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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.
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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
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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." -
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.
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 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.
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.
Operating a site with good content costs money. Most good sites are run for profit. If you visit a site and don't like the content, don't visit that site again.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Sure, MP3s sound better than FLAC, but if you used *both*, you'd get even better sound.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
The net would be a better place if all the for-profit 'information' sites went offline.
Your suggested course of action would include the removal of Slashdot from the Internet. Why are you posting here? You obviously don't believe your own drivel.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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
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
The example I was thinking of was electric guitars, and when musicians started integrating distortion into their music. The argument a lot of people seem to accept is that any format that preserves things exactly is superior to something that changes the input. Just because something preserves the original bits exactly doesn't mean it sounds better. It may sound worse, and the change made by the codec may in fact sound better to many people's ears. The lossy decoder is guessing what bits to put back during playback -- the bits it substitutes may be better than the originals.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
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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.
First of all people who purchase Monster Cables, Gold Plated Cables, and all that crap are utterly clueless. The gold is plated and only a couple or angstroms thick, in other words it is worthless.
A thing or two about cables...
For carrying the output of the main amplifier to the speakers, ANY cable that can handle the power load without overheating and starting your house on fire will work fine. We are talking high voltage and current levels.
Signal cables... We are talking millivolts here. They need to be well shielded and well built that is about it and the mechanical connection needs to fit securely.
In ANY audio system there are two critical components: A. The device that produces the music from the source ( tape, phonograph, tuner, cd player ). and B. the device that takes the amplified electronic signal and turns it back into sound waves and those are the speakers, everything else is BS when it comes to all those flowery terms that audiophiles use.
The Pre-Amplifier ( often sold as a seperate component). If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power output ( measured in millivolts ) with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum and performs the correct equalization according to the RIAA specifications ( especially critical for vinyl ) then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Amplifier. If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power ( measured in watts ) output with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum rating then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Speakers. If the speakers produce the same wave form, without distortio then it will not alter the sound.
The biggest problem with almost EVERY music system being built today is the fact that the power supply is inadequate and that the components are quite often under rated for the power that the amplifier is specified to produce. If an amplifier is designed to put out 100 watts of audio power then it's power supply should be able to provide at least 1000 watts to the final amplification stage to handle transients, especially in the lower frequency ranges and the components of the amplifier should be able to handle ALL of that power, and the amplifier will never clip and distort your signal.
So the moral of the story is.... Spend the biggest portion of your audio budget on 1. The Speakers and 2. The sound source component, if you listen to vinyl, spend it on the best turntable and cartridge you can afford, if you are a CD person I suggest Creek Audio ( over a thousand bucks for a SINGLE cd player, but they simply are the best ). As far as I can tell, no company is manufacturing tape recorders other then Nagra which are mono and are used pretty much exclusively in the film industry. You can still find good reel-to-reel and some professional cassette equipment on ebay and there are companies still manufacturing tape for at least reel-to-reel.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
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
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
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
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.
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.
Eliminate the stuff which most of us can't hear?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
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I'll explain this effect to you: you just like to think you're superior, some kind of Ubermensch. That's all there is to it.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
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
There's no need to; they're bit for bit identical (well, wav is, flac or shn are after decompression). Your wav or flac or shn will sound exactly the same. Your MP3 or OGG won't.
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