I am familiar with the psychology behind hearing. Ears become attuned to certain frequencies and noise domains. If you are consistently exposed to low quality signals, your brain adjusts for them and learns to extract the signal from the noise. If you are consistently exposed to high quality signals, your brain becomes used to it and is not good at dealing with noise. Hence, this argument is the same as this argument:
"1/3 of people cannot recognise a quality racehorse from a nag". This is because they are not educated in horses and have no decent experience by which to judge from.
This is entirely different from saying "Nags are as good as race horses because 1/3 of people think so".
I guarentee no matter what the compression format, I can tell you which audio is sampled at 48k and which at 160k, because I work with them daily.
This article is basically saying "1/3 of people have completely untrained ears and dont know the difference between different sounds. Therefore, they dont know the difference between different sounds".
If this wasnt so boring it might be an Ig Nobel candidate.
I'm not tone deaf - I just sing in a low bitrate!
The subject and the summery are completely misleading.
If you RTFA is says that two different audio codecs are being compared. Not just bitrates. This is apples and oranges.
If they think 48kbps sounds better, that right there is grounds to objectively say....they're a bunch of idiots. Not much more to read into.
And many people cannot tell the difference between 720p 1080p or 480i for that matter. They also cannot tell the difference between a crappy and a good paintjob on a car/bike or distinguish a Harley from a chinese chopper with a 250 engine.
Depends on the music too. Most people use the standard crap iphone (and alike) head phones for crap encoded mp3.....
Then there are people who do not care because they are too old, busy, deaf or ignorant.
For me: I sometimes resent that I need good sound quality, 1080p where ever possible, and my bikes cost twice as much as my car costs. I also can make a difference between a bad and good paint job, but never wash my car (only my bikes) and my old trusted BMW's clear coat is literally peeling left and right ...... because I really really do not give a doo-doo.
I think most people do not give a doo-doo about the quality of anything anymore. Mass crap rules, so yeah, encode it in 48kbit so you can stuff more on a cheap drive....
The article is about a comparison between music services that provides audio streams over the Internet. For a given connection to the Internet, the number of simultaneous listeners equals the connection's overall throughput divided by the bitrate of each stream. So the services have an incentive to minimize the bitrate of each stream: if they do so, they can serve more listeners with the same bandwidth bill. But customers often don't demand transparency; instead, they demand good enough, and the article shows that 48 kbps is good enough for a lot of listeners.
There is absolutely nothing surprising about this study - it is right in line with the large AB studies done in the past comparing AAC, WMA, MP3 etc. (Since the poster didn't bother to read up on the topic before positing to slashdot, I cannot be bothered to look up a link either) . AAC+ is a vastly superior codec for low bit-rate streaming, for which it was developed. It uses a very powerful technique called spectral replication (who would have thought something that useful would come out of Sweden - just kidding). Please don't post articles about things you know nothing about. Thank you.
I'm always amazed that these tests have much credence. I'm a FLAC fellow and I'll be damned if I can tell a song is in 128 kbps unless I'm familiar with the song. Stick in one of my favorite recordings and I'll notice elements that sound off or muffled... but on any other song how am I to know what it is supposed to sound like?
Over what period of time did the participants make this judgement?
I have to say I struggle to tell the difference between 128kb/s and 320kb/s, at least on first listen. Though I would have thought I could tell 48 from 160.
But there's a big difference between picking one or the other after a single 3 minute track of each and sustained listening over a period of time to one or the other. I mean like several days of having them on your mp3 player.
Back when I had a minidisk I tried recording stuff with atrac3plus on the higher compression (their LP4 mode) and on first listen I'd think, "oh, it sounds good enough". But after a day or so of listening to MDs so encoded, it got very annoying and it became quite obvious it was inferior to the LP2 mode (which was 132kb/s) . It can take a while to notice, at least if you aren't a super-aware hi-fi buff. A short comparison test doesn't mean much.
PS if you hi-fi fanatics are wondering why people don't buy true hi-fi any more, its because we can't afford the large houses to put them in! If you can only afford a tiny flat with no sound-insulation there's not a lot of point in expensive hifi.
As too often in today's culture, everyone is focused in on tiny things and missing the big picture.
Some original content / source material compresses well to a lower bitrate. IE: it didn't have the sonic detail in the first place. This test would be more meaningful if there was a way to measure how much loss occurs during compression, and test people to see if they can hear the difference- knowing how much numeric loss there is.
I would want to see a spectrogram of the original music to know if it has enough high-frequency detail to begin with. If not, then I'm sure the lower bitrate works just fine.
at 292kbs sounds great-faithfully reproduces the "artifacts" on my vinyl cleanly without clipping or distortion, and gives me hours of listening enjoyment, even if I "encode" at LP2 or even LP4. my portable MD player lasts days without charging the battery and does exactly what I want it to do-play music.
:)
Now, git offah mah lawn!
I know that the **AA may disagree, but your music tracks may someday be used by your heirs, no? And being that there is a good chance that you will have kicked off because of being old, it's likely that their ears could be a lot younger and more sensitive. (Not to mention the portion of the population, probably a large portion, who believe that if they buy a music track it is OK to let all of their children use/listen to it, also.) I frankly agree with the previous posters who said that in this day of cheaper and cheaper storage, it pays to rip to/buy at higher quality or even lossless, and reencode if you need a lower quality for a small capacity music player.
In other news, 1/3 of audiophiles still think vinyl gramophone records sound better than any digital format.
Score:5, Irrelevant. The cited study compares 16 bit/44,100Hz CD quality audio with audio stored in higher resolution formats (the whole DVD-A argument). At CD quality, there are 44,100 samples per channel per second, each of which has 2^16 (65536) possible values. You have to look really closely to see that as jagged, and in reality the physical motion of a speaker will not reproduce the tiny amount of aliasing that could occur.
This is completely different to lossy audio compression. Sheesh.
I'm still looking for monophonic audio equipment. I've never been able to tell the difference between mono and stereo, and can't see the reason for paying for the doubled bandwidth, second amplifier etc. Total waste of time. But then again, we're talking about music, so we started at "total waste of time", and haven't gone anywhere uphill from there.
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WTF 2/3 did hear the difference, which proves there is a difference , so how can you use this clear result to argue the opposite is true, sjeesh /.!
If 1/3 said the lower rate sounded better, they were probably guessing, because neither sounded better but they were in a forced choice situation. That being so, it's likely that as many people were guessing when they "chose" the 160k. Thus, it is most likely that 1/3 of the people, or less, could tell the difference.
And chances are if you played the samples back using desktop compact speakers or made them listen on ear buds, that last third would disappear as the guessers took over, half of them right, half of them wrong, and nobody hearing a bit of difference.
The main difference is in the very high frequency clipping, an effect noted by the audiophile crowd when CDs were first being introduced. It was proven then that the technology (which is essentially unchanged now) caused a high frequency noise which whether embedded in the music or removed and play by itself, grated on the nerves, made people cranky and made the listening less pleasant.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Sound is just like art, not everyones ears are designed to hear exactly identical as anothers, same goes for vision. The problem here is tech people who think they are scientist and it doesn't work that way. The way audio waves are understood by the human brain is a 2 part question, 1) What enviroment has the ears been subject to for the vast amount of time and 2) how much training has been given to understanding sound with assoication.
A monk, who spends 30 years of his life in a temple high up in the mountian tops and very rarely hears sounds other then nature and possiblely his own voice will have a totally didn't processing then say a 22 year old who spent thier entire life growing up in manhatten, ny. With those factors in the puzzel, you now have personal choice, hence why almost all stereos/radios/winamp have something called AN EQUALIZER!, to allow people to adject the wave lengths to there choice, it's not just for BASS.
Nothing new here, move along.
This was done long ago in what the September 1970 Popular Electronics magazine called, "The Experiment that saved Hi Fi". Then as now, Joe six-pack was accustomed to hearing noisy distorted music. In 1945 he was accustomed to hearing Billie Holiday and big band music with a freq cutoff of 5000Hz or so. If engineers hadn't second guessed Joe and redesigned the experiment FM radio would have always sounded almost exactly like AM radio.
The thing about tests like these is that they say nothing about quality in general or "the truth" as perceived by the individual.
The majority of people in historic Germany voted for Hitler. ...and so forth.
The majority of people thought DDT was a good idea for keeping moths out of your clothes.
The majority of people are more scared of dying in a terrorist attack than of taking a leathal step in the bath (http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2362835/posts).
The majority of Americans don't know that Georgia is not just an American state.
You can either learn from this that any selected majority of people are idiots, or that they just have different opinions, but that - thank you scientists - there are actually non-idiots out there working hard to provide crisp sounding silky smooth feinschmecker audio fidelity for the ones of us who can actually tell a difference.
Think of it this way: 1/3 thinks that 48kbps AAC+ sounds better that 160kbps OGG Vorbis... Well, don't throw out those broken loudspeakers just yet - there's a market stock-full of suckers out there just begging to buy them from you, just as long as you tell 'em they're 48kbps Ready (TM).
I hate it when they put it like that. It should be "1/3 of people AREN'T PERCEPTIVE ENOUGH to tell the difference..." The difference is there; it's fact. Just because you haven't developed your perception enough to tell doesn't mean it doesn't matter and that there is no difference. (people who say the same about framerates drive me mad as well)
I wonder how much of this is the Loudness War and GIGO.
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A lot of people are writing this off because the lower bitrate couldn't possibly sound better. Personally I couldn't judge because I never use either codec. I did notice in my experiments with MP3 over the years though that quality is also highly dependent on the encoder. 96kps (Joint Stereo, 44.1kHz) on Fraunhofer would sound far better than 160kps on Xing (but encode in 5x the time).
Ultimately though, MP3 has become the lingua franca for digital audio, so it's more like "two formats were compared that don't play on any of my dozen or so portable players; some preferences were revealed." I have MP3s from a decade ago that still play fine now on anything with a CPU and sound output, but my Yamaha YQF files? Lost them, and I might even be hard pressed to find a player. For me, quality takes a backseat to long-term playability. Both formats have this in theory, but at the moment, they aren't even that playable in the present day.
Of the 16 people tested, six people -- over a third -- thought Sky Songs ('version B') was the higher-quality audio. Conversely, ten people identified Spotify ('version A') as being the higher-quality track.
That means 16 out of 16 did report a difference, which is a long way from "1/3 of people can't tell the difference". I actually wouldn't be surprised if 1/3 couldn't, though, because practically everyone loses high-frequency hearing as they age, and probably 1/3 of people are old enough to be affected by that.
Of course, the tiny sample size speaks for itself...
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!