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Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3?
EddieSpinola writes "Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files. Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!" Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded. The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version.
and certainly not in a typical house room, car, bus, or bike.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
If the mix doesn't sound good on almost any device, it wasn't mixed well. Audiophiles seem to think we don't take the fact that most people don't have high-end audio gear and lossless audio into account.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
128bps is certainly not enjoyable for certain classical pieces. By the time you've hit 192, it's fine. At 320kbps I can't tell the difference. If that means I have "tin ears" I'm thankful for them. They save me thousands of dollars in high end equipment and they save me using obscure poorly supported lossless formats and then having to convert to mp3 half the time anyway.
Apart from a new survey of an old topic is there anything new here?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded.
These statements are becoming increasingly common in story summaries, and it's sadly ironic for a site that serves ads itself. How about cutting out the snarky anti-ad commentary and just sticking to the story?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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Set up clips online, play them using some player. Have the listener choose which codec they thought it was, a recaptcha for keeping false choices to a minimum. and have a section where you can select the same clip with each codec back to back. I would love to see one if someone has a site like that.
Do I seriously need to look into the past articles to prove how old this news is? Seriously folks; this isn't exactly rocket science here - this is all stuff everyone knows about by now. Hey, do I even need to point to the link to the story about how people actually prefer the sound of MP3 because of the encoding artifacts, much like how people preferred records after CD's came out because of the noise/repressed frequencies?
Quick and dirty tests are not good enough to test this.
We need significant sample sizes, double blind testing, and appropriately rigorous scientific methodology.
It's of my understanding that when you rip CDs to WAV or FLAC, you don't have an option to normalize your audio like you do with MP3s. It's not that you can't, rather the option is not available on most programs.
Life is not for the lazy.
Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
I have found that though I can tell the difference between a FLAC and 128Kbps MP3, most of my friends can't. Most of them, if I play the same song back to back, one FLAC and one MP3, they will almost always pick the MP3. :( Thus far, except for me, the only reason I can justify ripping things to FLAC is because I can then convert the file to whatever loss compression format is needed, MP3, AAC, OOG, etc.for portable music players (yes people, the iPod is not the only music player), without the double compression loss.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Maybe they have a compression fetish
You may not be able to tell the difference between MP3 and the original CD audio, but as soon as you subtract the right channel from the left channel, you sure can. Elements which would perfectly cancel from subtraction instead sound warbly.
I definitely can tell the difference between MP3 and Lossless.
When you're an audiophile like myself who has invested in Monster (tm) branded cables, the actual bits are richer and reproduced more faithfully than with the gear the plebs use.
Protip: Also use Denon Link Cables with the built-in packet directionality device. Your TCP's wont know which way they are going without it.
It all really depends on the bit rate of the MP3, the type of music you are listening to and the equipment you are using to listen to the music with. It also depends if you know what you are listening for. For example between 128Kbps and 192Kbps MP3 I find the former flatter than the latter.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Most people greatly overestimate how well they can hear these differences, but the never actually try it in ABX testing. I tried it years ago and I can't hear a difference between most codecs at reasonable bitrates and unencoded originals.
Here is an old classic from the Hydrogenaudio forums, from someone would bought expensive head phones and set up ABX testing. He was very shocked when he couldn't even tell the difference between FLAC and Vorbis at 64kb/s.
ABX Just Destroyed My Ego, My perception of my bitrate needs was greatly inflated.
I'm sure I can tell 128 MP3 is not so good. it's sounds a bit hot to my ears. Oddly perhaps this happens especially when there is clipping in the music (see for example green day) or shreikin trebles ( "battle without mercy" kill bill sound track). At first this seemed counter intuitive to me since you think that adding more distortion would be the most easily hidden during distortion, right? My rationalization is that whatever the MP# psycho acoutic model is, it's best for music with harmonies and tonal trajectories in different registers (base, tenor, trebble) and not music that has all sorts of aliased frequencies randomly jumping around in volume. I dont' really know but I can hear it. With normal music you may not hear the change in intonation because it simply sounds equally good even if it is altered.
But By 192 MP3 I cannot tell the difference. 128 AAC seems to be about as good.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This isn't surprising at all. The so-called better sound of LPs isn't really a higher fidelity recording but an artifact of the way records are played (and amplified). That people are more emotionally attached to music with "flaws" should be kind of obvious by now. Entire genres (glitch being the most obvious but certainly not the only) have developed out of this understanding. People don't always want perfection. Sometimes they want character.
I'll bet that some training would make some significant differences. The person who correctly identified the cymbal differences may have spent some time listening for the differences. Just as young musicians are given tonal training early on, if you know what to listen for, I imagine the test subjects scores would have improved.
I would also wonder how each subjects personal histories impact their preferences. I have heard that blind people tend to have more sensitve hearing, perhaps those who mostly listin to MP3s already won't be as sensitive to compression distortion.
Another slashdotted story highlighted that people are growing increasingly fond of the hiss of MP3 noise (see link below). Perhaps subjects have a unconscious bias that makes it difficult assess what is better. It would have been neat if they had run test where both were MP3s or both were lossless.
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205
The conclusion of the article is significant: "The only person to get all four tracks right is someone who listens to their headphones at pitifully low volumes and hasn't attended any rock concerts. We can think of two explanations. One, the subject has particularly sensitive ears, so doesn't need to turn the volume up high. Two, the subject hasn't wrecked their hearing through years of listening to a walkman/MP3 player at high volumes and/or seeing Motorhead at the Hammersmith Odeon. Arguably, both apply." From my experience, impaired hearing from concerts or loud headphone volumes is much more likely. Also, the age of the listener matters, since it is well-known that the ability to hear high frequencies diminishes with age.
There is a reason for it, and it isn't what most people think.
It's related to how the brain handles white balance when it comes to colours. Your brain compensates for missing, or contradictory information. After a while you get used to it and don't notice it, and then when you are presented with something closer to 'perfect' you may, or may not recognize it as being all that different.
Sat Radio has relatively poor quality, but after listening to it for an hour or two the artifacts get filtered out by my brain (all but the worst ones anyway) and I don't notice it; but expose somebody to it for the first time and they will cringe.
I kinda find it funny that you need to have adblock and flashblock to visit a site named TrustedReviews so your browser doesn't go into a tailspin... It's like having Sid Fernwilter smile at you and say "Trust me!"
Anyway, 192kbps MP3's is good enough for most people so I don't really see the point with FLAC unless you are an audiophile which means you don't touch encoded/compressed music anyway.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
I've never been able to hear the difference but my hearing isn't great and I'm not a music person so I wasn't completely sure. But this isn't that surprising. Note how the audiophile community has so many strange ideas about what sounds better that James Randi has actually bothered to include some of their claims as acceptable for his million dollar challenge (this is a prize if you can demonstrate supernatural or paranormal abilities under controlled conditions- http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html). See for example http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/752-get-real.html. However, a large part of the audiophile community has rejected digital sound as somehow innately inferior and so won't even care about TFA. It is never so surprising how irrational humans can be so much as what they choose to be irrational about.
I've been saying this for years - it is not hard to reach a point where an MP3 is indistinguishable from the uncompressed source, "even if you have top notch equipment and well-practiced hearing skills."
It is basically scale of bitrate vs odds that the recording will be indistinguishable at that bitrate.
My personal experience tells me that most songs are audibly degraded at 128kbps, some songs are audibly degraded at 160kbps, few songs are audibly degraded at 192kbps, and nothing I've yet experienced is audibly degraded at 256kbps. And this is being conservative... with a superior modern codec like LAME, MP3 may be even harder to distinguish at 128kbps than you might expect. Other codecs besides MP3 could be even better, but I don't have enough experience with other codecs, so I can't comment there. Plus, VBR makes the situation even better. You could have a lower average bitrate but still achieve a signal thats indistinguishable from the original with VBR.
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as .wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp. An $80 1TB hard drive can hold $19,000 worth of uncompressed CDs. Sure... in flac format I could store more like $60,000 worth... but who has a $20,000 CD collection let alone a $60,000 one?
Anyway, the primary counterarguments I've heard are either from neurotic audiophiles that think "mathematically lossy" means "audibly lossy." People from that same category justify multi-thousand-dollar power cables to their amplifier and claim night and day differences, so their opinions can safely be ignored.
The other end of the fence says low bitrate stuff sounds "perfect." In my experience when presented with a reasonable comparison, even audio-ignorant people can tell the difference between a crap 128kbit mp3 and the original, but that difference might not be immediately obvious on, for example, built-in laptop speakers.
I'll bet that some training would make some significant differences. The person who correctly identified the cymbal differences may have spent some time listening for the differences. Just as young musicians are given tonal training early on, if you know what to listen for, I imagine the test subjects scores would have improved. I would also wonder how each subjects personal histories impact their preferences. I have heard that blind people tend to have more sensitive hearing, perhaps those who mostly listen to MP3s already won't be as sensitive to compression distortion. Another slashdotted story highlighted that people are growing increasingly fond of the hiss of MP3 noise (see link below). Perhaps subjects have a unconscious bias that makes it difficult assess what is better. It would have been neat if they had run test where both were MP3s or both were lossless. http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205
Sure, MP3s sound better than FLAC, but if you used *both*, you'd get even better sound.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Pop tracks are typically mixed in part to sound good over portable, low-res speakers, and when accompanied by road noise, etc. Many albums sound muffled and unnatural when played on high-end systems that deliver flat frequency response. This has been true for the past fifty years. Pop may account for the majority of what people listen to today, but many people like to listen to classical, jazz, and other mostly-acoustic music at least a portion of the time, and that's when superior fidelity can make a big difference.
MPEG 1 layer 3 (MP3) encoding was designed as a 'perceptual encoding' algorithm where less "effort" (fewer bits) is given to signals that fall below below a threshold based on the other signals present. For example, a quiet tone close in frequency to a loud tone cannot be heard by the human ear, so no effort needs to be expended on reproducing it. All we're debating is whether the engineering behind this is sufficient. Certainly at lower encoding rates the distortion characteristics get very weird, though, and not at all like degraded quantization noise or analog distortion (Try it for yourself...) A few years back I decided to perform a little test one time to see how 192kbps MP3s performed. A self-avowed audiophile friend of mine lent me a copy of one of his favorite "reference" recordings (a Diana Krall jazz CD), and decided to give him a little test. I ripped his 'reference' song to .wav, encoded to 192kbps MP3, decoded the MP3 back to a second .wav file and burned a new CD for him.
He couldn't tell the difference much at all, and actually thought the one that had been through the processing sounded a little better. I couldn't tell any real difference on my studio monitors either.
MP3 is certainly good enough, at least at 192kbps, for portable use and on any 'normal' home system. I'd be interested to hear of any other opinions from similar tests.
Buy a nice pair of monitors for $400 and the differences are easy to tell. I sort of wish I hadnt because my lower encoded music 256kbps sounds awful compared to 320/flac
I love how people who write articles debating the merits of lossless codec's obviously haven't listened to their sources on a decent setup, although decent audio equipment is becoming harder and harder to get too.
Still I laughed when I saw this, the difference is pretty substantial, that last bit of quality is what makes the music really pop and take on that quality that makes your skin tingle and your volume knob go to a slightly less than painfull level.
That's largely the point. The "good enough" mark is largely dependent upon the complexity of the music more than just about anything. Some very simple music might sound very good at only 128kbps, whereas more complex music might demand to have the entire 192kbps.
I thought the conclusion going back quite a while was that 192kbps was good enough for pretty much anybody and that anymore than that was really just for specialty use.
I can't. I just deleted a crap load of .flac files after downloading the .mp3 versions and not being able to tell the difference while listening through some pretty decent headphones. I'd rather have a few more free gigabytes.
256 and 320 bitrate are great, 128 is another story.
......than it was, say, in the '60s or '70s.
All that lovely vinyl with its great warmth was in fact listened to, by most people, on $79 fold-down "stereos" from Sears with $2 ceramic styli. Or on car radios with a single 4-inch speaker in the dash.
I find it totally plausible that "the kids" today are hearing better sound, even at 192 kbps and after the loudness wars, than my big sister was when she listened to her copy of "Meet The Beatles" for the eightieth time on her tabletop "Hi-Fi".
ridiculous... if ignorance is bliss, its no wonder mp3 listeners are happy with their chosen format.
A good part of the reason that people use FLAC et al is NOT to listen to, but to avoid re-ripping CDs or transcoding when switching lossy formats.
With most real music (as in not coming out of a sequencer with the highs already filtered out), yes, you can tell if your upper frequency hearing is toasted by too many rock concerts. You can tell most definitely with some specific songs that sound like crap even in the vocal range if it's lossy ("Sad To See the Season Go" by Cowboy Junkies, in particular).
Hi-hats or any other cymbal, bells, glockenspiels, etc., all sound like shit in anything below 256. I can't describe the distortion other than to say it sounds hissy. Go ahead, listen to ANY Police tunes in low bitrate. I defy you to not cringe at how MP3 ruins Stuart Copeland's percussion.
The only music that doesn't suffer badly from mp3's lossy distortion is electronica and its related genres. Erasure sounds just fine at 192.
--
BMO
I've been exposed to people who write audio codecs for a living. They can tell because they've become sensitive to the artifacts present in MP3s. They also can pick up problems with CD's that haven't been dithered properly. They can easily pick out MP3 even at 320kbps. These are specialists. But even in this study there was one individual who had a high success rate.
At 192K and a good pair of headphones with good material I think most people could learn pretty quickly to pick up the difference - loss of stereo image at higher frequencies is pretty easy to pick up.
There are also studies available that point out the advantages of high bit rate recordings - these enable the use of sophisticated filters that eliminate some of the issues present with CD sound. If you are interested and have a mathematical bent, look up the work of Meridian's Peter Craven. Again the differences can be detected by specialists. I'm old enough so that my ears are not good enough to pick up these improvements.
I rip to FLAC and convert for my portables because of these factors.
If you want to try some testing yourself visit hydrogenaudio. They have apps set up to do abx comparisons so you can test yourself.
For me, it is easy. If I spend hours listening to lossy compressed music, I start to get headaches. It doesn't happen when I'm listening to lossless compression.
For me, that is end of story.
I dunno about FLAC and mp3, but to get an idea what difference the sound quality can make, try this at a both standard and high quality using a good set of headphones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqc8JNzniUc
I don't dare speculate where the cutoff in what we can notice is, and it likely is not the same for everybody, but there's certainly some music tracks where the difference between different levels of lossy compression is quite clear.
I thought this was pretty much common knowledge, but regardless, it has no impact on what seems to be the primary argument for lossless codecs: storage space is practically free and transcoding introduces extra loss, so we should keep lossless copies so that we can use cool new codecs without quality loss. (Of course, bandwidth is definitely not practically free, so I've never agreed with this view, but it's still the pro-lossless stance I've seen the most).
Some people can hear differences even between 320CBR mp3 and flac. I have myself, even when not expecting to. It can happen depending on the style of music.
But that's irrelevant.
flac is future proofed, at least to the point of cd quality audio. Additionally, flac's tagging is far and away better than mp3. Myself, it's flac for the archive and convert to mp3 for the portable player, on account of hardware acceleration, and thus battery life.
Now can we please stop treating flac users like they're crazy? Some people like it for the long term benefits. Some people like not having to wonder if they're missing anything from the otherwise cd quality level. With flac, you don't have to.
The difference will be content dependent. It is also listener, location, and system dependent. If you are currently listening to MP3's you will become acustomed to 'tuning out' the artifacts. If you listen to predominantly lossless you will be more sensitive to the artifacts, but it still comes down to the actual content, the original mastering, and the playback system. Some material will simply compress with fewer artifacts than other material. I have an extensive collection of both MP3 and the FLAC albums that they were sourced from. Because the collections are identical, and because of the way that I use my playback environment (foobar) I don't always know which I am selecting. I grab something by album cover, close my eyes, and listen. I rarely look at the details. Sometimes it just doesn't matter, I have sat for hours listening without any knowledge of which library i am listening to, but occassionally an artifact will just jump out and 10/10 times when I check the file details I see that it is an mp3 (at 320kb VBR). My hearing is ok, but not exceptional, I do not claim to have golden ears, but I know the music I listen to. I listen to a LOT of music on both a high end stereo (> 20K$) which is driven digitally from a custom PC based system in another room to a high end DAC, and on high end headphones, as well as on my mp3 player (ipod touch), and the artifacts that I hear (typically problems with reproduction of high frequency sounds, sometimes something that is just wrong with the tone) is such an irritating thing that you cannot ignore it. Can I hear it on all recordings 100% of the time.. no way. But on the right material I will pick it out every time. But unless I am in my listening space (which is almost painfully quiet) I doubt I would even notice and I doubt most people who listen to earbuds or car audio as their primary environment could ever pick out the difference, its all a matter of what you are used to.
The small size of lossy audio was an important factor when storage capacity was limited. This is no longer an issue, so there's not much reason to bother with lossy music when dealing with the storage capacity of current devices. 100GB of music would be an absolutely massive collection, yet that would only occupy less than 10% of a US$100 1TB drive. The 16GB common is portable devices is enough for more FLAC than you would listen to for even a fairly lengthy journey. It's certainly still of use in streaming media, but the bar for quality isn't usually set very high in that area. Full CD quality FLAC streams should be usable on home broadband within 5 years, I would hope...
The reasons to argue against FLAC just aren't that relevant anymore. Bits are cheap, who cares if you save a few?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Most people are used to the slight hiss or static that comes with MP3's. In fact, we have lived with it so long, we believe it's normal. It's a form of bias, where most people are used to the sound of MP3's.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
Hey, I get that it's not the most visually appealing thing on the Internet :). I'm just really tired of the culture of bitching about ads wherein people honestly expect to get stuff completely free of charge or ads when producing said stuff costs money.
Remember when google wasn't the dominant search engine? You had yahoo, altavista, and the other guys filling up the search page with all sorts of ad banners. Google comes along with a very simple search page which is still there. Text ads only. A very large of information that you searched for, and only a few ads to the side.
Guess what? Most people don't bother blocking google's ads. And now they're the dominant player, because everyone would rather use them than their competitors.
It's reasonable that you want people to visit your site and get paid by supplying ads. If you make the ads so damn annoying, and divide up the information that should be in a single page into 15 pages just to get more adviews...well, don't be surprised when people try to circumvent your ads. It's your fault for losing the customer.
Your other option is to go the route Murdoch keeps saying he wants to switch to. You can charge people to visit your site. That's also fine, but don't complain when people aren't willing to pay the price. It's their choice to spend the money however they want. Bottom line: if people are complaining about your business model, your business model sucks. You can't just fill up a site with ads and expect that everyone will be happy about it because they're also benefiting from your hard work. You have to find that point that maximizes profit. It's the equilibrium point where you enough ads that you make the highest profit you can make without alienating so many people that you can't make a profit. It's the same for anything you sell, ad-supported or not. You don't think all those people selling iphone apps would like to price them at $500+? So why are so many of them around $2? Because there's more money to be made selling 10,000 copies at $2 than 5 copies at $500.
If you can't find that equilibrium point, and no matter what you do you can't make a profit...then either your business model or your product sucks. That's your problem, not mine. Obviously few people will miss your product/site.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Most people have spent so much time with iPod earbuds that they've killed their hearing, and that's why they can't tell the difference between formats. Besides, I think most audiophiles would agree that it's file format + speakers/headphones that make a difference.
Now, I'm not saying that everything should be in FLAC and you should blow your budget on $500 headphones, since most people probably won't be able to tell the difference, however, I consider it just an accomplishment if people can enjoy their music without the person next to them being able to clearly hear it because they've jacked the volume up to insane levels(a sign of poor earbud fit). That's all I really care about.
If there is a statistically significant preference for MP3, then I would guess people can tell the difference. I would guess they have become so accustomed to lossy compression that they expect it, and even have grown to like it.
It does depend on the recording, though. It's in the small details, like the sound of the singer breathing. You can also hear the frequency extremes better, but you need the right speakers for that.
I think a large part of it is also how the music is recorded. The older recordings are recorded at a much lower level, taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the medium. The newer recordings are all packed into the loudest little bit so the dynamic range is compressed.
Add to that the simple fact that most people today listen to music that's digitally encoded on tiny little earplugs.
Now expose them to a full orchestra in a well-designed sound hall. They simply have no basis for hearing the range of sounds.
As with everything else, listening to music takes practice. If all you hear is 128Kbps mp3s then your ears will not hear any of the richness of a concert hall.
Not saying one is better than the other, but practice makes perfect and listening to modern music, which is fairly limited in both dynamic range and instrumentation to begin with, compressed into a tiny bit of the bandwidth available, on tinny earphones is a poor way to develop a critical ear.
The german magazine c't made 2000 an test with several people, they found out that the pereson that had the worst hearing was best at differenciating between CD and mp3. That person's hearing had suffered from an explosion and he as only able to hear frequences up to 8kHz on one ear and had a Tinitus on the other ear. He could hear more of the effects from the filters that are applied to mp3 streams. Further (german) info see http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html
Many people don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" but that doesn't mean the rest of us should stop caring.
One problem is the simple A/B and asking which people like better. Well that is fine if you are doing something like testing two compression formats to see which has a sound people prefer. That is not fine if the question can people tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed music. For that you need an ABX test. X is a reference uncompressed sample, A and B are randomized such that one is uncompressed, one is not. People are then asked to identify the one that is the same as X. A test like that lets you tell if people can hear a difference, regardless of if they like it or not.
Also there is another angle to why people might choose to use uncompressed music and that is if there is any additional processing (like equalization) planned for later. Psychoacoustic compression schemes can have problems when processed later. Reason being that they do rely on things like masking, in that because X is happening, we can't hear Y. However when the balance of the sound is altered, well then that isn't necessarily the case anymore.
How important is that? Probably not very in a lot of cases. However how important is storage space? Last I checked 1TB was under $100. Storage is cheap. There's not really a need to milk every last bit out of a file. FLAC'd discs are in the realm of 300MB for a full CD. Big deal. I'm got space to spare, so why not go lossless?
What it really comes down to is what is "good enough" really depends on the situation. Depends on the music (some kinds cause more trouble for encoders), the listener, the environment, storage constraints and so on. I mean 64k is good enough to recognize the music. A 64k AAC or WMA is fine, FM radio quality maybe, and even a 64k MP3 is listenable. Is there distortion over what was on the CD? Sure, but maybe it is good enough in some situations (like say you need to be able to transmit stereo audio on a single DS-0 channel).
I really don't like these tests that try to give the one magic rate is that is good enough for all situations. Especially when they use bad testing methodology.
Personally, I'm a fan of lossless compression because then there's just not any additional errors. I've got the space so why not eliminate potential problems?
"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." http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/19/176209/13-of-People-Cant-Tell-48Kbps-Audio-From-160Kbps?from=slashdot_itself_duh
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
MP3 compression is, at least as far as I know, based off the same algorithms we use for lossy image compression in schemes like JPEG. Essentially we take blocks of the data, whether it is visual or aural, and we apply a transform function to it. In JPEG this is a Discrete Cosine Transform, I'm not sure about MP3 but I imagine it's a very similar transform, adapted for sound.
The transform function changes the values of the data in the block, essentially separating them by how 'noisy' they are. Then we throw away the noisiest components of the transformed data, because these are least likely to contain 'information' content - where in the audio case, information is the actual sound. If you take too much away, you can eat away some of the information as well as the noise, which in the case of audio will introduce degradation and a loss of the richness and texture of the sound. However if you take away a smaller amount, the bulk of what you're throwing away is not interesting or useful.
FLAC by comparison is lossless compression. All that noise in the sound is preserved. However a lossy-compressed copy of the same audio may sound 'better' to our ears because some of that extra noise has been eliminated by the compression. The same phenomenon has been observed with images. Sometimes perceived image quality can actually be improved by lossy compression. It's a side-effect of the process.
Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.
Most people have known for decades that audiophiles are full of crap. Every single time I've seen a double-blind test to see if they can hear the difference on what they claim they can hear, turns out they can't. Hey, good for the people selling them $1,000 audio cables.
That said, there's a good reason to go with FLAC. Want to re-encode a lower quality version for your storage-space-limited device? You can do that without additional quality loss, just like re-ripping from the cd. Want to change your collection to ogg because it sounds better at lower bitrates? Again, go ahead.
Basically, it's nice having a hard drive copy that is lossless, because you can re-encode it into the lossless codec of your choice for whatever device you want without introducing further artifacts.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Well I sure-as-hell can tell the difference, but I'm almost 50, so I remember what real high fidelity is supposed to sound like.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Perhaps they should try ripping the same track to FLAC and MP3. And then ripping the ripped track to FLAC and MP3 again. And then again. And again. And then compare the results.
For instance "Talkie Walkie" by Air has some very subtle sound that gets jacked even at 320kbps mp3 compression. Even with $30 headphones it's quite easy for me to tell the difference. My skeptic friend could nail the blind test, after knowing what part of the sound to listen to.
"Cat and the cradle" with audiophile equipment at 192kbps I'd be guessing. poorly.
"AxelF" (beverly hills cop theme song) might be hard to distinguish at 64kbps.
Most everything encodes pretty well under mp3, but it has its limitations.
Storm
I just listened to some Grateful Dead archives remastered by some of the highest end audiophile collectors and audio engineers that also had some specially generated MP3 versions. The two were easily different.
Even through 5 year old $50 5.1 PC speakers. Through the motherboard codec of a 5 year old PC.
Maybe because I actually know the difference between good and bad audio quality. Because I care enough to do what it takes to get the good stuff. Most people don't know, maybe because they don't care.
Most people also can't tell the difference between the computer science blather they see in science fiction shows and what they'd have to deal with in an actual geek argument.
Who cares what they think? Let them settle for crap. I want the good stuff. It's too late for me to pretend I can't tell the difference.
--
make install -not war
I rip cd's and encode at about 320 (quality 9) oggs. Most songs don't need that level of quality, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from one encoded lower. But there are a few where a higher bitrate really is required. And I'm not going to experiment with each song individually to find what's optimum for it. So -q 9 for everything.
Loose lips lose spit.
I can clearly hear the artifacts on every 128 kbps MP3. Try encoding "Baba O'Riley" on Who's next and listen when Daltrey sings: "Don't Cry...it's only teenage wasteland" At 128 kbps, the artifacts are SO bad that it sounds like his mouth is fillled with marbles! 160 kbps is quite a bit better, as is 192 and the artifact is gone at 256 kbps encoding. Generally speaking, 256 kbps is the MINIMUM that I use with MP3. 320 kbps is even better...and more and more of my library is FLAC and WAV. Another thing is that many MP3 streamers use extreme audio processing (compression, limiting, etc) and the encoder is designed to run with unprocesssed music. This causes even more encoding errors. Generally speaking OGG and AAC+ are the best (standard AAC at bit rates over 96 kbps). 64 kbps AAC+, 96/128 kbps Ogg and 160 kbps MP3 are roughly the same quality wise....at least to my (educated) ears. We should also be discussing something else-the 'dumbing down' of our hearing from all this perceptual coded stuff....
about 60% of them are people claiming they can hear the different. about 3% of them didn't lie.
the rest are just rehashing the same stuff we hear about headphone use in every one of these articles. about half of those people think that there is a significant difference in the hearing damage you do yourself depending on if you use ear buds or circumaural headphones....
ssdd
This debate is largely irrelevant to most people who don't have high end gear (particularly headphones which can be disturbingly revealing). It really comes down to your specific situation and equipment. I have run endless double blind tests with lossless files and LAME encoded MP3s (at -V2 and -V0 VBR quality) and I can safely say that I can't tell the difference between those formats. 128Kbps AAC and MP3s are a different story. I could hear discernible differences with those bitrates against the lossless versions. With Amazon and iTunes now offering DRM-free 256Kbps files, I find the issue nearly moot.
I say "nearly moot" because I refuse to regularly pay out a minimum of $10 for digital albums that don't have the overhead of printing liner notes and pressing CDs. But I have purchased several Amazon $5 albums and even an iTunes album that was $7 that included a high resolution PDF of the liner notes.
As a result, I still buy most of my music on CD and vinyl and archive the files to Apple Lossless and rip those to LAME -V0 VBR MP3s for actual listening. Why keep a copy of large lossless files if MP3s are good enough? Chalk that up to my fear that one day I may want to transcode those lossless files to a new format that improves compression and maintains transparency or storage prices for DAPs and media become so cheap that I might as well just use the lossless versions as my primary playback files.
Properly mixed CD > tape > vinyl > mp3.
In other words, no extra noise is better then hiss is better than pops and clicks is better than mind bending compression.
Please note, I said PROPERLY MIXED CDs.
The latest Slashdot meme.
As the subject says, it will all depend on your source material. Most recordings now are so compressed and level maxed that there are absolutely no dynamics at all. All of it is done in the name of radio since no one wants to be the song that can't be heard. There is a max transmittable volume for a signal, and thus, if your recording leaves in the space to keep dynamics such that a drum's attack has very large peak followed by an extremely fast drop off in sound pressure, that the things like vocals will be relatively quieter than that drum, the drum then becomes the loudest noise of the recording, forcing all other things in the recording to be relative to that peak, which in tern will cause them to be "softer" on the radio for a good quality, high dynamic recording. What almost all audio mixes do now is simply chop off all those peaks so that their song is constantly at a high amplitude throughout. This has the effect of compressing all those peaks down, and losing all that signal quality, and is actually compressing the amount of audio data in the waveform itself since they are shifting the entire wave up in amplitude while keeping the same upper boundary, thus squaring the waveform and losing data, which is no different than lossy compression algorithms for things like MP3. In fact converting a waveform that is already amplitude compressed, can save "data space" while not losing much quality. In fact, it may even add some of those lost dynamics back by sampling at points in the waveform where the wave may be under that peak volume and thus (along with the fewer samples) under-representing the true value amplitude for a section of the waveform.
Then of course, you have the fact that audio mixes are being done to try and compensate for piss poor speakers like ear-buds, giving huge boosts to the amplitude of lower frequencies, and trying to cut the amplitude of higher frequencies as well (because let us face it, that 1/16th inch piezoelectric speaker that make-up ear-buds just doesn't have the power or mass to move enough air to reproduce lower frequency sounds with any kind of accuracy). Quality speakers, in a well designed environment will always show the difference in recording quality. When you use poor speakers, you are listening more to what the speaker does to the recording than what might be found in recording quality.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Pick up a Little Dot MKIII and a decent pair of Sennheisers and I GUARANTEE you that you will have no trouble telling between flac and I dare say 320kbps mp3's. I think that the real issue is that nobody really has hardware good enough to take advantage of FLAC.
Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music.
I'll start by saying that I'm an audiophile. I have an all vacuum tube, several thousand dollar stereo that I hand built from source to speakers. I still prefer to buy music on vinyl. If I had the disposable cash, I'd buy it on reel-to-reel tape.
That said, the parent has accidentally stumbled upon the correct answer. FLAC, MP3, OGG, whatever-- if you want higher quality, then listen to BETTER MUSIC.
The most important part of high quality music is the musician. The second is the engineer. Beyond that, everything is just incremental gains. Audiophiles know this and spend their energy getting the right recording of the music they love. And I'm not just talking about old stodgy stuff. There's tons of great new music released new on vinyl geared towards audiophiles-- it's just all labeled "indie".
Let me spend half a minute on vinyl vs CD vs MP3. CD and MP3 contain data that your ears can hear and they both contain that data very accurately. I certainly can't tell the difference between a CD and an MP3 recorded at 192 KBPS. Vinyl is the only format of the three that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear. You can't hear this data, but you can feel it, physically with your body. This sensation enhances the realness of the recording and makes it feel more engaging and more alive. Anyone can hear and feel this, but usually they can't describe it or perhaps even notice it. They show the difference by not wanting to get up and do dishes, or homework, or play a game, but by wanting to sit and close their eyes and just listen to the music.
Forty years ago people used to sit down and listen to albums. Albums! The reason why we don't do it anymore is NOT because of a lack of time or high quality new music-- we have both those things. It's because the music doesn't engage us anymore. It simply doesn't contain the data to make us forget that we're listening to a recording.
There will always be people who claim the LP is superior to a CD. It just sounds "real" they tell you. Personally, I'm fond of my mp3s. They just sound "real". You kids with your "lossless" formats just don't get it.
High frequencies have a tendency to *roll* at 128k. At higher bitrates, it depends on what was used to compress the album, but it won't be as good as FLAC or analog :)
Digitized music just doesn't have the warmth of an old LP (my opinion)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
No different that how, 30 years ago, it was 'good enough' to have nearly any race played by any actor who looked 'ethnic'. But now, the populace in general is more broadly educated (not to mention more instantaneously informed); and studio try harder to have a Korean play a Korean, a Arab play an Arab, and so on. I think the same thing is happening with music - as more folks grow to understand what really good recording can sound like, they begin to expected it and deride anything else.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
"The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC."
The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between Bud Lite and real beer.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
While it has been mentioned that bits are cheap now, and that today's 2TB internal hard drives will hold 2,857 uncompressed full-length audio CDs, I saw one other person (posting anonymously) about a digital to analog converter (DAC). I don't expect everybody to hear marginal differences in encoding quality when the components on their computer sound card have 15% voltage tolerances. When you're taking 0s and 1s and marching them gracefully in to the range of 65,536 discrete values, precision matters. If you don't believe me, ask an electrical engineer for yourself. I went from a Xitel HiFi Link (USB audio device) to a used Stello DA220 MKI, and the difference was night and day. At that point the DAC was the weakest link in my system, which allowed me to fully appreciate the difference it made. Personally I rip CDs to the Apple Lossless format, because it's convenient and I like iTunes. However, I can also playback with foobar2000 and the WASAPI plugin on Vista/W7 for that 'bitperfect' output. If you anticipate at any point beginning to care about sound quality, I suggest you rip to lossless (or uncompressed) from day one.
I generally use MP3 (car, iPhone, etc.), but I rip to FLAC for archival purposes. It's nice to know that in the future I can re-convert the music and start from scratch.
Also, I like the fact that I can use FLAC track/album gain on my Squeezebox at home but normalize the tracks for output to MP3 for use elsewhere.
MP3 encoders/decoders have gotten seriously good and if you don't know the songs well it's easy to be fooled. However, if you DO know the music very well it's often easy to tell the difference. It's not worse, really, just different and for people with strong auditory memories it can be a little annoying.
I also listen to a lot of music with significant distortion and MP3 seems to be weak in this area.
-Dave
The way most ABX tests are conducted makes them effectively useless. People play a track through, so they are comparing time t1 from one source to time t2 on another source to time t3, etc. This approach may detect gross differences, but not subtle differences, as they will be masked by the differences in the source at different points. The way an ABX test needs to be conducted is to loop a very short segment (since humans have a short audio memory). Any other approach is logically flawed. Unfortunately, virtually all published ABX tests are flawed in this way. Bad science!
That is if I pay for music I want the full lossless file period.
Buy earbuds from the dollar store and everything will sound like crap. You won't be annoyed because the mp3 was encoded at 128 anymore.
Sounding best is not a measure if one can tell the difference between formats!
Best is subjective. And if someone picks 320kbps MP3 as 'best' over FLAC 4/5 times there IS a NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE.
I can (with most tracks) easily pick out the 128bit MP3 in my car, or on my home stereo. I don't even have to listen back to back. I think it sounds bad. 160kbps and well I can't tell for the most part.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
I did a study myself... One at a time, I took people off the street, and told them to make a rocket that could go into space. None of them could. The result is clear: space travel is impossible.
Lossy audio coding is an area of intensive scientific study. All the comments here amount to a bunch of 6 year-old kids debating where babies come from...
The answer to the question is quite simple, and has been known since the 1980's. The rule of Perceptual Entropy is that you need a minimum bitrate of 176kbps for 44.1kHz stereo. If you're encoding below that, it can't possibly be indistinguishable from the original. ITU-R BS.1116-1 testing has proven that simple fact out over and over again.
And don't bother claiming your 192kbps MP3s sound perfect, either. MP3 is certainly not the ideal audio format, so it doesn't come that close. But much more importantly, it (like all low-bitrate audio codecs) is a frequency domain codec, making it impossible to avoid pre-echo and the like AT ANY BITRATE. MP3, AAC, Vorbis, et al. just can't possibly do it.
The only possible competitors for indistinguishable (transparent) lossy audio coding are time domain codecs, primarily: MPEG-1 Layer II, and Musepack. Some hybrids like AC-3 exist as well.
Amateur testing is pretty pointless... You're no longer judging which sounds more like the original, you're picking the one whose distortions you like more. Low bitrate codecs often throw in a relatively small amount of noise, which masks artifacts, and simply sounds sufficiently different that it's no longer the same audio. Compare a song (from a CD), to the same after normalizing the volume, and you'll have the same problem... You'll probably pick the modified version as sounding better, even though both are lossy, and at first glance, the same audio.
I can certainly imagine the next generation of lossy audio codecs will pitch-shift music to an octave people generally prefer, to get a higher rating on such "tests". Cheap igital cameras often do the same thing... over-correcting gamma to make every picture more white (bluish, really) and turning up the contrast to make it more vivid, so much so that it looks "better than the real thing".
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I would love to try to look at this kind of thing with electroencephalography. Is there a noticeable change in the brain when music is enjoyed in different formats? What about the loudness effect? Google scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=EEG++music&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0
I can't tell much of a difference when listening to music normally if the mp3 is any higher than 128k, but I've found that it really makes a difference if I'm slowing a song down using a program like Transcribe to try to figure out a fast guitar line or something. Even at 50% speed, lossy compression really loses a lot of detail and makes it hard to hear details. It's the audio equivalent of zooming in on a JPEG.
If you're listening to the codec then you're doing it wrong.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
and certainly not in a typical house room, car, bus, or bike.
I had been buying things from iTunes (128kbps AAC) and noticed no problems in my car or with my cheap computer speakers (with various computer noises in the room). I had, however, burned a few disks from iTunes and played them on my low end component system. Again, all was reasonably well until I played classical music that way.
When I first played downloaded classical music on that system I thought that something was broken. It was truly and horribly unlistenable. It took me a while to isolate the problem, but after other disks played fine and this disk played "fine" in my computer and car I finally figured out what the problem was.
Between that time and the introduction of iTunes+ (256kbps AAC) I stopped getting compressed classical (and some jazz) tracks.
What was so surprising about this experience is that (a) I hadn't set it up as a test of my hearing, but I noticed the difference entirely spontaneously. Indeed it hadn't even occurred to me that this might be an issue. And (b) I don't at all consider myself to be an audiophile. My hearing really isn't all that good.
The lesson is that what matters is what you hear with your music in your listening environment. In my most common listening environments it's all good. And with most of my music it's all good. But with a small subset of my music in one of my listening environments, bit rates can make the difference between unlistenable to perfectly enjoyable.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Took my Grado studio reverence headpones, hooked it up to my tascam 48k audio interface, listened to a song in 128, 192, 320, and FLAC. 128 of course sounded like crap, 192 sounded like the ones above it for most songs, and I couldnt tell the difference between 320 and FLAC on all the songs I got. 320 definitely saves space.
The warning about using adblock was definitely warranted.
We've seen lots of these articles on slashdot, but I've yet to see a single one that offers audio clips to compare. Not for data's sake, but just for the curious to see what difference (or lack thereof) the article is talking about.
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I did my own test. I ripped a CD to both MP3 (192) and FLAC. I played both files through a Logitech Squeezebox connected to a Peachtree Audio Decco amp which was connected to a pair of Tannoy Revolution Signature DC4s. I could clearly tell the difference.
This may be a shameless plug for my website but I did an ABX sound test to see if I can tell the difference, and it turns out I can for some sounds and can't for others. There was a wide variation, for some I couldn't tell between 128 kbps and lossless, but for some I could tell between 320 kbps and lossless. It is possible, you can do it. You have to know what to look for. Note: I have expensive headphones so that would have helped with the sound resolution. Links for my posts: http://vel.co.nz/vel.co.nz/Blog/Entries/2009/7/17_ABX_of_Lossless_versus_MP3_-_Part_1_-_Introduction.html http://vel.co.nz/vel.co.nz/Blog/Entries/2009/7/28_ABX_of_Lossless_versus_MP3_-_Part_2_-_Materials_and_Methods_.html http://vel.co.nz/vel.co.nz/Blog/Entries/2009/8/21_ABX_of_Lossless_versus_MP3_-_Part_3_-_Results_and_Discussion.html Last one the most relevant if you just want to see the results.
This is the same incomplete study technique again and again. Asking people which they like better doesn't mean they like what they've chosen better. It means that what they'll say when you ask them.
Presuming that a listener can accurately decide which they like better is the researcher's stupidity.
Let's go with another example: wine. A while back I learned to drink wine. You can ask most people hwich of two wines they'll prefer, and the majority will prefer the less expensive wines -- because they taste better.
The truth is, obviously, more expensive wines taste better (we're not talking about over-pricing). Quality wines cost more. Period. But they only taste better when you know how to drink them.
The easy part, you get to decant the wine for twenty minutes for good wines, and two hours for great wines. They are garbage until then. If you don't know that, you drink a great wine out of the bottle and it tastes wretched. It's that simple.
Of course, the food you eat with the wine makes a huge difference, and vice versa.
But the greatest difference between cheap and expensive wine would be the effects later -- like the next morning. Or the effects when you drink it often. Great wines won't give you any sort of a hang-over (at modest quantities), and heart-burn is incredibly unlikely. With a greater variety of tastes, you can more often enjoy something different, whereas cheap wines all taste the same.
Music is the same way. If you were listening to low-quality music all week, versus high quality music all week, week after week, one remains enjoyable, while the other becomes mundane. That's not "which one do you like better" that's "which one do you still like after it becomes abusive".
Similarly, good quality music isn't something I listen to in my convertible sports car doing 120 on the highway in traffic. Good music is for those quiet relaxing times when a world-class harpist is plucking out a rock-n-roll beat, I'm in the dark, reclined, with a glass of decent wine.
How about "which one do you remember best" or "which one inspires you most" or "which one produces an emotional effect". But most people don't know how to consider such options, let alone answer such questions.
Which one do I like the best? Football's better than baseball because it's played on a gridiron, and "F" looks better than "B". That's not a valid opinion. It is, however, mine -- and not only mine.
A 128k mp3 can sound MUCH better with better quality DSP hardware and better quality speakers/headphones.
The best investment I made for listening to music was investing in a klipsch 2.1 speaker set. Modern motherboard HD audio is pretty
decent but using $10 speakers it all sounds like crap.
The present study suffers from that methodological malady known in scientific circles as being "fucked". Please bear with me as I explain this technical term.
The question posed in the text is 'can we tell the difference'. One assumes from this that the answer is yes or no. Testing this question would require playing two versions and asking whether they're the same (can't tell the difference) or different (can etc.).
But that's not what gets asked. The subjects get asked to tell which version sounds better. The question assumes they can tell the difference. Even if they can't tell the difference they are forced by the design to choose one over the other as if they can.
Since they are forced to say which sounds better even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or picking one arbitrarily, and there is no way to determine if or when this occurred. Thus, the results are not only unable to answer the original question, they are unable to answer anything because the data do not even necessarily represent answers.
The design is so fatally flawed that there is nothing that can be pulled out of it. It's complete garbage.
As an aside, I'm not familiar with the musical pieces used, but I'm betting they're fairly new. For years now recordings have been increasingly compressed by the engineers. Most popular works produced in this decade are already so compressed that you can't tell much difference between the original and a recording of it having been compressed yet again, no matter by what method.
To tell the difference between compressed versions one should start with an uncompressed source. And for a person to be able to hear a difference in two versions, they should already be familiar with the original in uncompressed form so they can try to say whether one sounds more like the original than the other (the alternative being both sound worse or both sound like it). If they have no clue what it's supposed to sound like, any attempt to say which sounds better is badly broken due to having no reference with which to compare them.
No attempt was made to determine whether the subjects even had normal hearing. And I don't mean just asked (though that should be done) but tested. People can have frequency drop outs that they're unaware of and that would affect the results.
There are so many problems with the study that it is completely useless. The problems were of the authors' making. Thus, they did not know what they were doing. This is what we mean by "fucked".
I want to know who determined that 'trusted' was a good name for the magazine/blog/honey wagon in which the article appears. I wouldn't trust them to test light bulbs to see if they're burnt out.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Take any modern track and encode it into MP3 in the bitrates 64, 128, 192, 320 kbps.
I can certainly tell the difference.
IRL we have headphones for $40 or the "free" ones that come with the player. or computer speakers, etc.
we have noises all around. at home. in the subway. wherever.
so honestly what does it matter. 160Kb/s aac, 192Kb/s mp3, FLAC, full PCM.
all of the 4 above sound *nearly* equally great in a "test" environment. and while walking down the steet with an mp3 player. it does not matter what of the above formats you use.
PLEASE at some point ... just enjoy the music, k?
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Well first of all PCM, the base of most "lossless" codecs is lossy by itself. It only approximates the original waveform. (just like tracking a mechanically recorded one with a stylus does)
However the bigger loss is before it even becomes a waveform. You have an instument which radiates different sounds into different directions, yet you can only record it with a limited number of microphones. That signal from the microphones is then mixed down to a small number of channels. Those channels are reproduced by loudspeakers in a random enviroment before reaching your ears.
Then some reproduction equipment plays the sound at the wrong volume. Just increasing or decreasing the amplitude of a signal can greatly change it's sound. So it's vital that you use the same volume as it was originally. Unfortunately records don't have callibrated tones on them to tell you how loud they should be played.
MP3 and OGG are economical Alternatives to PCM for when the bitrate is limited. Just compare any of those PCM-based "lossless" systems to MP3 at a bitrate of 64 kbit. If you have the bandwidth, just use PCM with the maximum parameters your hardware can do. (Or parameters you can easily convert to the ones for your final product)
So don't post it.
Not like we haven't covered this before, several times on less obnoxious sites ;)
Screw your frequency analysis. A loud *CLICK* between movements of a symphony or string quartet is exactly what some of us don't need.
Will this "story" make 500 posts? Will the philes still be replying in 2010? Tune in next week!
The "quick and dirty test" bit is a really nice touch. You can feel the hate.
We salute thee and thy mighty trolling skillz!
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Check out this link to BestBuy. This is a fiber optic cable, meaning it transfers LIGHT not electrical signal.
Now read the descritpion:
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I'm not sure what to say other than... if you can't tell the difference between a 128kbit MP3 and uncompressed source material, you may have a hearing deficiency (or extremely poor quality equipment).
I've played audio engineer, designed and built amplifiers and speakers, and tested for phase distortion and coupling. I'm not saying this as an audiophile (though I appreciate quality sound), but as an astute observer: 128kbit CBR MP3s are appalling. 256VBR are quite good, and 320kbit are indistinguishable from source 95+% of the time. These figures vary by compressor; lame is, in my experience, the best across the board.
An easy test for low bitrate MP3s (you'll score 100% on a double blind test): Listen to the cymbals and female vocals. Listen for "Ffffff" or "Thhhhhh" instead of "shhhhh." Almost like a lisp.
Listen for compression; the difference between the loudest and quietest audible sounds is significantly diminished, causing the song to sound lifeless and distant (like listening to a live band from behind a door, or over a phone).
If you can live with it, low bitrate MP3s are great. But to deny high-ratio lossy compression diminishes signal quality is retarded.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files.
It might have been pointed out before, but if they actually can tell the difference and prefer one from the other then it still means there's a difference. That they grew to like the artifacts due to MP3 compression is a different story from the fact we can actually tell the difference.
You just got troll'd!
In today's modern, tightly packed, overly compressed mastering of commercial audio, you'll have a very hard time telling the difference between MP3 and FLAC. But throw in a song with lots of dynamics, and you'll definitely hear a difference, though which one may be more pleasing is a matter of personal preference.
Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...
Some of your audiophiles will tell you that tube based amplifiers produce less distortion than transistor based models.
The truth is that they often produce MORE distortion, only the distortion that they produce is pleasing to the ear, where as the distortion created by transistor based amps tends to be unpleasant to listen to.
If listeners are rating MP3's as superior to FLAC, it is most likely because the psycho-acoustic models used by the codes are introducing artifacts that improve the sound of the music, at least according to the subjective opinion of those listeners.
What you have to realize is that there is no perfect recording of music or any other form of audio data. All music is distorted as compared to what it actually sounded like in the studio. Some of this distortion is deliberate, which is why you have all those knobs and dials on the mixing console. A lot of music nowadays is compressed, which creates more deliberate distortion. Encoding that analog data into a 16bit digital stream stream at 44khz produces yet more distortion.
At the end of the day you have to figure out what sounds best to you because all of it will have distortion of some sort or another.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Fraunhofer spent considerable time and effort to build a lossy codec that was indistinguishable, to most listeners, from uncompressed music (44.1/16-bit) files. mp3 codecs (and the improved codecs that followed, such as AAC or Ogg) all craft the file in such a way as to make the parts "thrown out" the least noticeable and the parts "we keep" the most important cues. Unlike other digital audio compression methods that preceded them, mp3 codecs are built from the ground up to retain most or all of the music signal that human hearing and the brain need to enjoy a satisfying musical performance, and to concentrate on discarding what seems unnecessary to that end.
That they succeeded is hardly groundbreaking news. That some listeners can tell the difference is also hardly groundbreaking news; there were a significant minority amongst Franuhofer's listening panels who were almost always able to discern which was which. At some point the majority of casual listeners were not able to do so with any consistency. That's when they said "OK, we'll use this method, then."
There is nothing wrong with well engineered lossy codecs, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with sat radio or mp3 via computer or music player can easily attest. To say there is no difference, or that an mp3 is "CD quality", is the kind of hyperbole that can't go unchallenged. To be a bit more honest and say "it sounds pretty good" or "I like the way it sounds" is fine, however.
Most people are OK with some form of lossy codec; in the environment we most often listen these days, it's limitations are not drawbacks, and possibly not even evident (i.e. in a car; there is plenty of extraneous sound to mask most limitations of compressed audio; and as anyone who has ever used a sound pressure meter in a running vehicle on even a deserted road can tell you, the low-frequency noise of any automobile just going about it's business is very high and much of it is subsonic, which we can't normally hear but none the less masks lower-level detail information on music we might be listening to). It's not a crime to say you're OK with mp3, even if you can tell the difference between lossy and lossless formats.
There's a saying in the sound industry: "Musicians have the worst stereos". And, generally, they do. The reason has more to do with how they listen than what they're listening on: musicians will mentally fill in the sound by following the notes themselves, and things like the beat, the rhythm, the tone, and the timing of the players and their instruments. It's as if they are playing the notes themselves, in their heads, and they need only the elemental cues to do so.
If you love a song, you don't have to hear it under ideal conditions to enjoy the performance. These are the kinds of things Fraunhofer concentrated on making sure remained in the mp3 after compression. It's supposed to sound good; that was the whole point, and that's why the Fraunhofer codecs succeeded, despite the royalty payments due.
All that still does not take away from the enjoyment of uncompressed formats, reproduced competently by accurate equipment, in the appropriate environment. Your car or via earbuds on the street are not those types of environments, and mp3s etc are perfectly reasonable compromises between quality and the need for reduced data footprints. There is a place for both uncompressed and compressed formats; they are not mutually exclusive.
Sure, MP3 or other lossy compression can actually remove some of the bad distortion harmonics from the over-compressed and over-limited material what the big record companies are throwing out these days.
Any of these tests done on material which has any signal clipping in it, is immediately invalid.
Most of the CDs from big record companies produced on this century sound horrible. Luckily there are still small record companies producing good material on a multichannel SACD...
If "The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version." then not visiting it at all is recommended, adblock and flashblock notwithstanding. You want to astroturf, then find an article that understands how the web works (eg, that it can scroll)
It is sadly something that has to get compromised a lot but it makes major differences in sound quality with regards to soundstage or imaging. Makes sense when you think about it. You are being presented with a stereo signal, not an independent left/right setup. Instruments aren't all the way one or the other in a mix, they are panned around in the middle. Well, so be able to hear that convincingly, you need to be in the center of the speakers' sound projection.
Having good placement is as important as good speakers, at least for some aspects of sound. This is mitigated somewhat with movies and surround sound (since there are more speakers), but it still matters a great deal (and theaters take care with speaker placement).
Hi Everyone,
I saw this article, and while I haven't read all the comments yet, I wanted to mention that I coded up a little ABX tester for Mac (Leopard or SL) a little while ago. I am hoping to add some improvements in the coming weeks, so if anybody tries it out and has any suggestions, I would be glad to get feedback.
The program is available here:
http://swingingsultan.com/Swinging_Sultan/Juxtapose.html
My contact page is available there as well.
-owen
Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!
"The vast majority of people AREN'T die-hard audiophiles! My GOD, do you realize what this means?!? Our entire perception of the world has been wrong all along!!! It's not just a few troglodytes we run into once in a while who are deaf to the point that they can't tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio to a variance of .0000045Hz! It's EVERYONE! Are WE wrong? Is lossy compression actually good enough? Oh God. OH GOD. I'm freaking out I'm freaking out I'm freaking..."
(Sound of some song nobody cares about, least of all the ranter in question, coming out of disgustingly overpriced and obsessively calibrated sound equipment)
"...aaaaah I'm in my happy place I'm in my happy place I'm..."
The question they asked was "Which sounds better, channel A or B?" whereas the question to be asked is:
"The original is channel C. Which sounds more like the original, channel A or channel B?"
Asking the first question, your subject will pick the track with the higher 'loudness' (a bit of bass/treble boost) almost invariably.
The latter question is the correct one, as the whole point of recording music is to make it sound like you're actually there in the room with the musicians.
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
Is fun!
Like to hear the special sound of The White Stripes, Icy Thump mixed by the audio engineer legend Steve Hoffman, in high resolution sound. :)
You could of course go "Meeh, I don't care.." , but then I think you are missing out on something. And I can back that up by my friends reaction listing with my gear.
This was my 24th, 25th 26th, year present to myself:
Headphones: AKG K701
PocketAmp: Emmeline "The Hornet"
MusicPlayer: iPod 5G with Rockbox (flac suppport)
SoundCard: Transit 24bit 96kHz, M-audio
If you are interested in music, and have some extra cash to invest. This would be my recommendation.
Cheers!
Tip: Look for Steve Hoffman, and DCC mixes.
Ya I'd be interested in seeing MP3 (or others) compared with DVD-Audio discs. This isn't because I believe you CDs are bad and you need ultra high rate recordings or anything, but because all the DVD-A tracks I've listened to have been highly dynamic. They don't limit them much, if at all. So I'd be interested with those to see how they stack up. Try the native MLP (lossless compression kinda like surround FLAC) vs various lossy compressed rates. I'd be interested to see what people say about the sound, maybe some objective analysis too.
Might be interesting to see how different codecs cope too. I've done some informal testing on low signal levels between OGG and MP3 and found some interesting things. I was curious if they could encode 24-bit audio. In theory should work fine, after all they use 32-bit math internally. So I made a wave file with a test tone at -100dBFS, which is below the noise floor in 16-bit (and indeed if you converted the file to 16-bit with no dither you got silence). That I encoded in to MP3 and OGG. In both cases they successfully encoded and decoded the test tone. However they differed in the result. The MP3 was as you'd expect, the tone played back just as it had before. After all, it was an unchallenging test, a single 1kHz sinewave. However in OGG the tone was there, but only some times. It would drop out and static periodically.
Now none of that says how they'd deal with encoding low level information when there's also louder information, this was just a test to see if they could handle it at all, but it does reveal some interesting differences in how the codecs work.
From my experience, most people don't have audio equipment that is accurate enough to reveal the imperfections of a lossy format. I can easily tell the difference of even 320 kbs mp3 on my studio reference monitors (although this does take some training).
Well, I guess I must be one of the few people that can tell the difference in many albums between the lossless and lossy digital format. I find depth is often lost, and high's seem somewhat distorted. ie. Symbols sound flat, and if there's a lot of symbol thrashing, it almost sounds like rattling tinfoil.. But thats just me though, go ahead and ditch "lossless" audio since so many people apparently can't appreciate it anyway.
this "news" article has managed to find these shocking truths: a) MP3 encoded with LAME goes transparent to most ears at or below 192kbs, which has been known for a good few years now and with current versions of Lame can be pushed lower still b) MP3 encoded with LAME at 320kbs is transparent to everyone who isn't deluding themselves, which is hardly a surprise given that MP3 encoded with LAME goes transparent to most ears at or below 192kbs, as been known for a good few years now Seriously, what is this non-news doing here? There have been plenty of actually controlled tests studying when lossy formats become transparent; and comparing them with FLAC rather than comparing them with the original CD is a meaningless addition since, by definition, unless someone did something seriously stupid during the encoding the FLAC is identical to the CD.
Cymbal.
Could the characteristic sizzle of lossy mp3 encoding be pleasurable to the ears in the same way vinyl has it's distinct pleasing sound?
Indeed the warmth and softer warmer noise background of a record is that 'vinyl sound' that which fans of the analog format love. It's a result of the limitations of certain frequencies and wave forms a needle in groove can't reproduce too well as well as some of the mastering techniques. MP3s have a squelch, sizzle and smear resulting from compression that should sound much worse than the actual level of sound detail loss indicates, could it be desirable even? Especially with certain instruments? Indeed the algorithm has been designed to fool the human ear, masking the loss, did they accidentally make it sound good?
It seems that people are actually prefering MP3s, partly because thats what they are used to hearing of course, but I think this is because there is a ceratain character to the sound that people may actually like. By my own preferences I can hear the difference between a FLAC and a 160kbps MP3 recording, but I don't hate the loss as much as I should.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
How much is the recording? After all they compress the sound now to make it sound louder to sell it so it's likely in this case that FLAC would have nothing that couldn't be thrown out with MP3 and still be lossless.
I find disturbing that quality standards should be tested on uneducated random people. Obviously they can't distinguish between MP3 and FLAC. They also cannot tell the difference between Brahms and Mahler. However this doesn't mean that we can now ditch Mahler symphonies in favor of Brahms'.
Check out my cross-platform apps
Even up market HiFi headphones don't convey the music they way half decent speakers do. Do the tests again with speakers and come back to us.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Few years ago it was rather easy to distinguish even a 320 kbps mp3 from the original, the space present in the wav version collapsed in the mp3 (done with some olde lame incarnation - 3.90 or something). Thus I doubted the quality of mp3s. Recently one guy pointed to me that newer versions really improved so I gave it a bit time to testing. Using LAme 3.98 and beta 4, listeningwise it is rather hard to detect any difference but is possible to notice subtler detail in quieter parts of songs but I doubt that it would prove significant enough as to show for majority of subjects in blind listening tests. I also ran the sampes thru analysing sw (arta) and the mp3 exhibits a tad more distortion (mere 2-3 dB higher threshold). Must say I was pretty amazed.
Ahh MP3, the Vinyl of the digital audio world.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
When will people realize that it depends on the type of music you compress whether you can hear artifacts or not? You need mustic with lots of overtones and/or noise to pick it out most easily. Classical music, or distorted guitars coupled with cymbals in rock music, etc. are where artefacts appear most clearly. Relatively clean waveforms such as found in most modern dance music are not.
And, yes, lossy codecs improve to the point where it becomes harder and harder to distinguish them from lossless codecs. I'm not claiming that's not the case. I just think if you bother to test anything like that, pick music that would actually show the differenes.
That's like telling me you can't tell the difference screwing bareback or with a rubber. Uhh yeah I can tell
Duc Duc
God's gift to chicks
http://www.zimbio.com/Headphones/articles/54/ear+headphones+ear+canal+headphones+safe
It's all about background noise. If you get some earbuds with the cups that fit snugly in your ear then you get less background noise and can play music quieter.
Similarly, using old style headphones in a noisy place is fine if they are closed cup. Open cup you'll get the background noise.
Studios tend to go for the open cup because they are easier to use for long periods of time.
Open vs closed http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1994_articles/mar94/headphones.html
[Intentionally left blank]
> Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC.
I think you have described the whole purpose of MP3 !!
(i.e. for most of the people, most of the time it is good enough, however the file is much smaller !)
Yeah, I even find it's hard to listen to a lot of newer albums for very long without my ears getting tired. On the other hand, if I listen to LP's I can listen to many in a row and not feel that way. The Loudness Wars are just ruining the way music is heard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_wars
"a worrying preponderance" "if slightly disturbing"
I'm more intrigued why the submitter considers this worrying and disturbing. If people are happy with the quality of sound produced by an MP3, why should it be a concern? Surely this is more an indication that MP3s of a certain bitrate are doing what they were designed to do. Should we be implementing a law to force FLACs on people? After all, they clearly don't know what's best for them and need to be told.
But why you would find it a worry is beyond me. Does the submitter often have sleepless nights over the absolutely dreadful tastes of those less discerning than themselves?
I stopped reading at "quick and dirty" - media quality comparison requires a careful methodology if the results are to be at all meaningful.
I believe that, although not everyone can recognize at the first place, most of people can 'sense' the different when comparing lossy audio with lossless audio (they may not be able describe the different, btw). Especially the very low bitrate lossy audio (128k and lower).
The lossy compression is to analyze the audio data and remove what it think that data won't be noticed by the human. So if you listen carefully, you should notice what is 'missing' from the lossy audio file.
Also, badly compressed file tends to have artifacts which is very easy to notice. I have some examples of those.
Yes.
Anything else?
I find it really disturbing that no one ever brings up the fact that these results will vary widely depending on the size of the listening space.
.jpg .tiff file of the same photo. Yet when we take these same two files and print them at 5' x 12' billboard size, the jpg file will appear so grossly grainy and pixelated, .tiff file will maintain a much more coherent presentation of what the original picture looked like.
While my own experience is that at home (Genelec 1031A, Shure EC530 in-ear monitors, etc..) or in a small studio it is somewhat difficult to pick those
differences out, as soon as the same test is conducted in a larger acoustic space, they jump out to the point that it is obscene and hard to ignore.
As I have already said many times in previous posts here, we can sit here and argue all day long about which looks better on our laptop's LCD monitor, a 65 Kbytes
or a 82 Meg
while the
In other words, large-scale sound systems tend to act as magnifiers for these minute artifacts and differences which lossy audio compression introduces, and there is no
question in my mind that when the same tests are performed in an auditorium or a reasonably anechoic concert hall (in open air even better because no reflections) it
does immediately become quite apparent how much the lossy encoding process actually messes with the information.
It is not merely a function of frequency response, distortion and other lab specs, rather a more fundamental one of the poorly-understood characteristics that give music its
inner dynamic, the 'punch' in the low frequencies, the cleanliness in the top end and tails of reverbs, as well as many times the resultant waveforms of many combined
harmonic sounds in the midrange, probably a bit more so on acoutic instruments, but not always necessarily so.
I would welcome similar tests done on a reasonable sound reinforcement rig, like a typical line array system with 50,000 watts of power in a room which can accommodate
1,500 people, a pretty standard setup for concerts and DJ gigs. (keeping in mind that in such systems there is a digital processor in the chain through which the sound will pass)
There are much deeper implications to this, such as the fact that vinyl and open-reel while flawed to some extent still offer the human ear a much smoother experience
in acoustic spaces of that size, as CD and DVD players do a very poor job of reconstituting the the 'slices' of digital audio after D/A conversion, yes great master clocking will
make the signal sound more bearable, but there is a continuity between the waveforms which analog seems to do much better than most digital systems ever can at the sampling
rates they are currently working at, and which I am sad to report haven't really changed a lot since 1981 when the CD spec was developed, SACD being a step in the right direction.
That these older analog formats are not even included in the tests means pretty much the equivalent of the one-eyed man being crowned the leader of the kingdom of the blind.
Which is why to this day, many of the top professional DJs insist on playing from analog sources such as vinyl, which while they have certain inconvenient artifacts of their own, do offer
something else that the human ear craves for, and is really keenly attuned to: continuity of sound, and the smoothness of a natural waveform. This effect is clearly demonstrated by making
an high-quality open-reel tape copy of a CD, and playing the two side-to-s
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As many people have said, a lot of this is just what you are used to.
An anecdotal tale from my previous life as a shop-floor assistant at a hi-fi store. We used to sell cheap consumer stuff alongside the serious amps and speakers but probably about a quarter of my customers genuinely preferred the sound coming from a cheap boombox to a more serious setup. It'd make my ears bleed it was so bad but it was the sort of sound they were used to and they liked it.
It matters a lot for Classical music, less so for most types of pop music. Obviously it depends also on bitrate and recording quality. But I have never yet heard a compressed music file with classical music/ Opera which matches FLAC. In this day and age with the size and price of disk space there is absolutely no reason to use lossy compression.
There definitely is a difference in sound quality. MP3 is really bad at encoding cymbal sounds at 128kbps- they sound 'watery'. Because of this one artefact, I can tell every time when an 128 kbps audio track I'm listening to is an mp3 or an ogg. That's with cheap headphones in an office environment. The differences get less noticeable at higher rates though. I won't go as far as claiming that I can hear the difference between a lossy ogg and lossless FLAC. Does it matter? Depends on the circumstances. In the car I probably couldn't care less.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Unlike other digital audio compression methods that preceded them, mp3 codecs are built from the ground up to retain most or all of the music signal that human hearing and the brain need to enjoy a satisfying musical performance, and to concentrate on discarding what seems unnecessary to that end.
mp3 does not take the hypersonic effect into account, does it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_effect
I've been keeping my music in lossless FLAC for years. My family gave my a bunch of crap about this 'cause they don't see the need so I told them to shut up, listen and put their money where their ears are.
I had them each pick one of their favorite tracks and ripped each track to MP3, FLAC, and OGG in front of them. Then I randomized the order and played them as samples A, B, and C. They consistently picked the MP3 as the least desirable sound. There was some back-and-forth on OGG vs FLAC but they all agreed that minimally lossy or completely lossless beat the crap out of lossy MP3.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
I did a double blind test and picked 10 out of 10 correct comparing mp3 at 128 to 320 to wav, the difference was always obvious in every case. What do you expect? Even at 320, 75% if the encoded information is just gone. But I guess the whole issue really only matters to people to whom it matters. Most have never heard music played properly so they don't know the difference. Maybe ignorance is bliss in this case, hearing my college roomie's Quad setup in the 80s sent me on a very expensive and sometimes frustrating ride.
Here's your possible and much simpler explanation for prefering MP3's more and more. There is a large difference between recent LAME and...whatever people were using at the turn of millenium.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Eliminate the stuff which most of us can't hear?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Yeah, I can support that conclusion - I have tinnitus (though with actually somewhat higher than average frequencies I can hear, last time I checked; plus who knows how my hearing is overall just "different"), and I always preffered slightly higher bitrates/quality settings (and even then I seemed to have "ugh, that part/sound is horrible in lossy" more often). Yes, it was ABXed; I seemed to do somewhat better than average at differentiating.
But then I realised how stupid it is to train myself in noticing differences (semi-regular ABXing would do just that). It's better and cheaper not to be able to hear the difference very often. And with current encoders typical 128kbps AAC or mp3 from LAME with typical VBR preset is fine.
One that hath name thou can not otter
You wouldn't want to do a test with a commodity soundcard or portable mp3 player - I believe the difference requires decent ADDA converters which don't necessarily cost an arm and a leg (a $250 receiver should suffice) and decent speakers (again, just decent will do). With that set, if you focus the reverb trails on the same track encoded to 192 mp3 vs a 24bit flac - the difference is obvious. When there's a lot going on in the mix it gets significantly more difficult to tell since the lossiness is more prevalent in the lower end of the dynamics..
A lot of the comments point-out the compression that makes everything seem equally loud, which is done to make it sound good on consumer-grade audio equipment. Maybe it is time to release two mixes: one for consumer grade, where the volume is maximized for the duration of the song, and another that is meant for high-end audio use that preserves the levels. Or even a new format that combines both.
What's it to you if I think I can hear the difference when you think I can't. Maybe I can hear the difference, maybe I can't. It's a personal thing and if I preffer listening to flac or 'pure' music or iof I want to hear crap played from out of a tin can, it really shouldn't make diddly squate difference to you! SO GET OUT OF MY EAR SPACE!
On another train of thought...
If you want to manipulate the music and say put it in another format, up the bass whatever and save it again, you really need to work with the lossless formats. Then if you must lower it to MP3 to save space, cheep hard drives makes that need a little less. Of course, on your IPOD or other little device with your cheasy headphones, you might as well go to some quality 4 bit recording format and really spave space. You won't hear the difference once the earbuds are done with it.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
In 99% of cases, of course not. But as the article points out, if you bought a CD, it's worth keeping a lossless copy around so that at some point in the future, if mp3 goes the way of the dodo, or even if you want to re-encode at a different bitrate, you won't have to suffer generation loss or re-purchase the items in the new format.
The gold is plated and only a couple or angstroms thick, in other words it is worthless.
You do know that the electrons only move along the surface of wires, right? You might want to just stick to what you know...
if you know the music you'll be able to tell. any decent set of headphones or a properly amplified loudspeakers should show the evidence of compression. I've been using SHN/FLAC since my post DAT trading days of GD tapes. If you appreciate your music and don't want to miss anything the artist intended for you to hear then stay away from the mp3 format.
All depends on the source.
I listen to a lot of old 1950's radio broadcasts, believe it or not they sound great at 64kbps! They are mono recordings, made of very early equipment, so anything is up!
I also listen to a lot of death and thrash and quite frankly your wasting disk space and time when you go above 192kbps. 128kbps, you still get a bit of clipping, so just erring on the side of caution is better. FLAC? What, for stuff by Cannibal Corpse, Dethklok or Malefice? Just not worth it!
All modern music from popular genres, pop, rap, metal, rock, is compressed to death, so even if you FLAC it, it's still pretty much screwed before you even get it, so why waste your time, yeah go up to 256kbps for peace of mind, but any further and your wasting your time, on popular, "mainstream" music that is.
Did you use thousand dollar oxygen-free copper dielectrically balanced speaker wire, or did you use a bunch of coat hangers?
Personally, I think that MP3 is warmer and more human than these newfangled "lossless" formats, anyway.
I actually recode all of my downloaded tracks to 128k mp3 files to save space. My ears really don't hear a difference between this and the original files most of the time and it saves a lot of disk space. I have 43,000 songs in my library and as it is they take up quite a bit of space. Plus I stream my library to my iPhone and with the lower bit rate that works better. I'm sure at some point I'll probably wish I had higher quality files but I started this collection years ago and so far it's worked just fine for me.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
The problem with doing listening tests with the "average joe" is that the average joe has no idea what to listen for. They have "uneducated ears" so to speak. For a vast majority of today's listeners, if the sound track doesn't have an overbearing bass track and squeaky highs, to them it "doesn't sound good". They have no clue what a quality recording sounds like. If they even hear nuanced sounds, like the quiet echo of the symphonic hall's acoustics (in the case of such a recording), they don't know what it is and they don't like it. I have even noticed that for some people, if the music recording is not over saturated (loud and distorted) they don't like it.
Lossless, and even better, uncompressed audio is and always will sound better than lossy, you just have to know what you're listening for.
well, eventually it is.
But the point is, what happens when the next great encoding scheme comes along, and the only copies of your music you have are compressed?
I refuse to pay for lossy compressed music. Period.
I first decided I could hear the difference when listening to the first few seconds of Radiohead's Airbag in lossless and encoded at different MP3 bitrates. The bells sound more defined at each incremented rate, but the different between even 320Kbps MP3 and lossless is incredible. I started ripping in FLAC and haven't turned back.
Most people, in my experience, can't discern jack diddly squat with their ears.
Most people can't hear the difference between a singer with years of vocal training versus a random person off the street who holds consonants, changes keys at random, and is a quarter tone flat half the time. Most people can't hear the difference between proper counterpoint and simple harmony. Heck, a lot of people can't hear the difference between melody alone versus melody with harmony. They just plain don't year the extra parts. Furthermore, most people can't tell the difference between a new CD versus a cassette tape that's been floating around the console and floor of a car for five years getting heated by the sun, chilled in winter, and dirty from salty-snow off of boots. Basically, hoi polloi can't tell the difference between music and noise.
But people with actual *ears* can tell. Music with mp3 compression sounds like jpeg images look: horrible. Ogg a little better, but still clearly inferior. FLAC, assuming your system isn't too heavily loaded, sounds just like WAV, very comparable in quality to a CD.
While we're at it, a lot of people can't see the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit color and can't see any difference between serif and sans-serif fonts (unless one's a lot bigger or bolder than the other), let alone stuff like kerning. A lot of people just plain never learn to pay attention to details.
This does not mean mp3 is a good format for music. It must means most people have no discernment, which, frankly, is nothing new.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
there is an obvious, but fundamental difference between lossy and lossless encodings: with lossy codecs you can't reconstruct the original data. In the lossy case, that means that if you ever want to edit or process your audio, you will be decoding imperfect data and lossily recoding it. Every time you repeat this, your audio will gather more encoding artefacts. Very soon these artefacts will be audible if not annoying.
A couple friends of mine have these. They don't look nearly as hip, but they also sound great. To my ears, about the same as the Grado. (An office mate had the SR60s) They're a bit more compact and also fold.
http://amzn.com/B00001P4ZH
I own a pair of these things. They also sound amazing and have 12-15db (18 claimed) passive noise reduction. They kick the ass of active noise reduction headphones.
http://amzn.com/B0016MNAAI
I am hearing impaired to a level I can't explain easily: I can hear my baby cry though it is in another room and I am watching TV on full blast. On the other side I need to consciuosly hear something, which can take several seconds if I don't know the person. It's like a cloud which gets clearer with time but often if reveals several alternatives which can be pretty funny - or embarrasing. And I need to read lips to a certain degree or speak a word or a phrase by myself to determine the right meaning.
But I hear a difference in most MP3s. It just sounds incomplete. And I can hardly understand the lyrics even if I know the song.
cb
To say that someone did an objective test which found mp3s or flacs sound better is fundamentally flawed. Now if you listened enough and trained your ears you would hear things that others might miss. I have no doubt that a top studio producer would hear things in the mix that I would not. And also,I would hear things that the teenager up the street with ADD and a fifteen second attention span would not.
If you want to LISTEN to music, you have to really LISTEN.
And I don't care if some people think that mp3s sound better. Their opinions
are obviously irrelevant. Even a 320 kb/s mp3 sounds "off". Some people think
Creative makes a good sound card. Go figure.
All you guys need a proper set of headphones and a high quality sound card. And then and only then can you get the quality you can tell the difference.
I thought we had an article about this phenomenon a while back. It turns out that people are so used to listening to music in MP3 format that it sounds "better" to them. It's really just familiarity. I have used FLAC for years and I can tell the difference with crappy headphones on my "MP3" player when I copy some MP3's from my girlfriend's computer.
Time makes more converts than reason
Now expose them to a full orchestra in a well-designed sound hall.
Bring earplugs, though. The loud end can be way too loud depending on where you're sitting, and that's without even factoring in the cannons.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's a bummer that they didn't use 192kpbs VBR LAME files. VBR is where LAME really shines nowadays...
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as .wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp. An $80 1TB hard drive can hold $19,000 worth of uncompressed CDs. Sure... in flac format I could store more like $60,000 worth... but who has a $20,000 CD collection let alone a $60,000 one?
Not that you're wrong or that I disagree, but one consideration that some people may wish to make is also transfer time. Moving around an extra few hundreds of gigabytes for transferring to a new drive, or doing backups can suck up time.
Personally I'd rather spend a little extra time up-front compressing things down using FLAC, so that in the future I don't have to waste time on waiting for file transfers to occur. I'd go with a FLAC 'master' copy and then convert once to (say) a decent AAC bit rate (160 kbps?) for general use. this initial work is then ammortized via having to wait less for any future transfers.
Remember it also takes time to send stuff to your music player, and bandwidth if you want to stream over your home network. Raw storage may be cheap, but backups, redundancy, and the time it takes to transfer stuff is often not as cheap.
Everyone has a different trade off of course.
Since they are testing people's perceptions this is in part a psychological test. You cannot conduct perceptual tests directly because perception is affected by the conscious mind. Thus if you asked people "do you hear a difference," you are likely to get many false positives since you are predisposing people to seek a difference. Instead you ask people which one sounds better.
"even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or picking one arbitrarily, and there is no way to determine if or when this occurred."
Actually there is a way to tell if this occurred--you compare the data set to what would result from pure chance, and look for statistically significant differences. If everyone is guessing then in the aggregate the experimental result should match pure chance (50% say one sounds better, 50% say the other sounds better). If a statistically significant percentage say one sounds better than the other, then you have proof that it is possible for some people to detect the differences.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The market for "home theater in a box" systems is proof positive that most people have terrible ears. The vast majority of consumer level audio equipment is just straight up garbage. My favorite is when people go on about how the "reviews are really good on this system!!!"...yea...reviews written by people who have absolutely no fucking idea what they are talking about. I see pictures of people's home theater setups...uneven speaker placement...rear channels set in front of the listener or even just strewn randomly about the room...and yet they say it sounds "awesome".
Yea, I'm an elitist, and I suppose it is good for those people that they can get by with cheap, junky, plastic equipment tossed randomly into the room. As an elitist, though, it just annoys the ever-loving shit out of me. I don't mind it too much for grandma and people that legitimately don't care...its just the people who get all hyped up like they actually know something that drives me crazy.
I can definitely tell the difference between compressed and not. The difference is readily apparently to me, though admittedly I have not run a FLAC/MP3 comparison...it's been mostly MP3 versus CD. I should probably try the FLAC comparison some time, just to see. I'm definitely not anti-MP3 either...its pretty much all I listen to in the car. I guess I am willing to make some compromises for convenience.
From TFA: ".. and that they struggle to hear much difference over 192kbps MP3 in many situations."
That's the whole point, isn't it? So what if a (very) large percentage of the music sounds "fine" in MP3? That still leaves the rest where you can tell "something is off" and in some cases it's just plain annoying.
Typical examples include high quality recordings of classical music in rooms with characteristic reverberation (the reverb is lost, resulting in location of instruments being hard to pinpoint, unlike in the lossless original on good hardware). Or live recordings of crowds cheering over "open" music, like acoustical guitar and song (applause and cheering tends to sound like it's been caught in too tight an envelope). Or heavy distortion in high density music like really noisy techno or very fuzzy guitars (as in stoner rock or some metal).
If you listen to none of these and basically only care for heavily compressed pop music with clear production, you're likely not to care. If you happen to like these more than anything else, you're probably hating MP3. On average, most people won't care most of the time, but whenever they do care, they'll wish they had chosen a lossless format. It's not like we don't have the space to store it, after all.
Streaming is another story altogether of course, the cost of size factors in differently.
Greetings, Grismar
Music is art and art is subjective. Let's all just stop arguing and listen to what we think sounds best. If I like my speaker system or 120$ headphones, and you're fine with 5$ earbuds, that's okay too. Let's spend more time enjoying our music, in whatever way is best for each of us.
I have a background in high end audio and I am a musician who records his own music. I can even tell the difference between my music recorded at 44.1kHz and 96kHz. 96k is superior, but I haven't experimented with releasing audio in this format, for lack of listeners. Simply put, no one but me enjoys my music.
I record in 96K and export at 44.1 to burn to CD. Then I rip the CD to MP3 @ 320kbps. I upload the MP3s to an FTP server and send the link to my friends on facebook or email. That's usually my last communication with anyone, I seldom hear back any feedback. For each album, I might get one or two people that says they listened to it. At least my Mom listens.
I find that I like to take a mix and hear it on a full sized stereo, in the car and on headphones. that gives a good idea of how it sounds across different equipment. The home theater stereo seems to really process the sound and add distortion by artificially boosting the bass.
I like listening to my own stuff and learning, honing the production technique. I would share here, but the lack of feedback gets very disappointing; you put some effort into something you're excited about, then you release it and no one hears it, or maybe if they did, it didn't excite them, so it's easier to just keep it on the down low and be happy that at least I enjoy it.
It's great to have the MP3s online so I can listen to my stuff where ever I am.
I would call myself a "digital audiophile" I suppose, since I fail to see that vinyl can have better sound quality than a good digital studio master.
On any system you can buy at BestBuy (Bose) chances are you won't see much difference between FLAC and MP3. The speakers aren't up to par, but most importantly the DAC isn't good enough.
I did blind listening tests with my Bowers & Wilkins 800 speakers and with a Burr Brown DAC the difference between 320kbps MP3 and Apple Lossless is slight but noticeable. With a dedicated PS Audio DAC the difference is very apparent, mostly in the higher frequencies.
I also purchase 24-bit studio masters from Linn Records and they really are better than CD quality. The detail and dynamic range is impressive. It is so engaging that you will find yourself listening to albums again, just for the pleasure of hearing beautiful music.
What seems to be the norm is that most CDs mastered in 1975-1985 sound better than most CDs mastered today, so if the original CD is mediocre to begin with then chances are you won't see much difference when you encode it to lossy, as the dynamic range is already compressed on the CD.
At 320kbps you are pretty close to the size that FLAC compression would produce, so at that point you might as well go lossless even if you can't tell the difference (at least you could get back to wave files that way). Also you may not have "tin ears," because I've found it takes thousands of dollars of audio equipment to tell the difference at 192kbps. However, any true audio file will say do what you think sounds good (even if it happens to be the tape deck in your car), it is only the snobby ones who are douche bags.
FLAC often has a bitrate higher than 1000kbps, so there is a significant difference between the size of a 320 version and a FLAC version. So it takes about 200% more storage space, takes 3 times as long to copy, etc. That being said, if possible, I'd still go for FLAC, especially for important things (original work, a rip of a rare CD/LP, etc.). With FLAC, you can always make lossy derivative copies, but if you start at 320kpbs (let alone 192 or, god forbid, 128), you will never get better sound from that source, it will only get worse. So if it isor whatever, go for FLAC, other
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
A CD is only 150KB/sec (1200kbps), which is pretty streamable now.
150 KiB/s is CD-ROM. CD audio has a slightly higher rate due to less error correction coding on audio tracks (32 * 44100 = 1411 kbps). If you compress the audio with FLAC, you can get it under the 1 Mbps of Spanish broadband,. But then you run into problems when A. two people who share an Internet connection are using it at once, or B. you're trying to download a whole album from the music store at more than 1x, or C. you can't get anything faster than dial-up because you don't live in and can't move to a country like Spain or Finland that treats some level of Internet access as a human right.
The problem with FLAC is that it requres floating point calculations
Citation needed. I thought the FLAC decoder was integer (because it's more predictable across platforms than floating point) and the encoder used floating-point arithmetic. Are you talking about players or recorders?
Isn't there crappy low-end playback equipment today as well?
Though, I have a feeling that playing the same record eighty times can't be good for it.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The Players: .....
Eric Idle - Wine Expert;
The Scene:
Soft introduction music plays
WINE EXPERT:
A lot of people in this country pooh-pooh Australian table wines. This is a pity as many fine Australian wines appeal not only to the Australian palate but also to the cognoscenti of Great Britain.
Black Stump Bordeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint flavoured Burgundy, whilst a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world's best sugary wines.
Château Blue, too, has won many prizes; not least for its taste, and its lingering afterburn.
Old Smokey 1968 has been compared favourably to a Welsh claret, whilst the Australian Wino Society thoroughly recommends a 1970 Coq du Rod Laver, which, believe me, has a kick on it like a mule: eight bottles of this and you're really finished. At the opening of the Sydney Bridge Club, they were fishing them out of the main sewers every half an hour.
Of the sparkling wines, the most famous is Perth Pink. This is a bottle with a message in, and the message is 'beware'. This is not a wine for drinking, this is a wine for laying down and avoiding.
Another good fighting wine is Melbourne Old-and-Yellow, which is particularly heavy and should be used only for hand-to-hand combat.
Quite the reverse is true of Château Chunder, which is an appellation contrôlée, specially grown for those keen on regurgitation; a fine wine which really opens up the sluices at both ends.
Real emetic fans will also go for a Hobart Muddy, and a prize winning Cuivre Reserve Château Bottled Nuit San Wogga Wogga, which has a bouquet like an aborigine's armpit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I sold stereo equipment in the middle of the HiFi revolution (1968-1980) and I can tell you, without a doubt, that most people HEAR but they don't LISTEN. The biggest piece of my job selling HiFi gear was spending time to educate the prospect about sound, what they were hearing, why one was better than another, and why something that sounded 'good' at first blush usually turned out to be craptastic, the aural equivalent of Microsoft's 'eye candy'.
MP3's underreport the low end and sizzle-ize the top end, in addition to losing sound information and generally gargle-izing the entire sound spectrum.
If someone has never heard very good sound, then how are they ever going to tell the difference between good sound and crap ? Just because you give them a good pair of earphones you can't expect them to identify quality reproduction because they don't know how to LISTEN.
i wonder how large the sample size was, or if they were using half-decent speakers through a half-decent amp. you don't need expensive stuff to hear the difference.
.ogg and .mp3'
it's so obviously different that it's comparable to listening to someone play an electric piano vs a grand piano.
if you think they sound the same, turn up your hearing aid and wait for the bus with grandma. while you're at it, try not to walk off the end of the earth since the ground looks flat.
a more valid topic would have been 'listening for a difference between
Not all mp3 decoding listening is equal.
I admit I read TFA in a hurry, but I think I didn't see any mention of the decoder used or the driver/sound codec combination. These factors are critical for any listening test. Specifically, I'd like to know:
a) Did the soundcard/drivers used upsample 44.1 kHz to 48 KHz or not? Usually resampling is the norm with either Creative or with cheapo codecs/driver combinations. I never used Vista, but from what I've read, few people know precisely what happens at the OS lever regarding bit-accurate audio playback.
b) Was a garden variety mp3 decoder used, or a high-end one like libmad or MAD Winamp Plugin v.0.2b (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=60454) supporting 24/32-bit output, sophisticated dithering etc?
If the answer to a) is 'no' and the answer to b) is 'yes', then according to my experience, I find the results very reasonable, mp3 can indeed sound better than plain old CD 16/44.1 or lossless formats.
In looking at the study, there were 16 possible outcomes...
(ie: right or wrong on 4 sets of independent events). If randomly distributed, we would expect a 1/16 chance that one person would get them all right, 1/16 all wrong, 8/16 half right, 3/16 1 right, 3/16 3 right.
They had 7 participants, 1 got all right, 3 got half right, 3 got 1 right.
These numbers just aren't very convincing one way or another - we need a lot more test subjects.
...did they test this with headphones?!?! Unless you're spending $1,000.00USD or more for a pair of headphones, then you're certainly not going to tell a lot of difference between the audio tracks as described in the article. You're just not going to get adequate signal reproduction from headphones that cannot accurately represent audio frequencies that are truncated using the sampling rates and encoding methods described. I will also call shenanigans on using downloaded files for the test! What tool was used to encode them? What hardware? Was the tool the same for each song file AND each encoding scheme? Was the encoding algorithm of each scheme similar or the same?
Best pseudo-science remain being called opinion.
First of all, most people don't know shite about audio quality to begin with. They actually think that CDs sound better than records. Not only is that technically inaccurate, it's downright sad.
Second, most people listen to music on crappy headphones or crappy home or car stereos, so obviously they are going to think that a direct digital feed of a symphony from a 24/96 DAC is going to sound like a 128kbps MP3 recording of the same performance.
Third, most people's ears have been damaged in some way that either has killed their low range or high range frequency response in one ear or the other, or both. So, when they say they "CAN'T" tell the difference, they actually mean it.
Finally, who cares? If I had my way we'd all get 32-bit/192kHz quality content for everything that was digital and have either big ass reel-to-reel decks, with 1" or 2" tape or similar analog equipment for recording and playback. But, that ain't practical. So, whatever you can stand is fine. Just don't expect me to buy too much of it if I can only get it in that quality.
What the article said was that most of THEM couldn't tell the difference.
The older recordings are recorded at a much lower level, taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the medium. The newer recordings are all packed into the loudest little bit so the dynamic range is compressed.
The irony of this is that even though CDs can have a greater dynamic range than LPs, they never do.
Not saying one is better than the other
What? A symphony heard live in a concert hall IS better than any recording. A live Chicago concert is better than a recording of that band. Any musician or musical group that sounds better recorded than live is a poor performer indeed.
Many of today's sound engineers (maybe most) are abysmal. I checked a CD of one of my favorite classical pieces when I first got a CD player (I know, not exactly "today" but still...) because it has cannons in it and I'd read how much greater CD's dynamic range was than LP's. I saw why when I looked at the waveforms and saw that none went more than halfway up.
Free Martian Whores!
Good enough for me.
Unless I'm ripping a ringtone for my phone, then it's 64 kb/s MP3. I tried dropping it to 48, but it became truly, truly horrid.
Constitutionally Correct
Most people cant even tell the difference between a sampled and compressed MP3 compared to the original analog source.
How do you expect them to compare to 2 different digital formats?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That's all I hear if an MP3 is low-bitrate. 128 makes pretty much every song sound swishy to me. It's even worse if you use that old windows media format where it had a pre-echo issue.
192 starts to be acceptable but some complex sections of songs you can still hear the strangeness.
I hear it mostly in cymbals and the subtleties of certain instruments.
I admit, most of the time I fully enjoy whatever MP3 I'm given and I'd not typically bother with super-expensive audio gear.
I also have to admit I hear swishy cymbals, missing bits, etc.
Incidentally, this 320kbps version of Hairspray Queen by Nirvana sounds pretty much perfect to me. I see no need for FLAC unless it's archival.
... or 32bit for FLAC
Or 32bit for FLAC, what? What the? Past 18 bits-per-channel, all you are recording is noise. There's no such thing as 32 bit audio, and there never will be. Unless you are adding extra channel information into a single channels stream, I have no idea how anything past 24 bits exists. Please explain, or provide a link how FLAC manages to reconstruct information back from randomness. I'd love to see that algorithm.
You can already get serious headphones around 300-400$ ; which is half of the price.
The difference CAN be spotted if you know the original track, by listening to the original master.
It happens mostly in the production process where gains get pumped up, details get lost but it'll boom anyway (cfr: loudness war)...
To be sure to hear the difference, you have to hear the full original, on tape or digital format. After hear the MP3 and you'll hear tiny differences which are in essence quality losses.
It's because the human mind adapts to the imperfections, it doesn't get noticed.
Like DJ mixes (through beatmixing) ; when a DJ makes an error, which is even grave, most people don't even notice; while it gets noticed immediately by my trained ear; I call that adaptation ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "take the ... effect into account", but certainly mp3 has limited all frequency response to the generally accepted limits of human hearing of steady-state signals.
This is partly by design, going back to the decision to limit CD RedBook response to 22.05 Khz; no CD can have any content above this frequency.
The hypersonic effect, regardless of what you think about whether it is real or not, is not a product of steady state signals. There is considerable debate, and certainly some research that suggests it is audible, but almost by definition it is dynamic content of very brief duration, and can be a component of a given musical performance in a live performance. High resolution digital formats (eg 88.2 Khz sampling rate and above) could possibly contain such information from a recorded live performance, but a CD or mp3 with a cutoff frequency of 22.05 Khz cannot. If a listener hears something attributable to the hypersonic effect when listening to an mp3, it almost certainly must be a distortion component of the recording and playback chain.
To illustrate, and take some liberties with an analogy, let's describe a crash cymbal with a fundamental of 10 Khz and we will arbitrarily say the volume of the fundamental tone is at "100". The second harmonic must be at 20Khz, and perhaps a volume of "10" in relation to the fundamental. The third, at 40 Khz with a volume of "1". This is not an accurate description of a cymbal's sonic signature, and such a cymbal may not sound good at all, but I don't know off hand what the correct harmonic structure would be, and if I manage get my point across, it's moot.
Suffice it to say that the harmonic structure of any instrument gives it the character we describe as belonging to an instrument; it's the content of the harmonics that make a violin sound different than a piano playing the same note (eg an "A"), and the harmonics are small fractions in level to that fundamental. Each instrument's sonic signature will be made of many fundamental tones, and their corresponding harmonics, but the note it's playing will be the most prevalent. If you strip out all the frequency information except for the most significant fundamental, you would be left with an A-440 tone and neither the piano or the violin will sound like themselves, but instead sound like identical pure tones.
Going back to the analogy, it's clear that the third harmonic in my crude construction is much smaller in level than the fundamental. If the third, at 1/100 the level, is not below the noise floor, then the fourth, or the fifth, or the sixth will be. When we speak of the hypersonic effect, we're talking about the audibility of these later harmonics; at some point one of them must be very low in level and above the generally accepted limit of human hearing of steady-state signals. The argument against says in a reproduction chain it's beyond audibility or alternately, it's buried in noise, the argument for says there are people who can tell two seemingly identical cymbals from the same manufacturer apart. Professional drummers choose cymbals this way, from a selection provided by the manufacturer, who did the same thing, separating the "better" sounding ones from the poorer. (The rest they ship to the music stores, where unwary buyers take their chances).
This despite the fact that professional drummers are unlikely to be able to maintain good HF hearing ability, which is measured by pure tones only, over a career; (perhaps over a few years of just practice with no career potential). The argument for and against the hypersonic effect are based on whether, or to what extent, a reproducing chain can reproduce each enough (and other audio content of similar above-steady-state-hearing frequency, vanishingly low level and fleeting duration) to discern those subtle differences.
I'm not sure if that counts as "taking [it into] effect"; I would describe it more along the lines of "not a problem we need to consider at all" if your goal is to fit a musical performance within the 16/44.1 limits. It would be something to consider if you were talking about higher resolution digital formats.
First of all, I can clearly tell the difference between 128 bit mp3 and the original. I know I'm not alone. A story already broke quite some time ago in which a study was done and determined that today's music listeners have been conditioned to prefer the sound of music distorted by compression. They have been listening to mp3s for the majority of their life and that is what they consider "normal." As far as I'm concerned, this story simply reaffirms the results of that study. More people picked MP3 because that is what they like and that is what they are used to. Also this "study" was carried out on what, all of 7 people? Give me an f'ing break.
If you can't get MDR-V6s, you can get the MDR-7506, which is basically the same thing with a gold plug. You don't really want to get anything else, though- like the V600 for example - which is designed for consumers and as such is very boomy and weird-sounding. Just use the EQ if you want bass.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
"I think you missed it, regarding wine"
Apparently so did you, seeing that Wine tastes like spoiled Grape Juice, I'd say spending anything on Wine is a waste.
i.e. in a car; there is plenty of extraneous sound to mask most limitations of compressed audio;
The luxury cars and some mid-class models are very well sound isolated. I agree that the dynamics are not that important, but there are other effects that are clearly distinguishable - for example the high frequency filtering in MP3.
Are you serious? Interesting... possibly. Disturbing... not even close.
the average person cant tell on a car or bike ect ect, like the first comment. we also cant tell using a sb live crap...i mean card, or a pair of tin can speakers. you need the hard ware. most of us do not have the hard ware. so the article is correct, but makes it look as if the populace is that deaf we cannot tell.
the artical should be more clear about having the hardware. creative cant product lossless sound, cept for the high end stuffs. 200+ dollars. where as turd beach (if you can get it to werk) or bluegears, oxygen, their top end cards for less than 1/2 the price creative charges.
wish authors would give the facts on both sides of the issue, not 1. but thats newspeak for ya
I think the main point here is that the one person who did hear the difference is probably the only one who hasn't fried his ears with an overabundance of DBs. It's going to be interesting watching all you young'ns join us deaf old geezers saying "huh?" while you're still in your 20s and 30s. My years on an air force flight line with jets taking off left and right now seem downright quiet compared to your ear buds and honking horn automobile stereos.
The device iBasso D3 uses a TI PCM2706 which is notoriously jittery. They may have gotten better results using a good pro-grade PCI bus sound card and an external DAC using S/PDIF instead. The Beyerdynamic 770 headphones are good, but hardly what I'd consider a good choice for this test. AKG K701's would be better for the job.
In any case the author does make a reasonable point. Using ho-hum equipment returns ho-hum results where folks can't tell the difference. The author refers to audiophiles as mystics who are confused about sound quality. Fact is anyone with scientifically proven equipment that is up to snuff and with a trained ear, can determine the difference and appreciate a higher resolution format.
A current debate among Audio Engineers (what I do for a living) is how one should mix music. With the majority of the market listening to music on mp3 (typically of lower quality compression), engineers question whether or not they should actually mix to make mp3's sound better. Currently, an old-guard engineer will find a good mix that translates to all sounds systems. That mix will then be rendered down for CD quality. Either before or after this step (most of the time after), the song is converted to mp3 form for digital distribution. The new school of engineer argues that with mp3's dominating the market, an effort should be made to ensure that albums are mixed to sound good in mp3, and to avoid the digital artifacts that can be heard when a .wav file is compressed (sounds like gurgling, but very subtle). Another argument is whether or not albums should even be mixed primarily for sound system translation! (translation = the mix one hears on one's home monitors sounds the same, or translates, to another speaker system). Newer engineers argue that earbuds are becoming more and more used, even more so than speaker systems! Thus, shouldn't audio be mixed primarily for headphone listening?
Personally, I can hear the difference between a high-quality wave or flac file, and an mp3. I try and get 320kbps mp3 format, simply because difference is lesser. Sure I can hear it, but listening like an Audio Engineer and listening like a regular joe are two different mindsets. When I'm listening to the music, I'm not listening to the gurgling sound that results from mp3 downconversion/compression.
The only person to get all four tracks right is someone who listens to their headphones at pitifully low volumes and hasn't attended any rock concerts. We can think of two explanations. One, the subject has particularly sensitive ears, so doesn't need to turn the volume up high. Two, the subject hasn't wrecked their hearing through years of listening to a walkman/MP3 player at high volumes and/or seeing Motorhead at the Hammersmith Odeon. Arguably, both apply.
No, I will not work for your startup
The problem with this review is the parameter on page 3. "......... the subject(s) simply had to say which version sounded best." If you don't like the character of the original recording, certainly an unfaithful rendition may be found to be preferable; BUT, if - faithfulness to the sonic character of the original is your aspiration - "whether you like it, or not" is really a poor criterion for judging which compression scheme is "best".
If the goal is to reproduce live music, then everything fails miserably. I realize that much music is designed primarily for listening through headphones/speakers, and for this there may be an argument for "fidelity," i.e. being faithful to the recording engineer's concept. However, I listen to mostly classical and jazz music, and in this case the "fidelity" involves faithfulness to the sound of a live performance. Nothing -- not the $10,000 headphones, not the most pristine lossless recording -- comes close. Even if lossless encoding were 10% better than lossy encoding (which it certainly is not), it would still be 60% worse than a live performance. I use decent headphones (circa $90) and lossy encoding, and I save my time and money for live performances.
First was the hearing acuity of the test subjects tested? Maybe most had hearing damage from blasting the ear buds. Then was demanding music samples used? Plus was the test subject intelligent and a music lover that knows what good sound is. For example, many vinyl fan-boys that insist analogue albums sound better than the CD do not realize that the "warm" they like is actually distortion from the needle rumbling in the record groove.