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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.
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
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.
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.
This could also have something to do with the way a lot of albums are mixed these days. Unfortunately, it seems that many studios are compressing the hell out of the music; I guess it has more to do with music industry execs thinking that their acts need to be louder to keep from being drowned out on the radio by the competition (who are also compressing their music into oblivion). I'm no audiophile but I abhor the practice; it has the effect of making the music come out of the speakers like a 747 on full throttle.
The bandwidth "ceiling" also has the deplorable effect of not giving the tracks room to "breath"; certain otherwise audible higher frequencies can get "lost in the sauce" (listen to an older recording and you'll hear the difference). The result is often akin to the difference between quietly closing a door and slamming it.
This space for rent!
This sort of comment is a bit frustrating to me. Some can tell the difference between even the most minute differences in lossy vs lossless. They may be a dramatic minority, but all the same, they are entitled to spend 3 month salary on their equipment to enjoy music as they see fit. Similarly, I can't enjoy a $1000 bottle of wine any more than a $100 bottle; but that's no reason to say that a $100 bottle of wine is just as good as the $1000 wine because the vast majority can't tell the difference. I recognize the validity of you're point, in that most can't tell the difference, but would like to pretend they can.
Ah ah ah!!!
From the story:
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.
Rarely if ever you can find such a contradiction right in the summary. If most of us can't tell the difference, how come subjects rated the two encodes differently?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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