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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I would agree with the desensitizing of some of the younger listeners. I have 2 daughters 16 and 18 and I always laugh when they come to me with some "new" music they heard. The last was some Iron Maiden. My 18 yr olds comment was how come my old LP's sounded so good played on my "old" turn table (yes I still have one that I jealously guard) When she compares what she plays on her iPod vs the LP, even she notices the difference.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Then the summary is misleading in presenting this as a comparison of bitrates. The article is really comparing the audio quality of the two services.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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? ]=-
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?
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1/3 of those who could spot a difference in the audio clips also complained of hearing voices in their heads.
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.
A big part of the problem these days (aside from apathy) is the grotesquely inflated price of stereo equipment. Most people just do not have it in their budgets to spend thousands of dollars on high quality amps and speakers -- the only reason I have the killer system I have is that I was able to wrangle up some nice vintage speakers for next to nothing (I had a coworker at my last job who had a drug problem -- 'nuff said), making it worth it for me to bite the bullet and buy a nice receiver and sub. If it wasn't for this, I would likely still be using the speakers in my TV, or a set of crappy bookshelf speakers connected to a cheap, shitty amp, just to avoid the obscene cost of admission into the hi-fi club.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I think a LOT of this has to do with so many of today's kids not KNOWING what good sound reproduction CAN sound like.
I've been building my stereo system ever since I was a kid. I walked into a high end audio shop at about age 12...and first heard Klipschorn's hooked to McIntosh tube amp, and I couldn't believe my ears...
It was right then, that I started building my system so I could have that some day. And, today...after buying piece here..piece there, deal on this..selling it and improving one piece at time (ok, thieves and insurance helped with the speakers at the end), I almost have that set up.
People that come over and hear it...are often amazed how good it sounds....they often exclaim they hear new things and nuances in familiar songs they'd never heard before.
Sure, I like an iPod, I have a couple of them...a shuffle for the gym, and a classic for travel, in the car..etc. I have good earphones for them, Shure 530's I think....but, I do realize that these are for very POOR listening environments. I try to get my music in the best source I can (this means CD's at this time, can't buy lossless online yet), I rip them to flac for home stereo usage..and decently high quality mp3 for portable use.
Unfortunately, somewhere between now and when I was a kid...people stopped buying good home audio systems. I don't quite know what or what happened. Somewhere along the line...ONLY portable players came into vogue...and it is sad that so many are losing out how good sound reproduction can be. I dunno if it is cause or effect....but, so much of todays music is mixed so poorly, overly compressed with no dynamic headroom anymore. So, maybe there isn't much point to getting good gear, if new music is no longer mixed to get the most out of it.
But, as far as good gear goes....you needn't go overboard on the super audiophile non-sense and voodoo that is out there, but, with respect to solid audio gear...to a certain extent, you do get what you pay for...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
No I am not deaf. I just don't care enough (ie. I'm not an adiophile) to actively listen for the differences. So 48Kbps and 106Kbps don't sound all that different to me because I have more important things in my life than worrying about what audio rate a two minute song was encoded at.
Mod parent up. I'd say *most* people don't know what good sound should sound like. At some point FM radio became the quality target instead of live performance; perhaps because people became so used to hearing music with other noise in the background (car, exercise equipment, talkative restaurant).
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.
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'll bet you that real stereophiles can tell the difference, but they're a dying breed.
Half the 'stereophiles' out there are running around buying Monster digital audio and HDMI cables.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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?
Well, to be fair....good high end audio equipment has always been expensive, and it certainly is on the luxury side of the aisle.
That being said....no one says you have to buy it all at once!
I'd mentioned this in a previous post...but, I started as a kid at 12...putting my stereo system together. Started with a cheapie all in one...saved my allowance and neighborhood jobs money (lawns, babysitting) and found on sale, a Marantz receiver. From there...found some big Fisher speakers....later years, I saved and got a pretty good deal on a closeout Pioneer turntable...etc. Over the years, I'd find a good deal on this, or that...and replace a component. So far..I've made it to Klipschorns for speakers...and I have a little Decware SET tube amp. I'm hoping to bridge it to mono, and get another one so I can have one dedicated to each front channel. Some day, I'd like to get some McIntosh tube amps in good shape...etc.
But the thing is...to get good components, just shop and wait for deals and build it one piece at a time.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
Precisely. Sitting and just listening to music (or even having it on while doing something low-key like reading) just isn't done anymore (hell, just reading isn't done much anymore).
I don't think a car is a terrible place to listen to music if you've got a decent sound system and a car with reasonable seals. Radio has gotten so bad that if I listen to a CD or ipod on my car stereo, and then switch to radio, it makes me very sad.
As I'm sure you know, sample rate is not the same as bps of streamed audio. Most digital audio is sampled at 48KSs/channel (raw audio data), and can then be streamed at any bitrate at all, after being compressed as mp3, ogg, or whatever. The sample rate has nothing at all to do with streaming bps.
Apparently this company doesn't understand they're business very well...
Just like some people don't understand the difference between frequency and bitrate?
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?
Unfortunately, somewhere between now and when I was a kid...people stopped buying good home audio systems. I don't quite know what or what happened.
Maybe they didnt enjoy it.
Why do you think people enjoy music and songs ? Most likely, not because its reproduced faithfully, or because they care about the nuances.
Almost nobody cares about the nuances, they like beats and bass or dancy tunes, gansta lyrics or love stories, stuff that is accessible and they can relate to.
Sure, some people care about that little uptick from the violin on the 3rd measure of the 6th symphony of whoever that you can only hear with an hi-fi system in a quiet room. But most people just listen to music to either give them some energy for their workout, have fun at parties or concert, or drone the sounds of their miserable commutes, dreary jog run or boring life.
Same reasons people eat fast food instead of fine cuisine I guess.
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)
Well, I'd actually think that today, a good high end system would be in more demand, with the different forms of entertainment out as you mention. I mean, with all the great HD sets out there and projectors coming into decent price ranges, well, good audio really compliments that. I'd think that the home theater mkt. would justify it....I mean, a good audio system isn't just for sitting an listening, I mean I really enjoy my 2 channels for doing just that, but, I also have other amps and speakers I crank up for 7.1 surround for watching moves and the like.
And, while I don't have any console gaming systems, I've thought that many of these too were now in surround with really good audio coming out of them..would that not also be better for the gaming experience? With movies, I love explosions that give my sub and K-Horns a real chance to blast the bass and shake a full city block in a movie...would that not make a FPS on a PS3 more fun too?
And while surfing the internet, I rarely if ever do it just by itself in a quiet room as that I've always got tunes and/or the various tv's in the house on, so surfing to tunes is pretty natural I'd think.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
People that come over and hear it...are often amazed how good it sounds....they often exclaim they hear new things and nuances in familiar songs they'd never heard before.
Same is true when I turn up the treble, or turn up the bass. I can hear different "parts" of a song. My headphones sound differently than my speakers, both have unique sounds that I hear the song differently. Which version is better is entirely subjective and opinionated to a certain point. Sure, hearing clipping will be a dead giveaway on poor quality, but not when (in effect) the equalizer settings are different from each system.
My brother loves songs with no bass, and higher treble. I prefer songs with middle to lots of bass and middle to no treble. He can hear a song on my speakers and hate it, but take it to his system and love it. Song enjoyment based on people's preferences is not scientific.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
I grew up in the 80s and early 90s and most people I knew just had off-the-shelf radio/cassette/record-players from Target or wherever. Myself included. And the music always sounded good enough. It still does. I had a couple friends who turned audio hobbyist but I never saw the point. They spent loads of money and seemed to enjoy the music less.
And nowadays, emphasis should really be on enjoying music live, anyway. I might be wrong but I expect distribution will bring less and less money, but not less fame - and fame will bring performances and money.
If I want to carry my favorite artists with me, or listen to them at home, I have bigger things to worry about and spend on than the quality of the audio. Good enough is good enough for that.
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.
It's not even "FM" quality, since even on FM, a song that is mastered well will sound very decent and authentic.
It's that the advent of compression in mastering, *in general*, has been so gradual that unless you knew about it beforehand, you wouldn't have noticed it.
Anecdote: I have two friends who heard me complaining about the shitty mastering and compression that has been happening in hard rock and metal for a while now. They finally made me sit down and explain what was happening, and then I found some examples on YouTube for them to listen to (of songs they knew, best of all).
Now they hate me, because now they *notice* it, but can't do anything about it :P
You can have all the greatest audio equipment in the world (leaving aside the argument about audiophiles and their dubiously useful accessories and beliefs about what results in "better audio quality), but the real problem is at the mastering stage, not the consumer output stage.
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.
I'm not an audiophile like you, but I do recognize differences in quality.
From recording FRAPS vids of games, I noted that 48kbit AAC HE (encoded with 3GPP AAC+ codec in MediaCoder) sounds quite close to the source material. MP3 needed twice the bitrate, and ogg +6kbits. This was for game music.
For encoding voices, it was totally different. MP3 was much closer, and ogg was in the lead. (but why not use one of those other voice-related codecs, instead?)
For songs (voices + music), AAC at 48kbit had too many artifacts to be enjoyable. It really sounded quite awful. Ogg sounded much better than it when I pushed the bitrate a bit higher. (which isn't possible for 3GPP AAC+)
My conclusion? A complete tangent, but I'm noticing more differences as I upgrade my speakers and soundcard. I'll have to revise this next upgrade. :P
And nowadays, emphasis should really be on enjoying music live, anyway.
tell me when Zappa tours again
For most people, listening to music is the hobby, not building the system to play the music. You're giving good advice, but attempting to fix the wrong problem.
Unfortunately, somewhere between now and when I was a kid...people stopped buying good home audio systems.
But, as far as good gear goes....you needn't go overboard on the super audiophile non-sense and voodoo that is out there, but, with respect to solid audio gear...to a certain extent, you do get what you pay for...
I think the issue is that home audio became less about amazing sound and more about penis extension. I have know two people who call themselves "audiophiles" and have their multi-thousand dollar speakers and monster cables and so on.. and while when they turn up the volume you can actually feel your bones rattling around.. the quality doesn't seem that much better than my cheap (relatively) $199 logitech pc speakers. On the other hand, I have another friend who's audio hardware is probably somewhere in the middle _but_ sounds absolutely incredible.
The difference? He knows what the hell he's doing! When you go over there he doesn't brag about how much money he spent and how many watts his speakers put out.. instead he talks in gory detail about how he used all kinds of meters and doodads to adjust the audio so that it's just right. I can actually picture him sitting in the middle of the room listening to white noise and saying "mm.. band xyz is a little high..".
So my original point.. I don't think interest in high end audio has gone down.. I just think the reasons for it have changed. People didn't stop buying high end audio.. they just stopped using it for more than a status symbol.
My favorite codec (for my psp) 64kbps ATRACplus3 MP3 128kps
I had the same experience, but it took me a lot less time & money to reproduce it!
Some guy at work got a deal on Sennheiser open headphones, and I picked up a HD 595 for about AUD 300 back when they were about 450 in stores. I used a Sony amp I already had, and now my PC is set up so that the output from the PC goes to the amp over digital optics, and then I just plug the headphone into the amp. That eliminates the static and noise from the PC motherboard, otherwise the only function of the amp is that it provides a convenient volume control knob.
I used to have 'proper' speakers and amps for my PC, but the headphones are a night & day difference, even to my untrained ear. I immediately noticed subtle details in audio, and I can now easily hear compression artifacts that I couldn't detect before.
At the time, I was playing Diablo II, and I noticed little things in the audio I couldn't make out before. For example, the blacksmith in the second stage throws her hammer up in the air and catches it. There's a tiny little 'slap' sound when she catches the handle, which I just couldn't hear before.
I figured then that audio in some good quality games is a lot like the visuals: if you play a game designed for 24-bit color on a 16-bit display, you're going to be missing the intention of the artist. The same goes for sound, artists would be using good equipment, and the sounds will have subtle nuances you can't hear without at least decent audio equipment. If you use the $5 speakers that came with your PC, you just won't have the same experience.
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!
you're doing something MASSIVELY wrong if you spend money on high end audio equipment and enjoy the music less. Seriously the purpose of the project is specifically to bring more enjoyment through better sound quality.
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
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.
Unfortunately, somewhere between now and when I was a kid...people stopped buying good home audio systems. I don't quite know what or what happened. Somewhere along the line...ONLY portable players came into vogue...and it is sad that so many are losing out how good sound reproduction can be. I dunno if it is cause or effect....but, so much of todays music is mixed so poorly, overly compressed with no dynamic headroom anymore. So, maybe there isn't much point to getting good gear, if new music is no longer mixed to get the most out of it.
Why do most people seem to prefer trash novels to great literature? I don't know, but they do. Same thing really. I enjoy high-end audio too but I don't care whether others do or not, it's my choice. The reality is that I mostly listen to music in the car and the high-end stuff is rarely switched on because I just don't have time to just sit down and listen to music, as an activity in and of itself. More's the pity, but it's probably true for most people too. That's why an iPod with cheap 'phones is the norm. Likelihood is that in terms of quality of reproduction, we've peaked already, as compressed formats are going to dominate eventually. Look at video/TV. We're already being sold the lie that because it's digital, it's automatically the best thing ever, and people are buying huge screens in droves to get that experience. But hideous encoding artefacts are readily apparent and screens have to smear the image using horrible median filters to help cover it up. But obviously, nobody cares and the broadcasters/manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank.
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.
>> I think a LOT of this has to do with so many of today's kids not KNOWING what good sound reproduction CAN sound like.
Ah.... kids these days, with their myfaces and their spacebooks!
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I do think it's a bit odd that your anecdote tends to disprove your assertion. You didn't require any special training to know that the high end stereo sounded good. So shouldn't today's kids be similarly able to discern quality?
I think that a good number of people really do have a poor innate ability to discern more accurate sound reproduction. Another group has that ability, if they develop it, and a third type can tell the difference without any previous exposure.
Well, I think as I was younger...I was exposed to good audio equipment more...there seemed to be many more outlets selling good stuff. It wasn't just one store in town that no one knew about or went too. Most all of my friends wanted good stereos too, and when we were all old enough to work, we did...and often bought decent stereo gear...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
High-end audio equipment for the general public was a fad that was brought about by the proliferation of the CD. Previously we listened to vinyl and cassettes, then we were blown away by CD quality and sought to realize the full potential of that format. Then most people began to realize that sub-audiophile quality equipment is pretty damned good, relatively very cheap, and we enjoy our music just as much with it. And now many people listen to music all the time, meaning it is often pushed into the background so super high quality is not necessary. The kid who keeps his ipod glued to his body for 12 hours every day is not generally listening "actively," so there is not a real need or desire for the type of audio you speak of. This kid is like most people. I appreciate a good system and enjoy really getting into the music and paying attention to it, but this is a fringe luxury, both in terms of the time and attention that need to be dedicated to it and the hardware. I know what "good" audio sounds like, but I am not made of money and have very little time to devote 100% to music, thus my laptop, G1 phone, Sony home theater system, and under-$500 car system are satisfying.
Short version: compression = bad, but convenience, cost, and portability are equally important as overall quality. It's obvious.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
Now they hate me, because now they *notice* it, but can't do anything about it :P
[...] the real problem is at the mastering stage, not the consumer output stage.
It sounds like the real problem is you, actually.
In other news, 1/3 of audiophiles still think vinyl gramophone records sound better than any digital format.
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.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Everyone wants a surround sound system, and a thumping sub: they just don't care what it sounds like.
Mass market "Hifi" is sold on features and price, not audio quality. This is why we have systems with !1000W PMPO! that somehow run off a 500mA wallwart. It's why we have satellite speakers and subs that are all lows and highs, and no mids. It's why we're happy to have iPod docks instead of hifis in our living rooms.
I'm not saying it's right, but I think in general people don't perceive the need for genuine high fidelity audio. That's not to say they won't appreciate it when they hear it, obviously.
Myself, I blew my ears with a decade of electric bass, standing too close to the highhat and going to raves back in the 90s...!
...buy you also had people in late 80s/early 90s putting together budget *hifi* systems: say a no-frills NAD 3020 amp, some Mission bookshelf speakers, an early CD player or a decent LP player etc.
I think most people are more interested in listening to good tunes and enjoying good music. While I agree that having a decent enough setup
makes a huge difference in sound quality (http://www.richersounds.co.uk/) and i would gladly house your set-up. However I would hate to be so anal about soundquality that it actually detracts from enjoying my favorite musicians and composers. Having spent a fortune on your set-up can you really argue that it actually makes your favorite band any better?
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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
But, doesn't the ability to listen to your music in a more quality fashion, enhance the hobby of music listening??
They go hand in hand do they not?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I don't consider myself anal about any of this. I just like to try to get the best of everything I can get in life in general. The higher end audio gear (and mine isn't the most $$ or the top of the line by any stretch, it is just what "I" like listening to) is not the end in of itself, it is merely a tool to allow me to enjoy my music in a fashion that I prefer. I LOVE music, I love listening to my favorite bands, I like having friends over to party a bit and jam out to old tunes.
In some cases...it is almost a bit of a drawback, in that my system is good enough now, to bring out some pretty audible flaws in the old recordings, but, I get around that, and really balance that out with almost emotional level enjoyment of stuff that is really recorded well by my favorite artists.
Again...I didn't really spend a fortune at once....maybe I have over the years...but, buying a piece here and there over 30+ years isn't a budget killer. I do have some unique problems though....sound disturbing neighbors now that I'm living with a shared wall again....and I have to make sure that the doorways of places I rent, are large enough to get the speakers through (I ran into this being a problem before).
But you do what you do...to enjoy life, and with it being so short, isn't that the main goal of living?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I agree.
I think a LOT of this has to do with so many of today's kids not KNOWING what good sound reproduction CAN sound like.
I know! Kids these days are even turning their guitars up so far that all that comes out is distorted!! You'd think if they actually cared they'd use a system which accurately reproduces the sound of the strings' vibration! It's almost as if they enjoy hearing these weird distorted sounds that bear almost no relation to the things that make them! It's not even real music!
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Only if the perceived end result is justified by the investment. For most folks, the "investment" is a one-time purchase of a stereo setup (if that) and an endless stream of low-priced music purchases.
Spending hours, days, weeks, months and years learning the detailed ins and outs of music reproduction just isn't worth it for most folks.
I only speak the truth! :D
If they didn't want to know, they shouldn't have asked >:D
Well, assuming this was a proper, double-blind test, it just shows the limits are between this 48 kHz and the (much) higher Hertz.
One of the things such tests have done is show, via repeatable experiments, that many of these "expensive" things like gold cables and so on, operate purely on a placebo effect. Without knowing there's a $700 cable or a piece of crap from K-Mart, people cannot tell the difference. And, most embarrassingly, that includes the heads of various audiophile magazines, who now simply refuse to be tested in such manner, profiting as they do from advertisements for such equipment.
In this case, though, "one third can't tell" doesn't say such a higher Hertz is worthless -- after all, two thirds can tell, which makes the quality increase desirable for the average consumer.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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 think a LOT of this has to do with so many of today's kids not KNOWING what good sound reproduction CAN sound like
Did the article specifically state that the participants were "today's kids"?
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!
And nowadays, emphasis should really be on enjoying music live, anyway.
Unfortunately for some stiles of music like Metal listening live is not always better than listening a good mastered album.
I still love going to an orchestra hall (Leipzig Gewandhaus). In contrast, after going to several heavy metal concerts of groups of my preference (dream theater, COB, stratovarius, satriani, vai, maiden, etc...); I find that the objective of going to such concerts is different than when I listen them at my desk/gym/home.
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