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.

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The hiss is where it hides

[goombah99]

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.

 

Recording Bias

[Afforess]

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.

Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you-

[EQ]

Likewise there's no reason to say that a $100 bottle of wine isn't better than a $1000 bottle just because someone is willing to pay for it. Frankly anything over $30 is a waste of money. All your paying for is rarity, not quality.

I think you missed it, regarding wine -- you have it backwards. Quality is rarity. Poor quality stuff is very common. Higher quality is usually a fortunate circumstance of a particular harvest of a particular grape in a particular area of a particular vineyard, and combined with a good vintner's touch. So high quality is a rare thing. Its not the rarity that makes it pricey, its the fact that high quality wine is remarkably rare and therefore pricey.

Re:You're accidentally correct

[sunspot42]

Vinyl is the only format of the three that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear.

I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Vinyl absolutely cannot "contain" any loud low frequency stereo signal - at least, nothing that was put there intentionally. The groove would become so shallow the needle would pop out of it and go skidding across the platter. You might be able to record a very soft low-frequency signal onto vinyl, but given the way human hearing works, that would almost certainly be masked by louder low frequency signals further up the audio spectrum in the music. Unless you like to sit around and listen to the output of a pure tone generator, this isn't really much of an "advantage" for vinyl.

Vinyl's inability to handle even moderately loud low bass is the reason why the sound of dance music changed so much starting in the mid-'80s - eventually resulting in things like house music - as CDs became popular and suddenly you could record deep bass at maximum volume and deliver it to consumers unaltered. I recall hearing Pet Shop Boys "I Want A Dog" in 1988 or thereabouts on a high-end sub/sat system at an audio dealer and thinking, "Holy crap! How did they get the bass so loud?" It felt like I'd swallowed a subwoofer it was so loud. You couldn't physically deliver anything like that on vinyl - you would have to roll the deep bass off by many decibels or the groove would literally go flat. Even most consumer tape formats would have had trouble handling that much low-frequency signal, especially given the tape duplication methods used at that time (although at least they'd fail less spectacularly, with tape's fairly warm-sounding saturation).

Discos in the '70s could pump out that kind of deep bass, but they did it using a gadget from dbx called a subharmonic synthesizer, which would produce a note exactly an octave below whatever you fed into it. They'd feed your typical vinyl recording with its anemic bass into the device, and get this pulsating, throbbing audio out. But until CD came around there was no way to deliver that to the home, maybe short of half-speed mastered reel to reel or (possibly) metal cassette tape.

You do get all sorts of low frequency signal coming off of vinyl when you play it, but it's mostly noise - rumble from the motor and pickup in the turntable itself, the scraping of the needle in the groove, low-frequency resonances induced by the playback speakers, and harmonics and low-frequency noise etched into the master itself when that was being cut. All of that garbage robs power from your amplifier and causes scads of distortion in your speakers, screwing up the real signal you're trying to reproduce. It's just another way in which vinyl is not only an awful audio format, but a spectacularly awful audio format. It's not just awful because of what it can't accurately record, it's awful because of all of the noise and artifacts it introduces which cause further distortion of what it has managed to accurately record.

As for high frequency data, yes vinyl can record signals higher than the 20kHz limit of CD, but if you're over 13 and live in the West it's unlikely you can hear any of it. Worse, each time you play a record the needle actually damages it, and the high frequencies are damaged the first and the worst. That's one of the many reasons why the old discrete quad format failed back in the '70s - it used ultrasonic multiplexing to record the quad signal, and that signal rapidly degraded with every playback. Whoops! (The matrix quad formats - which didn't rely on ultrasonics - failed for other reasons.) Beyond that, the vast majority of what signal there is over 20kHz on most vinyl records is pure unadulterated noise which has absolutely nothing to do with the original signal that was recorded. It's hiss, it's harmonic distortion induced in both the cutting head and in your pickup's needle by lower-frequency signals, it's from clicks and pops caused by dust or by imperfections