Slashdot Mirror
Can You Really Hear the Difference Between Lossless, Lossy Audio?
CWmike writes "Lossless audio formats that retain the sound quality of original recordings while also offering some compression for data storage are being championed by musicians like Neil Young and Dave Grohl, who say compressed formats like the MP3s being sold on iTunes rob listeners of the artist's intent. By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track, and when you compress that CD into a lossy MP3 or AAC file format, you lose even more of the depth and quality of a recording. Audiophiles, who have long remained loyal to vinyl albums, are also adopting the lossless formats, some of the most popular of which are FLAC and AIFF, and in some cases can build up terabyte-sized album collections as the formats are still about five times the size of compressed audio files. Even so, digital music sites like HDtracks claim about three hundred thousand people visit each month to purchase hi-def music. And for music purists, some of whom are convinced there's a significant difference in sound quality, listening to lossy file formats in place of lossless is like settling for a Volkswagen instead of a Ferrari."
How many posts before someone thinks they're being original and links us to "Betteridge's law of headlines" on wikipedia?
Usually if the bitrate is above 256kb/s, i dont notice any difference.
Ofcourse it still effects some songs (especially the percussion parts).
There is a long discussion among very qualified individuals on this subject. You can read it here
I am quite sure I prefer a lossy compressed version of a 24 bit, 96 kHz track than a lossless compressed version of a 16 bit, 44.1 kHz track.
yes.
Caveat: You have to have decent headphones (not Apple earbud BS), and/or good speakers, but that's about it. The difference is negligible once you hit ~320Kbps MP3, in my opinion, but anything under 256Kbps, regardless of lossy format, you can *clearly* hear cymbal hits turning to an underwater splooshy mess.
I can't tell which one is better though.
The quality of this comment will be lost in attempt for first post!
... and scratchy/poppy vinyl records. MP3s on my cheap ear buds are good enough most of the time.
No you can't. Not with any reasonably modern encoder and bitrates above 256. Anyone who tells you otherwise is experiencing the placbo effect. BTW, you can't tell the difference between 16bit/44.1khz audio and 24/96 audio either. And vinyl might sound "better" than digital to you, but digital is objectively more accurate.
Audiophilia is saturated with woo. This is the same market that brought us $500 ethernet cables.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm listening to a performance, not some audio benchmark. If a bit of loss bothers you, it must be some pretty damned uninspiring music you're listening to.
And if you're listening on some random mp3 player with bud headphones while walking around doing stuff, compression loss is the least of your worries.
as fast as a Ferrari.
Since I do most of my listening in a car, and am almost 48, I can't hear the difference between an mp3 and a vinyl album, or a cd, most of the time. Well, except for the lack of skipping. Ever try to listen to an LP in a moving car? But I digress. Sure, people who are younger and $pend lot$ of dollar$ on the Finest Audiophile equipment areound can tell. Me in my Chevy? Not so much.
Best Slashdot Co
Everyone else listening on the little earphones that came with their cellphone can't.
Now, in grand slashdot tradition, could we please have a debate about the use of 192KHz sample rates between those people who know what they are talking about and those who belive 'fourier' is just a word you say to sound smart?
We recently discovered that human hearing beats the linear response assumptions used in lossy codecs. So yes, their criticisms are scientifically founded.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The concept of improving consumer listening experience using studio quality recording has been thoroughly debunked, right here on Slashdot...
Why Distributing Music As 24-bit/192kHz Downloads Is Pointless
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
years ago i had music ripped in lossless and yes you can hear the difference
these days its all MP3 or AAC. and i don't care. only time i listen to my music is while running or sometimes on the train to and from work. most times my iphone doesn't have any music on it and i listen to spotify or pandora for 20 minutes while driving home
some people probably care about the best sound quality, most dont
i like blu rays. my wife will watch TV on the non-HD channels most times and she can't tell the difference in quality
The reason people use lossless compression for audio (i.e. FLAC or SHN) is not because they can tell the difference. Maybe you think you can, maybe you think you can't, but that's irrelevant anyway. The reason people choose lossless is that lossless is the only suitable solution for archiving. If you want to preserve your CD audio exactly as it appears on the CD, the only possible solution is lossless compression. If you choose lossy, you aren't making an archive or the original, but rather an approximation of the original.
That's all there is to it.
When it's low cost and convenient then it must be bad, expensive and impractical is the best!
Anyone know of any good double-blind studies comparing people's ability to tell FLAC from 320kbps MP3? Googling just turns up people debating in forums whether you would be able to tell the difference rather than any serious academic research.
People with normal, standard hearing cannot detect a difference, that' s the point of the compression.
If you are hearing a difference, it's because you have a hearing defect. If you can hear something that you don't hear after compression, it's because you're deaf to the sounds that's overlaying it (and killed it in the compression)
You were hearing the original differently in the first place, than anybody else with normal hearing.
With mp3 encoded at 320kbps the difference is negligible, but with storage as cheap as it is and internet speeds as fast as they are, why would anybody feel a need to have their music run through lossy compression, no matter how small the tradeoff?
I listened to the sample tracks hdtracks.com offers for some albums I own & have ripped to 256kbps MP3s and without question the lossless tracks did sound better. The question that I then had to ask was did they sound $20/album better and nope, not even close for me.
We still like XKCD around here, right?
This signature is false.
Yes, I can hear the difference. When working in a small sound recording studio, I trained my ears to pick up on fine details. There was one day in particular I remember listening to a track, and wondering what the strange noise in the background of it was. I realized that I was hearing the audio artifacts from the mp3 compression. Not sure how Mr. Young figures that a CD is only 15% of the master, though. A CD is pure uncompressed audio. If you recorded and mixed in 44.1k audio, then your cd is an exact copy of your master.
The difference is the ability to transcode to different bitrates and formats without losing anything from the original source.
Not saying that lossy is ever better than non-lossy, but with good "dithering", it can really make a big difference. Probably better for artists to provide their own mp3 (or whatever file type) than leaving it up to a vendor to do it. This Izotope video is pretty informative, despite being kind of an ad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVNzylf9sGo
I've been listening to digital audio since the '90s and have switched back and forth between lossy and lossless a few times. I've even tried to compare formats to see if I could tell the difference. Personally I can't, but maybe that's because I blew out my ears at loud concerts. I certainly can't hear like I used to.
Maybe some people can tell the difference and if they want to devote the time, money and space to lossless audio formats power to them, but it means little to me.
Get an audio interface, a pair of "good" headphones or studio monitors, sit down on a quiet room, relax and pay attention to mid-high frequencies in your songs (hint: bright cymbals, violin lines, guitar solos).
You will hear "more" presence in that area, but we all listen music in noisy environments most of the time, so those details are hardly percieved and it just not worth the 40MB flac/wav file in your Portable Media Player compared to your 8MB of your V0 MP3 file.
I'm nearing 50 and I already feel I'm reaching for the volume control more. 'True' 'audiophiles' will say anything to justify their beliefs. Same goes for 'true' 's elsewhere
I may, of course, be very very very wrong
Oh, it all goes to shit when you have kids too :-)
I can't tell the difference between 128kbit mp3s and CD most of the time. Fiona Apple or other strong vocal artists are degraded at 128, but at 256kbit I can't tell the difference. I would still rip at FLAC now, since storage is cheap, but I haven't gone back and re-ripped my 256kbit rips....
andy
I don't hear anything.
Well you would though, if it were playing.
The real magic happens in the 22kHz band, just ask my dog he can tell you.
And there's the rub of course. That general of a question can't be answered yes/no. It depends on a variety of factors, most notably the content, the codec, the bitrate, and the playback.
I don't even know why this article submission got accepted. It's like asking "can you win a race against a Toyoda?" where do you even start with that....?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
1) It depends on the quality of the encoder
2) bps
3) The music itself
4) Good environment (no external noises)
This is what bugs me for a few online streaming services...
Agreed, if anyone is really such a purist that they think a file format is superior over another, they should either skip the argument and go see the band live, or kill themselves to save everyone else the hassle.
I got here through a series of tubes
If you've got decent equipment and a quiet environment. With cheapo earbuds, I don't notice the difference. With my good headphones, the difference is obvious. When I'm driving down the highway, I can't tell. In my living room, I can tell.
With storage so cheap and bandwidth so plentiful, there's really no reason not to use lossless audio. My $40 Clip+ with a $25 miscrosd card can hold 40 gigs of content and can play FLAC. There's no reason to use a lossy format.
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market). After a certain quality threshold, say 256kbps mp3 or $100 bottle of wine, nobody can tell the difference in a blind test. Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track...
[ -- insert appropriate Neil Young lyric for satirical effect here -- ]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nope. Not if the quality is high enough, I can't tell the difference 99% of the times. There are some musical instruments (harpsichord) and singers (Tori Amos) where compression is very obvious. The lossy version becomes almost unlistenable once you've heard the lossless version.
On "normal" speakers I can rarely tell the difference, but on reference monitors the difference is noticeable on many tracks. Not terrible distracting but still noticeable.
The problem is not lossy compression per se. In badly encoded mp3 files (plenty of them out there!) drum cymbals sound "watery"- there's somewhat of a flanger-like effect to them as an artefact of the compression. In ogg vorbis files encoded at the same rate I don't notice the same issue.
Also... there's indeed a difference in whether you're listening to the audio in your car over shitty speakers over the noise of a roaring engine, at home in your average living room with decent speakers or in a studio setting with box-in-a-box isolated walls and on the high end studio equipment under the conditions on which the audio was actually mixed.
Otherwise, it's a bit of a mundane audiophile discussion, really. Most audiophiles fail to account for the fact that their mere presence in the room and what they wear makes far more of an impact to the audio quality than the extra money they throw at the problem (for the best listening experience, they should probably leave the room in which the audio is being played).
There are other reasons to choose lossless compression over lossy though- in audio material that underwent lossy compression, some frequency bands are simply no longer present. It is conceivable that this has some impact over how much control you have over the frequency response of the material on playback. You may find that that fancy graphic equalizer of yours won't work as well on lossy audio as it would on lossless audio.
Not that it matters. Stepping away from the intentions of the original audio engineer is blasphemy, anyway.
What I see almost every day are DJs with headphones plugged into their laptop and it sounds fine to them. The same track out there on the dancefloor sounds like a horrific wall of distortion. As I understand it lossy compression depends on a "psychoacoustic" trick - maybe this doesn't work if you can hear both stereo channels with both ears. Or something. All I know it sounds truly dreadful and I am no audiophile.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
I find audiophiles funny people, especially when they reach age 40 and over. Loss of eyesight can be denied, because it too obvious, but with enough woo you can keep claiming you will hear the slight nuance difference in sound, this of course will forever stay on the pinnacle of hearing, yeah right!
I've tested the ability of audio professionals to discern differences between high quality MP3's and WAV files in a sound booth. They can't consistently identify which file is playing when going back and forth between the files, even though they often convince themselves that they are hearing distinguishing characteristics. Certainly with lower bit rates people can hear differences, but not with high quality compression settings.
You do much better to spend your money on high quality headphones or speakers than on "hi def" audio recordings or the disk space to store them.
Can it go up to eleven!?
At eleven who cares, right?
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.
Just because Neil young and Dave Grohl are famous musicians, it doesn't mean that they actually know what they are talking about. 40 years of exposure to loud music has probably damaged their hearing enough that they really don't know what they are hearing.
Saying that A sounds better than B is completely subjective and affected by many things. Not just how the music was encoded, but the quality of the DAC used for playback and the quality of the speakers/headphones used.
For most people, the connection they have is about the lyrics and the memories associated with the song anyway. There's magic in lo-fi recording like this rehearsal, and zero magic in some perfectly recorded crud step (though I do enjoy many electronic artists.) I think the main thing is the yearning in the recording itself.
I'd check out Grohl's keynote at SxSW in any event. He makes some very good points about artists who wouldn't survive American Idol that are a hell of a lot better than anyone who wins it. Music is about expression, about documenting loss and love and joy, and the "karaoke dictatorship" of talent shows that rob people of their voice and replace it with meaningless corporate pablum designed to sell products... well, it's horrible and empty and it doesn't matter what the bit rate is because it's not worth wasting time for.
With lossless audio formats you are GUARANTEED to have the perfect replication of the CD audio data while with lossy audio formats, whether you can hear it or not, you have a crippled and imperfect replication. With lossy audio, the quality of the encoding *might* differ based on where you purchase it, and that's not good. When I purchase a digital recording, I want it to be perfect, I want it to be lossless.
We have the means to do it, storage is cheap, bandwith is cheap, there is absolutely NO reason to not use lossless audio formats.
Lossy audio is like a book with "unimportant" or "superfluous" words removed from it : the meaning is there, you can still perfectly read it, you lose next to nothing, but still it would be nice if all the words were here.
It's not about hearing the difference, it's about chosing the best option.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There have been more posts on Slashdot in the last 14 years on Slashdot about this topic. What I recall of them, is that people have been tested with blind and double-blind tests. And about ten years ago you could hear a difference between lossless audio and low-bitrate mp3's. The latter has less high and low, and mostly a certain "Hiss" sound through it. The preference was with the lossless audio then.
What struck me in later tests, was that people seemed to favour mp3's above lossless audio. I reckon it has to do with getting used to the Hiss-sound in mp3's, and therefore having it as a preference. A big factor in music taste is how much you are used to hearing similar music and sounds, and the hiss-sound does make a usual sound.
To be fair, I do think that mp3's in a high bitrate like 320 kbit are almost as good as lossless audio. Even though I prefer the lossless audio, just to be sure.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
I remember having to make the excruciating decision of which format to rip my entire CD collection when I was building my HTPC back in 2007. I listened carefully through high-quality studio headphones at the difference and concluding that lossless was going to be the better format for my setup. If I could tell the difference through the headphones, then I figured there would be even more of a difference through my Pioneer Elite receiver and Mirage DefTech speakers.
When I hooked it up, it paid off big time. Sounds heavenly. When I sync from my HTPC to my library and play it through my Samsung Galaxy S3, I convert down to 160 or 192kbps and it sounds as good as I can expect it in a mobile format.
Point is it depends on the setup as a whole. Like any performance chain, your worst component will determine the overall system performance. Furthermore, it depends on the listener. My wife couldn't care if it's coming from my system or from her Coby boom box (WTF?), and I'm the one who's hard of hearing. Big whoop to her.
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
The reason I because I want audio I can recompress to the format I like without progressive degradation. Better lossy formats might be created in the future, and I want to be able to re-encode in those formats without suffering the losses due to lossy compression twice.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I don't have the greatest hearing anymore, because most my life I had headphones plugged in my ear. But I can tell the difference between MP3 files and Flac files. Not only that, I can hear the difference been CD quality Flac files and 24bit/96khz Flac files.
My music collection demands I download at least CD quality (16bit/44khz), and prefers I got up a step. At worse, I will try to find 320kbps MP3's, but I like a bunch of older 80's music that I can only find in lower rates.
Sure, I could survive on 320kbps MP3's, after all, that what I have to listen to in my mp3 player. Shit, i survived on Cassette tapes for a couple of decades, and most that music was copied from friends.
There is another part to this story though. Not everyone know how to rip MP3's decent. So when I have a flac of the CD, then I can rip it how I like, the best quality possible.
Does my opinion matter? Fuck no. I'm the same about Video. I can see the imperfections in various codecs that others can't see. And I'm not down with that shit. for example, HDTV via Cable (Comcast) is crap, and I notice it. My dad? He won't notice it, shit, he doesn't even noticed with normal cable gets a bit overworked and gets a little blocky.
Also, I tend to like older music. Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, etc. And you'll find all sort of bad copies of their music. You don't know what the source is, LP, Cassette, 8-Track (joke), that the MP3 was pulled from, so getting flacs of the various CD's is best.
Then worse, you have the volume levels, or compression levels, or whatever they started doing in the 2000+ are a lot higher then previous CD releases. So while you might have a MP3 of Black Dog that is sort of quiet, the latest CD rip would be a lot louder. So now there are a few different sounding MP3 releases around.
Am I a normal consumer? Hell no. I don't buy music anymore, fuck that. I spent enough money on music in the 1980's and 1990's. I'm not making the Record Companies any more money on purpose, they do NOT deserve it.
I'm assuming to most people MP3's are enough, but then I have never followed what "most" people do, I like being myself.
Be seeing you...
there is some placebo effect, but there is an perceivable improvement in audio quality as well.
it is important to remember that digital is an approximation of sound collected at intervals
with a high sample rate you will hear more detail in the high frequencies. the higher the frequency, the shorter the wave length, the less amount of samples per second
with high bit rate audio quality over large dynamic range will be better... this won't matter with modern mastered music because everything is compressed so heavily
Neil Young is an aging rocker with hearing damage. There is no way he can tell the difference except in his own mind.
Even among people good hearing, only a minority can detect a difference between lossless and properly encoded higher bit rate (~200K+) lossy.
The hubbub over this is almost all placebo effect and snobbery.
While I agree that for most consumers it's really a bit of a moot point, the following may need to be kept in mind:
The difference in audio quality may not really be apparent when something is played back on earbuds or tiny computer speakers, rather than on a concert hall-sized system. These differences are very hard to pick out - even in an audiophile home situation - but become far more obvious once these same recordings are played on a 25,000-watt sound rig in a large auditorium.
Like taking a jpg logo you just lifted from a web site and blowing it up to a large billboard on the side of the road. Pixelation will occur, but won't be noticeable until you scale up to those large sizes. And yes, before someone dismisses this as irrelevant, do not forget the thousands of professionals who play recorded music for millions across the planet every week on those large sound installations. (granted, most of whom do not care one bit about audio quality)
But the difference is there, it's just a shame that no one wants to take the time to actually do these listening tests in large-scale environments with proper acoustics (clubs, concert halls, auditoriums). It should be added that if the venue in question has horrendous acoustics and tons of reflections, none of this will obviously matter.
These perceptual compression algorithms do in fact strip out the very essence of what bind the sounds together, the inner dynamics (so to speak) and it's truly a shame that by now it's become the new 'normal'. Even though vinyl is far more imperfect, on large-scale installation it has a much smoother presentation and the bass really comes out in ways that the castrated digital files do not seem capable of generating. The human ear is extremely sensitive to a lot of this once these details become noticeable due to the size of the room.
If the quality of the recording and mastering is crap, no format will help.
... not this discussion again....
If you have the right equipment for high-quality playback, and a good ear, you can really hear the spatial differences between a 320kbps MP3 and a Lossless FLAC copy. Many of my friends have said they can't hear the difference, but I definitely can hear a big difference.
TDM
...but for me, after years of attending concerts my hearing is shot just enough to not really tell a difference. This includes shows by both David Grohl and Neil Young. I don't mind the hearing loss too much, but don't lecture me now on the best file formats, thanks.
For pop, mainstream rock, goth, synthpop, RnB - no, I can't.
For Jazz, Blues, Classical Music, Opera, Art Rock, Rythm and Blues, very technical music - yes, in some parts of it.
However, the difference is usually smaller than that from whatever equipment you are listening on, so unless your equipment can handle the music you listen to it doesn't matter in most of the cases....
Leave it up to the sound engineer to create "optimal" versions using various codecs and compression rates, and let him recommend which versions are "good enough to sell" as a retail full track. Allow sub-optimal versions for thing like ring tones, analog AM radio broadcast, and other places where nobody cares about "perfect" sound.
If you're trying to cancel the left and right channels by subtracting them, you will get significantly different results depending on whether the files are lossless or not.
When they are lossless, it will work properly. Otherwise, it will have artifacts.
Thus, the *correct* way to appraise say mp3 is with very good speakers in a treated listening room
No it isn't. At least most of the time it isn't, though that result would be interesting.
If I'm trying to decide whether to archive my CDs to MP3 or FLAC, I don't give a rat's ass what it sounds like with great monitors in a treated listening room, because that's not where I listen to music. If my speakers give a non-linear result that amplifies the distortions from compression, that's what matters; not what it sounds like in an ideal situation.
By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track
Where does that figure come from? A CD is a perfect reproduction of the analogue master.
Depends of how you define "hear the difference". If you gave me two files encoded at 320 with the Fraunhofer codec, and one lossless file, and unlimited time, I could tell the lossless one from the others. Granted Frau isn't quite modern, but its certainly possible
I grew up with a dad who had a big hi-fi system and listened to Classical, Jazz, & lots of "Audiofile' albums most of the time, so I have pretty high standards for sound fidelity. I will say that while I certainly can tell the difference between listening to a Supertramp album on a good hi-fi system, and listening via my iPhone, I am actually surprised that the "quality gap" doesn't bug me more than it does. Basically, if you are in a car or jogging, or just have music on in the background in any situation, standard compressed audio formats provide perfectly acceptible sound (as long as the original recording doesn't blow, which is another issue entirely). Supertramp sounds great through my iPhone in these situations.
Most people don't spend a lot of time doing focussed listening in a quite environment anymore, so for these people lossless formats are not really necessary in any context. For those of us who do still enjoy sitting in front of the big speakers with no distractions for some serious immersion, you need a system dedicated to the task anyway, and that's going to include a CD player or even a turntable. Once the CD is really dead, I'm sure high quality recortings will still be offered in some other higher def format than iTunes/MP3, so those with a desire to get them should be OK. I just buy those types of recordings on CD, then rip into iTunes for more casual listening.
So, should iTunes convert it's entire library to lossless formats just so the rest of the world can hear what Neil Youg thinks they are missing? probably not!
I would pay more for audio tracks that are mastered properly.
Far too much of the music released these days is mastered to sound "loud". A sound-level compressor removes the dynamic range, and then the music is gained up about as high as possible, or sometimes higher than that (gained so high there is hard-clipping).
In the best case, the dynamic range is gone and the music loses some of the drama and impact it should have had. In the worst case, the sine waves are hard-clipped into square waves, which sounds terrible. Hard-clipping adds unpleasant harmonics and distortion and you definitely can hear this.
I promise you that a properly mastered track at 16-bit/44.1 kHz will sound dramatically better than a poorly mastered one at 24-bit/96 kHz. Mastering trumps format.
So if they are going to the trouble to make 24-bit/96 kHz tracks, I'm hoping that they will let the mastering engineers do their jobs properly! If they do, I would pay the extra money and bandwidth to buy the music in the higher-quality format.
The music industry is convinced that most of their customers are idiots, unconcerned about sound quality, who can be distracted by shiny things or loud noises; so they try to make every album as loud as possible. But maybe, just maybe, they will be willing to try something different with the high-quality downloads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Software users, who have long remained loyal to physical media, are also adopting the lossless formats, some of the most popular of which are ZIP and TGZ, and in some cases can build up terabyte-sized collections as the formats are still about five times the size of compressed data files.
Reads about as sensibly. Seriously, I could be wrong about AIFF, but I know FLAC is compressed. Maybe not lossy, but is a subset of compression, not the whole show.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I know I can not hear the difference. But for me, the few times I go for lossless, it is simply to have something as close to the original as possible, as I find it worth it to have.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
dude, my approach is, so what? somebody worked hard to get a little pot of money, and wants to use the money on something that makes him happy. audiophile stuff makes him feel happy. it wouldn't make me feel happy for the price, but who am i to tell him otherwise? Life got a lot easier once i let people be their own people.
This might shine a lot of light into the topic: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Most of the time I can't tell the difference. That is not why I use lossless. I use lossless audio because it means I can convert it between hundreds of different lossless formats and it is the exact same quality as it was when I started. It doesn't matter that every audio player I use requires a different audio format. 20 years down the line I can have changed audio formats as many times as I need to to take advantage of better compression or to achieve compatibility with a new player and I will still have high quality audio.
As a composer, arranger, producer and engineer working with audio on a daily basis. For someone to say they cant tell the difference between 24bit and 16bit obviously has never listened to said higher rate lossless audio. The higher the bitrate the more audio information is contained so you can hear more of what is recorded... Here endeth the lesson.
Yes, I absolutely can but this may be because of ear training I have done. I am a musician who has had an active interest in digital recording for around 20 years and have done things like actively listen to how small tweaks to digital reverb settings affect the sound and learning to listen to an effected guitar sound on an album and figure out how the raw amp sounded. Most people don't do this. In my experience the difference between very high quality mp3/ogg and FLAC/CD shows up most in the sense of separation between voices and instruments which is something that people with mixing experience (recording musicians, engineers, and producers) have listened to until perception of it is ingrained but your average music buyer has little perception of.
The human hearing bottle neck has been reached and far exceeded, no additional improvements to audio codecs are going to be noticed by anything other than lab equipment. and for those that think otherwise, you can keep buying those audio cables made by nude virgins on the third full moon of every other leap year.
I know in imaging that having better than the human eye can see is important in intermediate products as visual manipulation on low fidelity content could produce visible artifacts. Is it the case for audio as well? If someone is going to resample audio for a remix, is there risk of the decreased fidelity ultimately manifesting in the final product?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It seems to me this lossy vs. lossless compression debate is the information theory version of the $20,000 speaker cable. I'm willing to bet that in any blind trial, 99.99% of the population can't detect any difference. Pretending they can is just a way to conspicously signal that they care way more about music than you do with your $5 HDMI cable.
I can see Vinyl having some physical difference if your analog all the way from needle to speaker as the speaker may be getting more fluid response than having to make that quantitative hop between frequencies, but at least in the DJ world I see guys that swear by vinyl feeding into digital mixers which kind of defeats the whole purpose. I think that when people prefer Vinyl the just like having that warm hiss in the background or are enjoying the fact that Vinyl has to be mastered differently due to how bass is picked up.
I did a paper for my Digital Signal Processing class that compared the power spectral density of multiple songs encoded at different bit rates. This included raw WAV, 256, 192, 128, and 64. The differences were OBVIOUS. For each song there was a generally flat band, a "knee" and a rolloff of some dB per octave above that, a very typicall low pass behavior. The lower the encoding rate, the lower the frequenc of the knee.
Sorry I don't have the numbers, this was like 12 years ago. I think that at 192 the cutoff was above 17K and at 128 the cutoff was close to 15K.
The changes in cutoff were very obious and consistent across all audio samples. Whether or not this was AUDIBLE I did not try to kick that hornets nest.
I've listened to both and have never been able to tell the difference.
I wonder if they tested it in a double-blind experiment if audiophiles could choose the uncompressed music better than random chance.
We can take a song, whack it with a MP3 encoder and say "there, just like new" and it takes less space. But do we have to go through that process? There is plenty of HDD space and we can use WAV/FLAC to always enjoy the original quality without compromises.
No. With 320kbps MP3, it's indistinguishable for me. Even on a quality home audio system, good ear buds or earcans or a good car audio system. Folks who can tell and appreciate the difference have golden ears!
And if you put them up for a test, and told them which source was which in advance, I'm sure they'd be able to tell you the flaws in the one you said was the mp3 (or whatever). Even if you deliberately swapped the cables over.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Next question.
Yes, next question.
Lets see...
- The music being encoded. Some songs have combinations of sounds which don't encode well.
- The encoding format, and the type of artifacts that it produces.
- The bitrate and other encoder configuration.
- The playback gear being used, and the listening environment. A quiet environment and gear with clear treble reproduction will tend to highlight encoding artifacts.
- The listener, and whether they know what to listen for.
I spent most of a decade designing broadcast audio hardware and DSP code, and as a result I've become pretty good at picking out glitches/artifacts/etc - especially with familiar songs. But I'm not most people.
If you are a content producer you MUST have the original records in a lossless format.
This has NOTHING to do with you being able to know the difference, the main reason is because you are going to distribute/edit/re-master/convert your audio data to a different lossy format with different algorithms.
Lossy algorithms "remove" information and different algorithms remove different parts of the original audio data, if you store your originals in a lossy format son or later the audio quality is going to start to degrade until you start noticing the artifacts.
Its like in photography, you took raw pictures not because you can look the differences compared to a high quality JPEG, you took raw pictures because if you want to edit something later you will want all the original data available at the time that you took the picture.
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational
Evidence on Amazon.
ha ha h, what an ethernet cable!
Yes, it's the same kind of "audiophiles" who are chasing that perfect amp with 0.000000000001% of distortion ratio, which would require ultrasophisticated and expensive lab equipment to be measured, while a much higher ratio would be inaudible to them. And anyway, they'd shell out several grands for that.
These guys who are more interested in the specs of their audio system than in truely listening to the performance and musical intentions of the musicians. (I'm a musician and I don't mind if sometimes there is a slight difference. Sometimes it sounds even better!)
I don't think that lossy audio compression is inherently hurting recorded music. Lossy is fine as long as good encoders and sufficient bitrates are used. At a certain point, no one can tell which is which (lossy or lossless) in a blind test.
I mostly listen to MP3 encoded rock music. The loss of quality is very noticeable to me at 128kbps. The loss of quality is much harder to discern at 192, especially if a quality encoder is used. I use LAME -V 2 when I rip CDs and usually end up with average bitrates from ~190-215, and I can't tell the difference between those MP3s and the original CD.
IMO there are bigger problems facing recorded music anyway. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
You jerk! I clicked on that link!
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market).
Show me a rational market, and I'll have to inquire as to the nature and evolutionary history of the species of aliens participating in it.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I have engineered and mixed songs for decades. My training over the years makes me very aware of when I'm listening to something compressed. But who cares? Me, of course, but to you it might not matter.
* Can you really tell the difference between * ...
- A Picasso and a reproduction?
- Genuine marble and simulated materials?
- HD video and Film projection?
- $500 shoes and $50 knockoffs?
I'm happy that technology and storage has allowed me to retain my music (previously on CD) as lossless files for my enjoyment today. For some of my friends, they are completely happy with 256k AAC or MP3 files. That's the way it goes!
I've been into compressed lossless audio from the start. First, AIFF is definitely not one of the most popular lossless audio formats for distributing music because the popular formats are compressed lossless audio and AIFF is uncompressed. The top formats are FLAC, APE and ALAC. FLAC is the most popular because it is open-source and versatile. APE was highly popular in the late 90's and early 00's and still is with some because it has better compression than any of the other formats. However, as time went on hard drive space became more plentiful and mobile devices started popping up. APE achieves its superior compression via calculations that are more intensive than FLAC uses and thus more taxing on mobile devices. It is also less cross-platform-compatible. ALAC is Apple's Lossless Audio Codec and is a latecomer onto the scene. It has good iTunes support and slightly better compression than FLAC, but that's about it.
Also, it is definitely possible to tell lossless audio from lossy audio, even at higher bitrates. Around 2002 I had a friend who completely mocked my lossless ways, even though I'm not one of those gold-cable audiophile people -- just a normal guy who likes his music. I just had a decent pair of Klipsh speakers with a subwoofer. My friend was so certain that this was all in my head and I was so certain that it was not that we devised a simple test. He would show me two identical-looking files in iTunes, just showing the titles. One was a high-bitrate AAC and the other a FLAC file. I could click on them to play them as much as I wanted. I was then to decide which was lossless and which was lossy. We did this with 10 files. It was basically double-blind as he didn't know which was which either until he took the computer back to check my answer. He set up 10 files this way. All in all the test took just 5 or 10 minutes.
I got 9 of 10 right. It is hard to describe sounds, but the lossless music is "deeper," especially bass, guitar vibrations and high notes. This makes it obvious for many songs.
However, I expect not everyone has hearing like this. I suspect this because one day I heard this annoying buzzing sound and asked my girlfriend about it. She couldn't hear anything. So, I searched all over for what was causing it. It turned out it was a television that was on, but that was on a non-channel so it was completely black on the screen. However, the CRT television emitted a sound from being on in a silent room that I found annoying and my girlfriend couldn't even hear. My sister could also hear it when I tested her later. I also sometimes find the sounds fluorescent lights make annoying too.
Anyway, lossless is great and, yes, you can hear the difference if you have hearing which can hear the difference. It's sort of tautological, but it's the truth.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Lossless is not about being able to hear the difference. A professionally-created AAC or higher-bitrate MP3 will require exceptional ears and equipment to notice even slight artifacts.
But what you can't do with lossy formats is use them to create new music. If you want to sample a song as part of a new creation, you'll start to hear more artifacts with every lossy encoding process. Digital music applications have made content creation significantly simpler. Lossy formats are a way for the established cartels to ensure that customers stay consumers. A switch to distributing lossless formats would enable a new generation of musicians who iteratively build on the input of other artists.
The opening of Royal Oil by the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. It starts out with a quiet snare roll that gets progressively louder, joined by a simple bass line. I've yet to hear a lossy codec at any bitrate that doesn't turn it into watery gibberish.
Disk space is cheap. Rip to FLAC or ALAC. For portables, 256kbps AAC seems to do the least amount of damage.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
digital is objectively more accurate.
but music isn't
Vinyl is hissy and wears down over time and tapes distorted the hell out of music. The quality of the new higher quality mp3s is one of the biggest reasons I tend to buy more music these days than ever. I think nostalgia has tainted their hearing.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market). After a certain quality threshold, say 256kbps mp3 or $100 bottle of wine, nobody can tell the difference in a blind test. Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
I think that the improvements are asympotic.
Going from a $500 sound system to a $2000 will be a big deal. Going from $2000 to $5000 will add only a little. Going from $5000 to $10000 or more will add almost nothing of statistical significance. It's just most people don't even spend $500 for audio, or $100 on decent head phones, and so are stuck with crappy sound.
That first small jump will make a world of difference, but most people don't actually care about listening to music. For most people it's just background noise.
Reasonable "audiophiles" are willing to spend reasonable money to get reasonable improvement. But one never hears about the reasonable folks spending reasonable money (>$5000), but only the ones that are out in left field spending $50000.
...then there should be a market for lossless albums on DVD. I'm not an audiophile, but I haven't heard of this happening. Is there one?
When converting my CD collection I first used FLAC and then converted the FLACs to MP3 VBR 320kbps. I've listened to both and can't tell the difference. With Lossy, a high bitrate definitely is better. I can quickly tell if an MP3 has a bitrate of 192kbps or lower. I've also been buying MP3s from Amazon at 256kbps or higher and I've purposefully stayed away from iTunes (originally due to DRM and low bitrates).
Of course, it makes a difference in the playback equipment. I replaced the manufacturers Bose system in my car with a Kenwood + Infinity Reference speakers. The sound quality difference was like night and day. I'm now hearing a greater range of sound with clear separation, and this is with my Lossy MP3s on an iPod. Personally, I would prefer to use a Creative Labs MP3 player (better quality sound) but Kenwood only offers an iPod connector kit and only the iPod works with playlists, etc. with control from the deck.
this is not a loss of electrical energy. and for me, 90% of the time the ear buds are there to block the office noise more than listen to the music. I keep it low enough to hear when someone is trying to get my attention. the other 10% is my drive home and my truck stereo isn't that good either.
The entity we call 'Slashdot' must be a knowledge database left running ten years ago by Cmdr Taco inside a drywall that picks news bits and pastes them on the 'homepage'. No matter what it's about several hundreds of idiots flock to write comments as if the subject mattered.
Whoever is running this! Stop it! Please! Put these poor people out of their misery already.
The body of replies to any topic posted here can surely not be used to power a secret AI project because it's a quagmire of revolting stupidity and ignorance... Hummm...
I get it: For a million years we have been fighting an evil (good?) AI at the border of the galaxy who is trying to understand how we work before killing us and we need the huge stream of idiocy generated in here, fark, wired, linux daily news and digg to keep it busy. This makes sense! Let's keep Slashdot open, just in case. Remember your patriotic duty, good sons of the revolution! More funding! More funding!
I recently acquired a new amplifier that has a proper DSP in it. It uses a microphone to measure the output of your speakers and corrects for time delay and frequency responsiveness (equalization). After I installed it, I found that a lot of the MP3s I have were actually not sounding as good as some others and the flac albums I have (some I have double, since my car stereo can only do mp3) were always sounding better than the mp3s. Mind you, I have my amp set to extract phase and time information in the stereo signal and use that to create a surround sound of the 2 channel input (dolby DTS NEO6).
Most (probably all?) lossy formats use a psycho-acoustic model to take data out of the original audio signal and recode it in such a way that your brain will process it almost the same. What gets "lost" in these models is dynamics (difference between loud and soft), spatial placement (phase shifting) and such. The more "compression" takes place, as in lower bit rates, the more of this sort of information will be taken out. With sufficiently good equipment and especially once you know what to listen for, it is possible even for me (I have lost most hearing above 7KHz and have difficulty interpreting speech in noisy surroundings) to tell the difference between a FLAC encoded CD recording that I know well and a 192 VBR lame encoded version of the same track. I haven't tried higher bit rates, this is just what happened to be on my hard drive. If I can hear it well enough to be right over 95% of the time which one is which, I'm sure people with good hearing will be able to tell the difference as well, given the proper setup. With specific types of music (orchestra's, complex multi guitar heavy metal stuff like Dimmu Borgir) it's even easier. Those I can even tell the difference in my car, while driving. Those sort of recording just don't deal very well with the psy-a models that lossy formats use. Once all the instruments start playing intricate things together, the individual instruments are hard to make out in lossy audio formats, while with 16 bit 44KHz uncompressed, you can still hear them.
24/96 is nice to have/important for a different reason. If your audio source has 16/44.1 as a sampling rate, your modern player/amplifier, will most likely be doing digital stuff to that stream. Either it will resample it to 192/24 or 96/24 before it does that, or it will start porking straight with the 44.1/16 data. In the first case, you're dealing with a non-linear resampling that will add (probably inaudible) quantisation effects to the stream. It will then resample some more because of the DSP effects (volume buttons often are nothing more than a DSP program parameter changer these days) and it may or may not do yet another resampling back to 44.1/16 before it gets to a DA converter to make "sound" out of it. This isn't really the most pretty way to do it, but given the source signal, it's hard to do it better. In the second case, you start with 44.1/16, it doesn't get resampled but it gets chopped up and DSPed at that bit rate. What comes out, is at best equivalent to 44.1/14, but often the resolution (even if the sample frequency is still 44.1/16) is as low as 32/10. The difference between 44.1/16 and 44.1/14 is often audible, on proper equipment and for people that really listen very carefully. the difference between 32/10 and 44.1/16 is almost always audible, even on mediocre equipment like a cell phone or ipod with cheap ear buds, or a car stereo. While 24/96 may in itself not be required for proper sound as a end product before it gets turned into analog audio, even for garden variety sound, it's often a better source sampling rate, just because of the amount of processing we do even on digital audio these days.
With my limited hearing, I feel it's not realistic to call myself an audio purist. I enjoy listening to music in my car, with all the road noise polluting the listening experience and with my non optimal car stereo and speaker setup. My home system could be way better than it is, without the voodoo prop
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
While we may or may not be able to tell a difference. I for one feel that I can, I think there are other issues. Why not switch to DVD or Blu-Ray disks if disk space is truly an issue? Granted this would make the new disks incompatible with older players. It could be argued that not enough people buy physical copies anyway.
The other, bigger problem, IMO is the stupid "Loudness War", this damages the audio far more, IMO than any bit rate or lossy vs. lossless format. Music for the last twenty years, give or take a few, sounds HORRIBLE. The music is muted, jumbled, scratchy, just down right bad...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Coding Horror did a great experiment with their readers where they provided several samples of the same song at different bitrates and then had everyone vote on which they thought sounded best. The result? People could only tell the difference between 128kbps and everything else, and even that was not overwhelming. In fact, 160kbps beat CD!
I clicked on it twice!!! :)
With a sampling rate of 44KHz (CD quality), you can encode ALL frequencies below 22KHz -- the fidelity is only limited by the bit depth, and 16 bits is WAY beyond human perception.
Increasing the sampling rate beyond 44KHz will get you more detail only for frequencies beyond 22KHz, which no human can hear. There's a lot of misconception about this because people see images like the ones in this page and don't understand them completely. The truth of these images is this: it doesn't matter how coarse the quantization looks -- if the original signal doesn't have frequencies higher than half of your sampling rate, then you can EXACTLY reconstruct the original signal (as long as each sample has enough precision, which is about bit depth and not sampling rate).
If you still don't believe me, watch these videos to get better explanations.
In practice 192kbps variable Lame preset standard is good enough for pretty much anybody. Now, it might not quite beat uncompressed for some people, but it's close enough that I don't bother to worry too much about it. It's better than the head phones that most people use to listen to their music with.
Thank God my hearing isn't worth a crap and I don't have yet another thing to geek over.
As long as Frank Sinatra doesn't sound like Donald Duck, I'm cool with it.
Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
I completely agree about the speaker cables - and while I don't have enough money to spend $1000 on a bottle of wine to know for sure, I do think that there is a psychological phenomenon similar to a placebo effect that actually makes drinking the expensive wine more pleasurable. Here's some cool research: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/baba_wine.html :)
You're still probably right about stroking ego, but if I had billions of dollars, I might try the $1000 bottle.
I think what these artists are trying to point out is they spent a lot of time and money making $X, with compression technology and storage being adequate maybe they just want the ~80% of the audio to at least be available somewhere in some format.
Also, why not? Right now downloadable content is sold at the same prices as its "real" counterpart. They don't pay for pressing, printing album art, shipping, depreciation while it sits on a shelf or paying indirectly for the brick stores to pay leases and wages.
So maybe the question is if the artist paid for it and your going to pay for it, why not get it?
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
The Hydrogen Audio people with "golden ears" did hearing tests on LAME encoding at alt-preset medium (about 240kbps typically) and NOBODY could tell the difference. That's why LAME hasn't changed lately. There's nothing left to do if you leave it at this setting. 320 won't be any different.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Even if music has damaged their hearing, their brains are more focused and attuned to processing and interpreting audio. They are specialists. It's a trade-off and I suspect that even with hearing loss their opinion is more valid than an average slashdot reader's. just sayin'.
If you've actually done some blind testing such as abx then you'll have had to swallow your pride and admit that in general you can't distinguish lossless audio from lossy until the lossy bitrates plummet.
But there are specific "killer samples" that expose the deficiencies in lossy encoders. For example there is a sample called eig_essence on which mp3 encoders completely fail and which ogg vorbis requires very high bitrates to encode without smearing. Modern codecs do a lot better: iTunes AAC encoder or Fraunhofer's AAC encoder will encode of the same sample at moderate bitrates with the sound indistinguishable from original.
eig is an extreme example because most people won't have anything in their music collection that sounds similar (amphetamine addicted techno freaks excepted), but there are other well known problem samples (search somewhere like hydrogenaudio for trumpet and castanets) which are the kinds of music you might own and hear often.
When people say that they can distinguish lossy from lossless they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand but the claim should be able to survive simple scrutiny i.e. a blind test. And if I can't hear any difference between a lossy encode and lossless it doesn't mean that someone else can't, only that I can't. There are irrational people who assert they can identify lossy from lossless 100% of the time, or 44100 Hz from 96000/192000 Hz, and conversely there are irrational people who believe their subjective experience with their $20 ear buds and cellphone music player extrapolates to "everything sounds the same".
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication.
People don't claim to feel better, they do feel better. There is no incentive for them to lie, in fact, there is a disincentive for them to do so. The reason behind the cause of the "placebo" effect is in the mind of the patient. The patient believes they should be getting better and then they do. Power of thought, belief and, if defined correctly, faith. Really, it is the power of consciousness which no one fully understands.
This can be applied to apparent differences in audio formats. The observer believes that one source should sound better and then it does. Since qualifying better/worse is entirely subjective, objectivity has no place in the argument.
The problem is far worse. There are actually two problems with music distribution today:
- Massive compression of every music track to make music as loud as possible, eliminating the concept of dynamics
- The fact that a large majority of consumers of music have grown up listening to it as lossy MP3, and EXPECT to hear artifacts in their music. They think this is normal. When they hear a correct, lossless version of their music, they think it sounds "wrong."
I can tell the different on my stereo system. MP3 music seems to chop off the sub woofer sound level - while FLAC music seems for full
lots of dynamic in low and high (Subwoofer and tweeter) range. MP3 was made for PC in the 90s, without the
"By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track"
And nothing of value was lost in the remaining 85% of the *data* that is inaudible to the human ear.
"Young, in fact, created his own digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) service called Pono. Young has tweeted that the Pono cloud-based music service, along with Pono portable digital-to-analog players, will be available by summer."
There's your cash-in scheme lurking behind all the BS.
"Young's service would increase the quality, or sampling rate, of the music from 44,100 times per second in a CD (44.1KHz) to 192,000 times per second (192KHz), and will boost the bit depth from 16-bit to 24-bit."
I would like to repeatedly hit you over the head with http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
"The sample rate of a digital file refers to the number of "snapshots" of audio that are offered up every second. Think of it like a high-definition movie, where the more frames per second you have, the higher the quality."
NO, do not think of it like that unless you're a charlatan. Refer to rebuttal on xiph.org.
"Millions of people in the world are audiophiles."
No doubt, Millions of people in the world are fools and they have money that could be yours.
"It's just common sense that the higher the resolution -- the more data that's in an audio file -- the better the sound quality, Chesky said."
Too bad this thing called SCIENCE has been trumping "common sense" for millenia now.
"The site also recommends high-resolution player software such as JRiver, Pure Music, or Decibel Audio Player. The software, which basically turns your desktop or laptop into a music server or a digital-to-analog converter,"
HILLARIOUS. I won't even begin to..
"The most popular music server among audiophiles, according to Bliss, is an Apple Mac Mini."
This is beautiful. I am not surprised in the least to see this audiophile-appleophile overlap.
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Doesn't matter, the audiophile market is not rational (kind of like the wine market). After a certain quality threshold, say 256kbps mp3 or $100 bottle of wine, nobody can tell the difference in a blind test. Yet suckers keep paying money for $500 speaker cables and $1000 bottles of wine. Just stoking ego at that point.
Yea, the audiophile market is full of snake oil sales men too. I laugh when I listen to your average sales person even at a high end store explain why system A is better than B or why your home system is all wrong. Then they resort to the "side by side" test and I can almost ALWAYS guess what "sounds better" before they demo it by looking at the type of speakers. Ported speakers will usually win because they are louder and have more base so switching from A to B and not changing anything louder "sounds better" to most. Problem is, usually the less sensitive speakers are better so suspended speaker designs (without ports) will actually produce better results, you just need more gain/Power in the amp.. Sales guys don't understand *any* of this usually they are just looking to get a fool to part with his money.
This "can you hear a difference" reminds me of past audiophile debates. Tube amps over solid state ones, where the tube guys swear their amps are better and more 'mellow" than that harsh solid state.. Or analog over CD recording where analog just sounded better than that harsh digital stuff. Now we are debating Codecs, sample bits and sample rates in areas where it is generally ridiculous to think *anybody* could hear the difference.
In reality, what you can and cannot hear and what is "good enough" to listen too is probably a lot less quality than you imagine. Unless you have unusably good hearing, do this for a living, have excellent equipment installed in really good acoustically designed listening environment you are unlikely to know the difference between an MP3, CD or High Bit Rate recordings until the compression rate gets pretty high. You might be able to hear a difference, but I doubt you can identify the higher quality material in a double blind test. Just like I bet I can get you to pick the junkiest pair of speakers in the place as the best sounding if you let me "adjust" between the side by side tests.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Pretty broad brush you're using there. I'm sure that the people who can perceive 100 million separate colours are also experiencing a placebo effect. and are REALLY good at guessing during tests to verify as such.
I imagine the vast majority of audiophiles are just experiencing the placebo effect, but it would be foolish to believe that a similar condition to tetrachromacy is biologically incapable of existing for audio as well.
And if you used the LAME codec, I would wish you good luck at 256. Cause you're gonna need it.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
That's interesting. I'm not particularly sensitive to compression artifacts, but this is the effect I hear with satellite radio.
i can. it's like playing music through grated cheese. it's typically cymbals, trumpets and other complex sounds that i notice particularly are affected.
an associate who worked for a Real-time Audio restoration company - his job was to spot audio discrepancies such as phase errors on old mono tracks that had been incorrectly recorded in stereo - could tell even *more* than i could ever notice.
basically it entirely depends on YOU. if your aural cortex and your ears are sufficiently developed / not-damaged, you WILL notice - it's as simple as that.
I can hear the difference between lossless and a bad MP3 rip. But between lossless and a good rip - they are indistinguishable. However, hard drives have become big and cheap enough where it's not unreasonable to just rip everything into a FLAC file. You can put all your cds (for you old folks that still have them) into a sleeve binder and store them away. Then you can throw away all the jewel cases and free up some serious space if you have hundreds (like I do - yes I'm old). Then, should some new format or something come out in the future - you have all the original data for a mass conversion to the new format.
I believe this topic has been beaten to death for a while now at Hydrogenaudio forums.
For chiptunes, I can hear a difference between 256 and 320, but just barely.
The biggest factor is how the high frequencies are filtered out before the audio is compressed, because the filtering appears to be the same regardless of the final bitrate. Even ultra-high bitrate audio will sound awful if the stock frequency cutoff is used, and I have to fiddle with the settings in LAME to make my songs sound good, even at 320.
The issue for me is that mp3's only sound good if you listen to them "as is".
I do DJ work every now and then. If you use DSP's, as I do, like equalizers, compressors and all sorts of stereo/surround effects, the resolution in lossy audio is SO limited that artifacts become clearly audible to most people.
Even home systems suffer from this, albeit to a lesser extent. Systems that are calibrated for the room with a certain equalizer setting, 5.1 receivers that upscale stereo to virtual surround. They all mess with the audio source in a big way...and when that source is lossy, sometimes you can clearly tell.
Uncompressed audio simply has more resolution to play with. And that's why most of my music collection is now FLAC. Compare it to photoshopping a PNG vs. a JPG.
There may be more than ego-stroking to it.
To some degree it may be because doing the research to find the best fit is considered hard or tedious. Monster / Pear / whatever are total rip-offs, but im sure they are as good quality as the best "cheap" brands-- that is, that the $1000 Pear cable is as good as the best Monoprice offers. On the other hand the user may not know enough to avoid the crappy uninsulated cables that truly do introduce distortion or crap out or fail or have faulty connectors. Its possible that they (or the person they contracted out to) knows that there is a budget for the "high end", and its easier to simply pay for it and be done with it than stumbling around in ignorance looking for the non-crappy part.
If that is true, then the RIAA and others have been suing people under false claims.
Those cases need revisited.
I don't hear very well, but I hear the difference between lossy and lossless audio. Normally I don't care, though.
AAC (like MP3) is a frequency-domain codec, and can therefore never provide transparent audio. It has nothing to do with "deeper". but instead is an inability to represent transients... non-tonal components like percussive sounds and other noise.
If you had performed the test with Musepack/MPC or even MPEG-1 Layer II at high bitrates, you would have failed the test.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1#Quality
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A quote from the article.. This smells funny: "Young's service would increase the quality, or sampling rate, of the music from 44,100 times per second in a CD (44.1KHz) to 192,000 times per second (192KHz), and will boost the bit depth from 16-bit to 24-bit." Too lazy to actually go there, but if it means convert your cruddy 16bit 44.1k music into clear 24bit 192k music.. ehhhh...
Range compression ( http://news.cnet.com/8301-13645_3-10360787-47.html ) has done more to destroy the subtitles of music than lossey/lossless formats.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
If you don't believe a different exists just grab a flac file of your favorite band and that same file as Mp3, Ogg, Wav and anything else you want to try. If you have good hearing and good quality sound equipment you'll hear a dramatic difference. Of course listening to lossless sound files on crappy sound systems will leave you with an experience equal to mp3, this is why it's important for music lovers to always buy the best sound cards possible, at least for computers.
There was an experiment I heard about on Radio Lab where several pieces of colored paper were given to someone to tell apart, supposedly this would identify someone with 4 color receptors rather than 3 (a small percentage of woman) and was largely analogous to color blindness tests (normally men). In theory people with 3 color receptors would be unable to tell the hues apart.
What they found is that some people with lots of experience working with color could tell the color samples apart fairly easily, while most people literally could not. A lot had to do with training and life experience apparently. So yes, some people really see more colors than you because they are trained to as incredible as that sounds.
Sound could be the same way. Plus, depends on your stereo system I guess.
I've hated it for decades now. Whether or not I can consciously discern a difference has always been irrelevant. Similarly, whether or not my speakers can produce a difference is equally unimportant.
To the latter, assuming that I've "purchased" the music, and intend to retain it (as opposed to one-time streaming), at some point in my life I'll be using better speakers. Music lasts a really long time.
To the former, 3-minute listening tests are meaningless. Listen to the same song/album/artist/format for ten hours straight -- something I do recreationally, professionally, as background to work, and for inspirational moments. Some formats produce headaches. Some produce zero inspiration. Some have me "tired of listening to music". Others produce no headaches, tonnes of inspiration, and have me enjoy ten hours of music.
There is a difference. And not all differences are at the top of cognition.
Some music has my cat leaving the room.
Lighter stuff and instrumental music you probably won't hear the difference above 192~256kbit MP3, but anything 'busy' always sounds more flat to me. Like comparing a photograph to the original scene. I also have the misfortune of being able to hear compression artifacts...
Probably because the psychoacoustic models used to design these adaptive transform compression schemes are based on the AVERAGE human and I would charitably be described as 'abnormal'. ;)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Most people who say they cannot hear the difference are looking in the wrong spot for change. I have worked in professional studios. After a certain point, the difference is not in weather or not you hear a cymbal, but in dynamics. There are two factors that determine the quality: sample rate and bit depth. Simply stated, the sampling rate determines how many samples there are per second, which determines the highest frequency you will be able to accurately reproduce. The bit depth determines how many degrees of dynamics you can represent in each sample.
Once you have something that sounds like a cymbal, most people are happy. Once you increase the sampling rate, you get more of the overtones and things that most people can't hear and won't notice. Increasing the bit depth will mean that instead of just loud, medium and soft you will hear really loud, loud, slightly loud, medium, medium soft, almost soft and soft. Most people don't have equipment to accurately reproduces that. Anything that is going to be mass marketed is ran through a compression at the mastering phase that destroys the subtle dynamics anyway, so if you are looking for a difference when you convert your pop CD collection to high quality MP3, you won't find it. But you can ask any audio engineer, there is a difference!
You need to go deeper.
"Major recording artists, such as Neil Young and Dave Grohl, lead singer of the band Foo Fighters, have been publicly critical of compressed file formats and the "significant loss" data, and therefore music quality, consumers are suffering..."
I, on the other hand, have been publicly critical of the crappy musical ideas and songs that Mr. Grohl has been churning out over the years since Nirvana has disbanded and, likewise, no-one will listen to me and just keep on buying Poo Fighters music like it's the second coming of Grunge... So go figure. But seriously, the older he gets, the more I feel Grohl he should just shut the hell up. Who's with me?
I agree to a point. Using good headphones and specific songs, I can tell a 192kbps VBR MP3 from FLAC.
You need to train for it, though. For me, 192kbps VBR is transparent in nearly all cases -- I really need to listen for specific things in order to hear it, and only in some songs. Before learning what to listen for, 160kbps VBR was completely transparent to me.
I keep all my music in FLAC at home, but really only because disk space is cheap and if I ever feel like moving from MP3 to Vorbis/AAC on my DAP, I can do so without re-ripping.
This is an interesting question. I hope someone else answers it, but I will have a crack at the maths
I agree with most comments here ... both sides. I'm all for the audiophile, I paid a crapload of money to have exactly the proper colorization for the sound that I thoroughly enjoy. I have a big vinyl collection, and am still purchasing new stuff on vinyl.
Here's my culprits, in order:
Mastering must be done so the audio quality is the best. FREE TRANSIENTS! (Ref: Loudness war). That's the worst culprit these days. And I do understand it. Most music is listened with earbuds in less than adequate places (subways and other noisy enviro). In this case, we want the music to sound like a ribbon, we don't want transients, we don't want low volume followed by high volume. We simply want to listen to the song, and so be it with the quality. Much like in old times, where you had cassettes with Dolby to add +3 and +6 compression to what the tape could give you, or open reels with integrated limiters, or 45rpm vinyls that were created as hot as possible so the jukebox would play it loud in your milk shop :) The format of the day is MP3/4 and CDs. These are meant to be enjoyed by the most people. Too bad for me that got this awesome sound repro system, playing that overcompressed piece of junk that sounds plain flat.
MP34 compression is a destructive process. You take the wave, and you convert it in a frequency matrix, that you then compress. That DCT/iDCT conversion does alter the sound, even if no compression is applied to it then. Any music going through that process becomes slightly muddied compared to the original version. Then, Mid + Side adjustment means the best quality for your music (in mono), but gives the worst quality for spatiality. Your instruments are going all around the place, your sound stage becomes smaller as volume and complexity increases, and becomes bigger when it decreases back.
44KHz 16 bits is _adequate_ for most musical moments. 16 bits gives you adequate spatial bandwidth, except you are losing quality as you drop in volume. 44KHz gives you a proper quality, but will tend to become cramped for high frequencies, like violins, or very deep voices with a lot of harmonics.
In other words, I purchase vinyls because people (often) remaster the sound track to give it more amplitude, let it breathe, gives it less loudness. I rip my vinyl to 48/16, which should theoretically give me a subpar version of what I download or rip from CD, however, because of our Loudness War friend, it usually sounds much better than the purely digital one. Then, I use lossless formats to rip any CD-only releases because they will give me the most enjoyment, especially if I close my door and listen intently to the music. Then, I compress my collection so it can fit on my Fruity Device using MP4 audio 128 or 256Kbps, to give me the ability to listen to music while commuting, when quality isn't _that_ important.
Your friendly neighbour, the Anonymous Coward.
... Neil young ...
Neil is not so young anymore, you insensitive clod.
With all the gigs behing he cannot hear anything outside what his earpiece can transmit.
Because the publishers want to sell you double HD, triple HD, etc. in the future. They can't do that if they sell you the master quality recordings from the get go.
I guarantee anyone who has reasonable hearing could tell the difference during playback of a 16 bit and 24 bit recording in a studio with decent monitoring with the speakers set up in an equidistant triangle. The stereo imaging is distinctly broader in 24 bit recordings. Still speaking in the context of the capture stage of this subject, 44.1 vs 96 kHz sample rates are most noticeable in passages where we hear long reverb decays, and in passages with fast transient high frequency content, like cymbals, particularly high hats. High frequency, high amplitude amplitude transients signals that self modulate, such as high hats prove that you capture more accurately at higher sample rates, 96 thousand times per second versus 44,100 times per second gives you a much more smooth curve, and is less prone to digital dropout for such program material. This is where Neil Young's argument is beginning, he wants to take his recordings which were captured taking pains to be as high fidelity as possible, and be able to offer these in a format that is a better approximation of the original than could be made from a 16 bit 44.1 kHz CD, rather take the 24 bit 96, or even 192 kHz and the produce the compressed file for digital distribution.
IM subjective HO, I can distinctly hear a very obvious difference from a 24/96 audio file I create a FLAC from and an MP3 I create from an audio CD.
No matter how much space is on my current player, I never have enough space to hold my whole collection (well, except on my 160GB iPod classic...but I digress). That means either juggling what is and isn't on my device, or compression, or both. And, its entirely possible that I might choose a player that doesn't work well with the format I've chosen (cough*mp3Pro*cough).
Having a lossless version of everything means never having to worry about re-compression. My perception trails off between 200-230kbps. I can deal with 192 pretty easily, and 128 isn't the end of the world if I'm in my car or am on a cheap pair of earbuds. Heck, on my SwimP3, 64kbps is overkill. But a 200kbps that then gets re-coded to 128 can really end up with some weird sounding shit. So all my old CDs were ripped to FLAC. When I switched from Creative players to iStuff, I just recoded all of my library from FLAC to ALAC. No loss, no worries, no re-ripping. Most of what I buy today gets ripped straight to ALAC, but if I ever ditch apple, I can just recode it back over to FLAC.
It matters that you get a lossless format because then you can convert it to any format that works for you. And if you change formats in the future, just re-code and never worry.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The squelch and audible artifacts has been something that has pissed me off ever since the birth of mp3. Admittedly, it has got a lot better over the years but to answer the question, it still very much audible, at least to me, in bit rates up to and exceeding 320kbps. I do accept that mp3 has never sounded better than it does today (depending on the encoder) and to pick out these subtleties does require a bit of concentration to pick it out, but it is still there! The case gets much worse for formats such as aac (eaac+) and other super-high compression formats. They(codecs) do a fantastic job of getting an astonishing amount of high quality audio into smaller and smaller space and as incredible as it is, perfect it is not. (In fact I used to (12-13 yrs ago) use an encoder with a low-pass filter cutoff at 15khz to stop any artifacts above that frequency and to dramatically lower my filesizes as I was trying to fit as much as possible onto a 64Mb Memory Stick Sony Clié. Room for improvement but worked like a charm! I do also suspect that mobile phone manufacturers are fully aware if this and design their included headphones to filter out the squelches and whatever else to make the audio sound that much better using lossy formats. I'm not convinced this is true but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
How many articles have I seen on this on Slashdot?
The answer is that, yes, you can tell the difference and your ability to tell the difference increases with how discerning a listener you are and how good your audio equipment is. We don't need to debate this any more.
Most of the ones that say no (and some that say yes), don't even know what it is supposed to sound like. You must have been at the time of the recording to know exactly what is sounds like, tone, placement of players, reverb of the walls, etc. Or even more, you need to be exposed to a steinway grand piano for many hours to pick up all the small subtle details of how the steinway piano sound. I say this because the difference between lossy and lossless can be picked with ease at those subtle details.
Most of the ones that say no don't know the concepts of attack, body and decay of a note, attack is how the note starts, aggressive or subtle, strong or weak, body is how that note sustains while it lives, vibrations of the string or drum, blow of the sax player, etc all this affect the body, and decay is how this note ceases to exist, abrupt or gradually, you can get a feel of decay more easily with cymbals, but it exist in every note and attack and decay are what makes the difference between a good piano and a great piano.
Once you get to know, identify and appreciate this concepts from live music (doesn't matter how much money you spend, there's nothing like live music) you will never be able to enjoy lossy files even for casual listening, the music is not complete. The attacks get reduced to almost nothing unless is a very long one, and subtle decays are basically gone, cymbals abruptly stop at a point in time much sooner than recorded. And a really good recordings of piano once they get into mp3 sound like some devil from hell is hitting giant pieces of brass with a metal hammer, because of attack, body and decay distortions. This three concepts plus other subtle spacial aspects is what gets lost, the projected image of the players gets reduced or half go to the left speaker and the other half goes to the right one. Of course, for all this to happen the recording must have been done right, the mastering must have been done wright, etc etc. A crappy band, recorded like crap and mastered "for itunes" is going to sound like crap, no matter what resolution the file and reproduction system have.
Now, to pick this subtle things the system reproducing the music must be of certain quality, no $500 cables, but not logitech or creative labs crap either. IMHO the bottom of the barrel is at Audio Engine A5 or the Vanatoo for close field listening or a small room, and it only goes up from there. Once you go over $2k for bookshelf speakers and appropriate electronics for them you're going into diminishing return field or the snake oil field.
To those who can't hear the difference between a good recording in lossy and lossless, I salute you, your wallet is safe. But if you want to, go to live music, many many times, listen to those small things, close your eyes and picture where all players are, feel the echoes, notice how long that cymbal holds, notice how the singer voice really sounds like. After that you can go and try your ipod and ibuds of the same songs and see. Once you get there, all we can say is sorry for your wallet, spend enough and not more than that.
You won't know until you test. So I did. Here's my results:
With the aid of my girlfriend, I tested myself to see just what I could tell apart. The test music was "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", by
Blue Oyster Cult, listening through some very high end Audio-Technica headphones I picked up in Akihabara earlier that year.
I tested:
16bit WAV (GRIPped right from the CD, 1440 Kbit equivalent)
320Kbit LAME ABR MP3
256Kbit LAME ABR MP3
192Kbit LAME ABR MP3
128Kbit LAME ABR MP3
I found that the WAV and the 320Kbit LAME were "different", but I couldn't tell which was better. So, dead heat. I could tell that the
256Kbit LAME encoding was pretty damn close, but not quite as clean (the snare drums were the giveaway). Anything less was
clearly not as good. 128Kbit was practically unlistenable when I A/Bed it against the WAV or 320Kbit, it was that bad.
So there; now when I rip my CDs I keep the .WAV and encode
at 320Kbit ABR
I cannot hear the flaws of high bitrate MP3. Listening to them on decent (not the best, but not some crap computer speakers) gear reveals no defect to me (except for the Xing encoder, that has so many defects that it is painful).
However, the difference between that perfectly adequate MP3 and a real 48kHZ master is stunning. The clarity is just another world. Ironically, I found that the difference is even more marked in a noisy environment, where the music competes with background noise. It is more or less impossible to identify the overtones on the MP3 in such environment, while they remain very audible with the uncompressed format.
I am not an expert, certainly not a superhuman (I have very average scores on blind tests), but to me the difference is like a nose in the middle of the face, even though the MP3s are "plenty enough" quality, already.
Thus, the *correct* way to appraise say mp3 is with very good speakers in a treated listening room
No it isn't. At least most of the time it isn't, though that result would be interesting.
If I'm trying to decide whether to archive my CDs to MP3 or FLAC, I don't give a rat's ass what it sounds like with great monitors in a treated listening room, because that's not where I listen to music. If my speakers give a non-linear result that amplifies the distortions from compression, that's what matters; not what it sounds like in an ideal situation.
Do both.... When I converted my CD collection I used FLAC and the converted the FLAC to MP3 VBR 320kbps. I then archived the FLAC on to DVD discs and put all of my CDs in storage. My thinking was that I would use MP3s for now and, when audio players had enough storage, switch over to FLAC. Plus it also gave me a lossless backup in case my MP3 files became corrupted. I would just have to reconvert them again rather than having to run through my whole CD library.
Going back to the lossless/lossy discussion, I think you are ALL forgetting a big issue that I always get with music online. The problem is that the program doing these compressions, even the lossless one, are various and so are the settings. Sometimes I can analyse a 320 kbs mp3 and see that the encoding program has litteraly cut the highest frequencies (i usually use Audio Hijack Pro with the Blue Cat frequency analyser). Sometimes they are fine (rarely unfortunately). But I got even Flac files with these issues, an they are supposed to be lossless... If you want to get te best quality just buy the cd and support your favourite bands, or at least you need to know what you are doing playing with files, that's my suggestion
No you can't. Not with any reasonably modern encoder and bitrates above 256. Anyone who tells you otherwise is experiencing the placebo effect.
Or they could just be younger than us. Hearing does degrade linearly with age.
Use an ABX testing program. This will provide a definitive, scientific answer.
And to further my anecdotal experience, contrarily to all people that say that you need "good gear" to hear the difference. I found that on the contrary, an excellent source would render ok-ish on bad gear, while a bad source will just vomit mashed potato through the speakers.
I've been an audiophile since Nixon was president. And no, I've never dropped Large Cash for cables. I run 14 gauge zip cord to my speakers. MOSFET 60 wpc power amp. Pretty pedestrian by hi-end standards, but my home system is the equal of any so-called "reference system" I've ever heard. I agree there's a lot of snake oil out there, but if you know what you're doing, you can get truly superior results with the right gear. I do location recording for my wife's string quartet. I master at 24/96 and when I down sample to 16/44.1, I can hear the difference on my home system. It's not going to be heard on ear buds or a car system, but on something like my home system (Peachtree DAC, Bryston preamp, Linkwitz Orion loudspeaker system), you're going to hear it.
Problem with all digital sampling is not the A to D process but the extent to which the D to A process reconstructs the original sound. The theory behind audio sampling is that intensity measurements are sufficiently frequent so that the original waveform can be reconstructed later -- the Nyquist frequency, nominally double the highest tone. So 44.1khz should be enough to reproduce 22khz sound. Some of us hate compact fluorescents because even as we slide into senility we can still hear the damn things scream... But I digress... The problem is that not all music is a nice, clean sine wave -- percussion instruments particularly. So the clash of cymbals sounds muddy, drum beats become thumps. Analog recording did a better job -- although the slow acceleration of the needle tended to wear the record quickly. Think about it from the perspective of fourier series approximating a square wave -- that is what the D to A process has to do, not so easy without the higher harmonics... Personally, most of the sound reproduction environments I experience are pretty poor. And we seem to have forgotten a lot of the acoustic environment tuning issues that were obsessions in the earlier days of stereo -- like room resonances. Probably ok if music is just a background sound track to the rest of life.
It can even make boy bands sound like their voices have changed.
A modulated (varying frequency or amplitude) signal with an audible carrier frequency has Fourier components of unboundedly high frequency. These components can, and sometimes do, have an audible effect on the modulation. The value of >44.1 KHz sampling is debatable, but it's not dismissable mathematically.
Put another way, the "components" below 22.05 KHz that are preserved by 44.1 KHz sampling are the infinitely long unmodulated sine waves of Fourier analysis. The "components" that we hear are modulated sine waves. Cutting off the Fourier components above 22.05 KHz changes the modulation of the audible components below 22.05 KHz. Whether that change is perceptible depends on deep study of human perception, not on the mathematics of sampling.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Let's actually test it and find out. This would be a study I could get behind with my tax dollars (unlike this one: http://now.msn.com/duck-penis-study-cost-395000-dollars). If we find out no one can tell the difference it is going to save a lot of disk space.
If the singer is autotuned, and the drums are electronic, then does it really matter what the bitrate is? Lossless is going to make a much bigger difference for a Neil Young song, say, than for a One Direction song. If the original source material itself is digitally synthesized, there isn't much subtlety to lose with compression.
I do think once you go belo 256 bit rate you start hearing issues or at least you do with some music. But then people also listen to these songs on shitty PC speakers, cheap headphons or worse yet their mobile's speaker. Lossless vs lossy doesn't matter as much when playing the music through poor speakers.
All frequency-domain lossy audio codecs (MP3, AAC, Ogg/Vorbis, others) have inherent limitations that prevent transparent reproduction of audio. Transients will be poorly reproduced, and artifacts like pre-echo are unavoidable.
2+2 does not equal 5. The sky is not green. Water is not dry. Your assertion is wrong, and based in total ignorance of the topic.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not if you can mathematically prove that the two sound reproductions are identical
The best possible signal reproductions at different sample rates are not identical, so of course you can't prove such a falsehood mathematically. The argument is that they are indistinguishable in human perception. That's a very difficult thing to study, with many variables that are hard to control.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Beyond a certain point, the human ear+brain will NOT be able to tell a difference. CD quality meets this threshold. There have been so many studies on this, you're just spreading misinformation at this point.
Years ago a friend was raving over the MP3 format and said you can't hear any difference. I said you could and we set up an A-B test with my system. The sound stage on the MP3 collapsed. With the original recording, there was a distinct separation of the sound stage, placing musicians at left, right and center. Switching to the MP3 format, everything came from center.
Listening in a car, I'd opt for MP3 because you're unlikely to notice. If you're sitting down for a serious listen, go with the original recording. You'll get a lot more out of it.
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA – it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrangewell don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
fuck, now I'm stuck in a loop.
Yes, a difference is noticeable on many recordings, but most of the time it doesn't degrade the listening experience. On the contrary, lossy recordings played on crap speakers in a crap listening space often sound better than those same recordings in lossless format on proper studio monitors in a proper listening space.
Mumble mumble psychoacoustics.
ALAC is Apple's Lossless Audio Codec and is a latecomer onto the scene. It has good iTunes support and slightly better compression than FLAC, but that's about it.
Apple's ALAC lossless codec is only a dozen C/C++ files (C for the actual codec, C++ for the file format). It's easy to understand, port, and include in other software. To build it you type 'make'. So from a source code perspective ALAC is much better... FLAC has many dozens of source files, assembly, uses automake etc so it's annoying to work with the actual source.
Not that any of that matter to users, but to programmers ALAC is *much* better.
a 44.1kHz sampling rate can perfectly encode any signal that is =22.05kHz, and nobody can hear over 20kHz.
People keep saying this, but it involves two different meanings of a signal with content below 20 kHz. The Nyquist theorem says (correctly) that, for an infinite number of perfectly accurate samples at S Hz, there is only one signal agreeing with those samples and containing Fourier components all below S/2 Hz. Fourier components are infinitely long sine waves, with no variation in frequency or amplitude. People hear components that are modulated sine waves with carrier frequency below (for most of us, far below) 20kHz. "Modulated" means that the amplitude and/or frequency (usually both) vary. Fourier components of a signal with arbitrarily high frequency affect the modulation of audible components with arbitrarily low frequency. Whether the effect on that modulation is audible is a very subtle thing, quite difficult to measure, and not completely known at present.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
Ogg 64Kbps sounds better than LAME 320Kbps in many sounds, and better across the board at 128Kbps. Either that test was about how well LAME can encode a 60hz single note or those people didn't have "golden ears".
When a drummer hits a cymbal, the horribleness of MP3 is apparent. Just flip between the compressed and uncompressed in small samples of sound, like 2-3 seconds. It is night and day.
But we're not talking about crappy 24-bit (with 8-bits per primary channel: Red, Green, Blue) which is NOT sufficient. There are horrible mach banding artifacts primarily in the primary colors. Dithering the non-primaries colors hides them but doesn't solve the initial problem.
The analogy is more like is 10-bit/channel sufficient or do we need 12-bits/channel? Hint: There is a reason rendering uses 48-bit (16-bits/channel) as it provides enough headroom to completely remove compositing quantization errors.
Another analogy: Why do we need 30 fps, 60 fps, or 120 fps when movies are displayed at 24 fps? Because almost everyone call tell the difference between the 30 and 60 once they know what to look for. However a few of us can tell the difference between 60 Hz and 120 Hz. Is 120 Hz "good enough" or can anyone even tell the difference between a higher framerate?
If you don't understand the difference between 60 Hz and 120 Hz this video will help demonstrate it:
Asus VG278H High Speed LightBoost Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD5gjAs1A2s
Guys, you knew that instead of talking you can get reliable data for yourself? There's this plugin for foobar:
http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx
After playing with it for quite some time, I came to the conclusion that it's nigh impossible to hear the difference with even 225k vbr. That makes using anything higher than 256k vbr really stupid for normal listening, when you care about disk space.
Disclaimer: I'm a skeptical audiophile, i.e. I love high-quality sound, understand the placebo effect and raise my eyebrows (but not my credit card) at $15,000 speaker cables.
What I find most fascinating about all of this is that the human body is not subject (yet) to Moore's Law. Computers catch up to us, fast. So, while 16-bit 44.1kHz audio was impossible in terms of processing power and storage 20 or so years ago, now it's trivial. At some point, anyone will agree that the resolution of music recordings exceeds the listening capabilities of even super-ears folks. 192kHz 24-bit stereo audio, uncompressed, is only ~4GB per hour; a trivial amount of storage and a very low data rate. Make it full 7-channel just for giggles, and it's ~14GB/hour. So a run-of-the-mill (today) 4TB drive can store ~300 albums. A typical audiopohile collection of 5,000 albums will require 70TB of storage, 100TB if you want some RAID redundancy, and that's with no lossLESS compression. Today that's $8,000 of storage, and it takes no imagination, plus 0.6x conservative lossless compression, to get that down to $2,000 or so. Not cheap, but not outrageous. The albums themselves cost said audiophile about $75,000.
Will there still be a debate that 192kHz 24-bit isn't "enough"? Probably. But human ears aren't changing much, and, it could be argued, we hit the limit of perception for most people at 44.1kHz 16-bit. At 6.5 times that resolution, it's probably enough. Problem solved (modulo a lot of infrastructure changes).
The same will eventually happen for video. 8x, if you've ever seen it, is like looking through a window, until the camera pans (which it shouldn't). Many people can't tell the difference between 480p and 1080p, never mind 4x.
It's already happened for photography. The resolving power of modern high-end digital sensors exceeds that of all but the best lenses. Storage of these multi-megapixel images is a non-issue.
There are imponderables, though: passionate, intelligent and sincere people I know wax lyrical over the aforementioned $15,000 speaker cables. Sound reproduction in a home environment, or when hearing headphones, is extraordinarily complex, and nobody has ever achieved "the absolute sound", i.e. a feeling that you're in a live music environment when listening at home. All you can hope for is some of the emotional involvement that the recording artist intended, whether in the studio or live. In the car on on good earbuds, I can JUST about tell that I'm listening to a 192 or 256kbps AAC (or MP3): it's in the sizzle of a cymbal and the like. But it's a fine line. At home, sure, a good audio system can make you cringe when listening to a highly compressed source. I've ABed the same recordings at 44.1/16 and 96/24. On high dynamic range stuff (orchestral, mostly), the quiet passages show a difference, albeit a minor one, because the signal is encoded using only 2-3 LSBs.
What's hardest to understand is the emotional engagement offered by (good, well-recorded, well-pressed) vinyl. It could certainly be a placebo effect, or it could be something yet to be understand in human hearing response when listening to digitally-encoded audio. To my surprise, the difference between a $10 speaker cable and a $500 speaker cable is clear, and in the favor of the $500 cable. There's some science there, but also a lot of voodoo. One or two manufacturers claim to have figured out how to measure the difference, but they're not saying how, for obvious reasons: they're, um, "marketing", or they really have found something to measure and want to keep it proprietary.
Finally, audio technology is really advancing, and fast. The DACs in most iDevices are ok: not great, but ok. The bundled earbuds are bad. But as little as $30 gets you decent earbuds. At $100 you're experiencing perhaps the same quality of sound as from a $1,000 pair of speakers. A decent DAC can be had for $250. A decent headphone amp for $200. So Mac/PC (which you already have)+$250 DAC+$200 amp+$100 earbuds gives you sound far superior to what most people enjoy. Not free, or cheap, but not very expensive, either. Then, I bet, a lot of people will want to move up from 128kbps MP3s.
Charge less for the lossless format. Audiophiles use a common benchmarking system that is hidden in plain view. You look for the number after this character "$" and the larger that number is the better the component or recording or system will sound.
In medical tests, people are given a placebo and yet claim to feel better or feel the same effects as people who are given the real medication. These must be the same people who rail against mp3s.
Don't dis the placebo effect, it works (for some limited benefits), even in cases where the subjects were aware that they were receiving a placebo
The most similar analogy would be to say that someone can enjoy lossless music more than lossy music. This could be true even if they can't tell them apart in a blind study. Of course, under these assumptions, they'd also enjoy lossy music more than lossless music if the labels were switched and they believed the labels. It's enjoyed more simply because of what it is believed to be. That may be silly, but hey, who am I to crap on someone's enjoyment?
On the other hand, making the claim that you can tell the difference, i.e. discriminate between then, is more directly challengeable and probably false in most cases.
I would LOVE to be able to download the original master tracks of my favourite songs, then remix them, and listen to other people's remixes too. You would have thought that with today's digital studios, they could provide this version of music, which would benefit the record companies big time - people buying these 'multitrack' versions of albums would be getting maybe 24 tracks per song, in lossless format, meaning they would be BIG files, maybe 5GB to 10GB per album, so they would be slower to torrent, too big for one DVD-R, and most people wouldn't know how to RAR them, etc.
Is that a crazy idea?
Who'e the jerk now?
Signature intentionally left blank
http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/kids-prefer-poor-quality-mp3
(and remember, kids are able to hear frequencies that you can't!)
If you think Fiona Apple is a strong vocalist, you can't hear shit!
It's quite unlikely that you can hear the difference between the lossless original and a 160kbps lossy version from the best modern encoders (e.g. Apple's AAC encoders from the last couple years). If you can, it's going to be for just a few isolated samples tested in ideal circumstances and it won't impact the quality of your listening experience.
People who claim otherwise are either using outdated formats and encoders or they're not doing proper blind testing and their results are dominated by psychological bias.
But if you ever want to encode your music in another format, transcoding from one lossy format to another is like xeroxing xeroxed copies; you get generation loss and are more likely to hear some artifacts. Encoding from the lossless original will never have that problem.
You can think of it like this: when you buy an mp3, you own an mp3. When you buy a FLAC, you own the music- the format becomes irrelevant since you can re-encode it in any other format, past, present, or future, and have the result be just as good as if you re-purchased the music in that other format.
I have a DSD (SACD) Player. I have several discs of the same music in CD (red book 44.1 KHz 16-bit) and DSD. DSD is PWM at 2.8 MHz.
I have done A/B tests with myself, and "blind" tests with friends. Everybody prefers the DSD playback. This is on higher end consumer gear, not high-end audiophile stuff by any means.
I have no doubt the DSD versions were mastered more carefully. Perhaps that is the biggest difference. However, they do sound better than PCM CDs to my ears.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I can easily tell the difference between 128k MP3s and 320k, and from CD. I rip all my CDs at 320 or FLAC, 128 is incredibly annoying to me. the very high end is usually reduced to bacon frying, and the dynamics are hosed.
Of course, now I'm busy normalizing my library on Google so it gets over the gym noise, and pre-eqing it to make my Bluetooth headset 'sound better'. Ick, but it's a bit better.
But, but, but, I really liked ATRAC, especially after 4.x. I had a Sharp Minidisc player/recorder that rocked, and was vastly better sounding than the early MP3 players, iPods included.
ATRAC gets no respect. MD failed. But I still use it sometimes.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I happen to really like my Volkswagen. The last Ferrari I was in wasn't very comfortable.
.. I'd like to say that for $40,000 your 'lossy audio file' at least doesn't have a reputation for spontaneously bursting into flames.
My 3 priorities are:
(1) What I am listening to -- e.g. I prefer Beethoven to Tchaikovsky
(2) What version is this -- e.g. in general I hate live (vs studio), and in classical works the symphony/conductor is very important
(3) Are there kids on my lawn? -- gray ears don't need more than MP3 has to offer
I come here for the love
I clicked on that link and noticed that the site, too, forwards me somewhere else. Came to post this before I dwell deeper (slow connection), but I promise I'll follow-up with a link to the original source once I reach it.
After all, we're talking about people who buy $1,000 Monster cables, even though in a blind test, they can't tell the difference between those and wire coat hangers.
Back in the 90's when people had 56k modems, a WAV file was huge (10Mbit per 1 minute of audio) but since then our connections are pushing 100Mbit/second+ (Canada on Shaw) , with a nice average of about 15-20Mbit/second - With this you could download a 3 minute wav (30Mbit) in 1-5 seconds. Yes, I know some people have poor quality providers, or slower connections around 1Mbit a second but still 30-60 seconds isn't bad.
The other limiting factor back then was small hard drives averaging around 50-80Gb which were around $500 in 1999/2000. Now, you can buy 3Tb of storage for $130. 3Tb is enough to store 104,857 - 3 minute WAV files.
Even 64Gb iPod Touches have enough storage for 15,000+ songs in WAV format.
Lossy, lossless---recordings are for the rabble! Anyone who would settle for anything less than lying under the piano or sitting in the middle of the live orchestra does not deserve to hear the works of the great masters of the classics!
Since if you store in some lossy format say MP3, and the world switches to some other lossy format, you won't be able go convert your files to the new format without hearing a big difference. If they are still good enough quality to listen to.
You need to store your stuff in a lossless format so when formats change you can convert. Even if you have versions in a lossless format for listening.
Show me the data. Produce a properly blinded ABX test of LAME -V0 vs PCM audio where the subject was able to identify lossy audio at a rate that is significantly (p>0.05) different from chance.
Lossy codecs do have artifacts. But that doesn't mean those artifacts are perceptible. The only way to know is to do a blind test.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
'The more that pseudoscience goes unchecked in the world at large, the harder it is for truth to overcome truthiness... even if this is a small and relatively insignificant example.' ~ http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/03/06/0048259/why-distributing-music-as-24-bit192khz-downloads-is-pointless
'For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.' ~ Carl Sagan
Asking for people to behave rationally may not always be the easy way, but in my experience it is almost always worth doing. I think as a species we'd be a lot better off if everyone valued rationality highly, so I think we should encourage that in everyone.
Tetrachromats can pass blind tests. Audiophiles cannot. That's the difference.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Asking for people to behave rationally may not always be the easy way, but in my experience it is almost always worth doing. I think as a species we'd be a lot better off if everyone valued rationality highly, so I think we should encourage that in everyone.
glass houses, my friend... could your life undergo such scrutiny? Would you want to be faced with the determinations of such an evaluation?
When I was much younger and had better hearing and MP3 was a new thing, I ripped my CD collection and encoded everything with whatever the state of the art was back then (bladeenc? mp3enc? this was pre-lame). After a while I started hearing artifacts in MP3-encoded music so I did some A/B testing against the original CD the music was encoded from. Turned out those same artifacts were in the CD.
MP3 encoding has matured and improved since then, so whatever degradation there may have been, it's less now. I've only ever used 128Kbps stereo encoding, and I've never been able to detect any difference from the CD in any kind of music. This is with fairly high-quality sound cards, amps, and speakers.
Of course, my high-frequency hearing is pretty much gone now so I sometimes worry that my music collection might sound horrible to anyone with fully functional ears.
... a piece of a dollar that only lists the value, or the whole dollar?
It's not about the spending power, but about the overall package.
Apply analogy to fidelity.
Not true at all. The physics of human hearing is extremely clear. And I really don't care if you want to be a flat-earther and refuse to believe it.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Its' not even on terrible speakers. No matter what the speaker device is, if the original data isn't there, it's not farking there, and you can't hear what isn't there.
I can tell a huge difference between a CD and a 256kbps MP3. Especially via iPod hardware, and iPods have absolute shit sound playback hardware. And I'm part deaf.
When you have at least two speakers, and signals from both speakers hit both ears of the listener, it makes a difference.
You can generate two high frequency signals, one from each speaker, such that the difference of the frequencies is in the audible range. The sum of the two signals includes a modulation with the difference of the frequencies (sin(x)+sin(y) = 2*sin([x+y]/2)*cos([x-y]/2). The phase depends on the distance from the speaker times the frequency. If the signals come from different sources, the phase of the low frequency modulation signal (which is audible in this example) depends on the distance from each speaker times the frequency of the signal from that speaker.
It is not possible to produce such a spatial variation with only low frequency signals. If both speakers instead produced a low frequency signal with a different phase each, the sum would have a phase which varies in space with a wavelength corresponding to that frequency. There would also be a sinusoidal spatial modulation resulting in places where the amplitude goes to zero (this doesn't happen in practice because of reflections in the room and the finite size of the source).
So the spatial variation of the sound will be affected by higher frequency information. Headphones are not affected, and can equally well be fed 22 kHz signals, but technologies like Dolby Headphone would theoretically make it equivalent to speakers. The variation of the phase in space is not reconstructed correctly by stereo speakers, or any number of speakers for that matter, except for at a single listening position if set up correctly, so it is not clear to me that the higher frequencies would improve the realism or the perception of space in music.
If you follow that link and scroll down through the comments, there is a very helpful link to a relevant article.
Used to be my 78's sounded perfectly good on a turntable and radio I found the pieces of in the basement. Then I got a nice Shure cartridge and Dual 1019 turntable and reasonably new amplifier, and it's almost impossible to get a decent reproduction. No one has developed a digital replacement for whatever that old stuff did to cover up all the noise and distortion. Just to test, go get the Charley Patton anthology "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues" and I dare you to make that sound as good as it does on an old Victrola (if you could get copies of the originals, I should say). A less extreme example is my old copy of Paul Whiteman's 1927 recording of "Rhapsody In Blue." It sounds horrible on the new stuff. Sounded great on the aforementioned basement pieces.
If I'm familiar with the song, then it typically takes a bitrate of 320Kbps or higher before I cannot hear a notable difference. However, the often-ignored problem with lossy file formats is what happens when you attempt to edit the audio you've licensed/purchased. For example, say you want to re-encode a lower bitrate version of a song for a mobile device, or maybe adjust the volume, or trim a song down in length for personal listening preferences. (I do this quite often, actually.) Trying to re-compress lossy source material again after editing just makes things sound far worse. This remains another reason I try to get lossless audio files whenever possible.
if ($question !~ m/bb|[^b]{2}/i) { die(); }
Music Lover - Someone who loves music
Audiophile - Someone who loves his stereo equipment
May be we can add "music Formats and Containers" to that definition.
I'd rather hear Yoko Ono with scratches and pops in 64k than Dave Grohl in FLAC.
The physics of human hearing is extremely clear
Then it should be easy to experimentally verify your predictions. Produce an ABX, and you'll have a point. Show me the data, and I'll change my mind.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The difference can be heard. All you need to do is to produce and mix your own music at 24bit/48khz (real instruments) and then at the end of the session compress it to any level mp3. The mp3 sound field is full of holes, phase distortions and other typical artefacts. In any case the lossless formats are more archivable.
Why 16/44.1 isn't worth it.
Modern gear (*) can do EQ to fix irregularities in the room. Basically you measure the impulse response in several listening points in the room, and then the system builds an equalizer to fix any unwanted colourings caused by standing nodes and such. The system can build a flat response, or to color it slightly according to some ideal.
This kind of system makes shit speakers sound relatively good and great speakers sound absolutely sublime.
Now, when you input 16 bits, your filtered signal will end up having more inaccuracies (noise) when you also output at 16 bits vs. inputting 24 bits, calculating the EQ and then playing out 16 bits with a shaped dither.
So this is one application where 24 bits is really a must.
It makes sense to possess master-level data. This avoids the need to buy the same data again in the future, since you can do any format conversions yourself.
(*) Modern gear here means a fully digital PCM signal path up to a high-quality amplifier which has a high-quality DAC, the amplifier connects to high-quality speakers using good quality cables. Furthermore the amplifier must feed in somewhat more power than the speakers can take, to make sure the speakers can push out sudden dynamics without effort.
I wonder if Darwin had this when people said "Survival of the fittest" to him.
Nyquist is about minimum requirement to reproduce the single frequency sine wave.
Nothing about phase or volume there.
A flute on high C will sound different from a piccolo on it. Pianissimo for the same instrument and note will sound different from fortissimo.
Nyquist and volume means you have zero knowledge about the volume of the signal, you can guess.
How did you set up your ABX, what was your success rate at distinguishing lossless from lossy, and what statistical test did you use to demonstrate that your success rate was significantly better than chance?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Am I really supposed to listen to the expert opinion of someone that doesn't know iTunes has always sold AAC files presently 256kb.
Go ahead and record in high quality, but for listening CD-quality is fine.
I can hear the difference with e.g. classical piano tracks when comparing in 16/44.1 vs. 24/96. The latter sounds more realistic and "open", it's hard to explain but every time the track is a bit more "closed", dark or dull it's 16/44.1. I've not done proper ABX though.
BTW my speakers can play up to 50 kHz (-6 dB) and my amp has a good DAC so that might be why the "airiness" is present.
As others have said, there are valid reasons to record/mix in high def. But you should be able to downsample the final result to CD-quality with no audible loss in quality.
I rip CDs to flac, because I don't want to keep worrying if I could have made a better rip.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The real world doesn't naturally produce odd harmonics. Therefore your ears are built to hear and process even harmonics.
You can re-create the same signal with double the frequency (again, this is why Nyquist limit is a load of shite) but that increases the power required by 4-8 -fold.
It is why your tube amp will be loud at 7W per channel but your digital amp will be straining to reach the same apparent loudness at 50W.
Even harmonics are "harmonious" to our auditory system.
It doesn't matter whether the difference between sample A and sample B is real or perceived, because when I'm actually listening to music, that is 100% perception, and I *do* know (or think I know) a priori which sample I'm listening to.
The scientific approach is great (mandatory, really) when you're doing science. I will go beyond saying that it doesn't actually help much at all with determining what you will enjoy. I assert that more often than not it actively *decreases* your enjoyment of the experience itself.
Of course, one can certainly enjoy understanding and appreciating the science behind it, leading to more enjoyment overall... I'm speaking purely of the perceptual portion of the experience.
This is my position, and I have recorded a lot of 24/96 audio and know how good it sounds compared to other digital versions. I am not a fan of the RIAA or the mainstream music business machine, but I do support artists' rights.
If I am actually buying a license to listen to an audio track and not the track itself, the way the RIAA wants it, then I want the highest possible quality digital version of that track. I feel I am entitled to access to it because my money is not only going to pay for the license to the track it pays for that original recording. If the original was analog, then a different license would need to be obtained for a physical copy of that. One thing I do not have a disagreement with is the separation of digital and analog rights. I do believe (from some experience) that high-end studio analog equipment is better than even the current high-end digital systems (24/192).
Basically, if I can buy an AIFF of a file I will! If I could get a 24/96 or better version of a song I would feel better about plunking the money I now do for digital music. It requires more effort to make the crappier versions anyway, so why? Let the masses do it themselves to put on their music players. Plus huge hard drives will drop in price! Win-win really. Hehe
Find the data for yourself. I don't take orders. There's tons of research out there, and it's not hard to find, and always getting easier.
You're the one who started off by making baseless bald-faced assertions. I'll leave the onus with you.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
the MP3s being sold on iTunes
iTunes sells AACs (Advanced Audio Codec), not MP3s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aac
AAC is generally of higher quality than MP3 at the same bitrate.
You need to go deeper.
That's what she said!
Then download your favourite album in mp3 format, and in FLAC format; there is big difference, but which depends heavily on the mp3 bitrate.
Since a FLAC album is typically between 200-500mb, and space/bandwidth is cheap, why would you want lossy formats anyway?
Even with a good DAC/headphones, get a DAC where you can change the opamps inside it; you would be amazed at how different opamps completely change the character of what you're listening to, and it is fun experimenting with them (so long as you don't get knock-off opamps that fry your DAC...).
It depends on your PLAYBACK device. The end.
Aaaaaannnd evilviper loses the argument. Better luck next time. Perhaps put some effort into it, mmkay?
settling for a Volkswagen instead of a Ferrari.
Have you looked at a Volkswagen recently? They are actually quite high-end cars, and vastly, immeasurably, more practical than a Ferrari.
By this analogy, a Ferrari is the oxygen-free amorphous copper $500/metre speaker cable of the auto world.
Music lovers love to listen to music. Audiophiles on the other hand would rather listen to their equipment.
Having weighed in with that bombshell, I've got a fairly decent sound system (Rotel preamp/processor, Rotel power amp, VAF speakers) and I can't hear the difference between MP3 V0 (VBR at around 220kbs) 256kbs AAC (my preferred format, simply because it's what I get from iTunes) and redbook CD audio.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
In the DJ world vinyl is prefered because it's much easier to manipulate, not for sound.
That's why an almost defacto standard is dual SL-1200 turntables for mixing vinyl.
Besides, people listening to that kind of music don't really care about *quality*
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
That's what she said.
I think I have a problem after your suggestion. The top on my desk won't stop spinning. Clearing my history has not helped.
If that was an actual request for data, my answer is no. But then I only migrated from cassette to CD because I was tired of having to turn the tape over.
You know, considering that rock music is sort of based on the idea that a live performance on suboptimal equipment setups (guitar going into an overdirven poweramps driving a microphone going though a floor box pre-amp/effect pedal going into a hastily set up PA mix/amp setup using all road-ready gear) full of electronic noise, hum, tube overdrive effects being part of the sound, mic clipping effects, feedback; it's always been about getting a decent "sound" out and getting the point (chords, beat, and lyrics) across, so the mastering process is not nearly important as a jam session setup that gets the band to get a decent take in that sounds like it did in that club where they had that "great energy"...
Point is they're not obsessing about picking apart the instruments and laying them down with lots of headroom and tons of retakes and splicing it all together. It just needs to sound good during the recording takes and at the mixing desk to an ear that's been blown-out from years of touring.
Then the mastering engineer has got to make that sound decent over radio play, and in car stereos competing with road noise. So compress the hell out of that, reduce the relative quietness of softer sections, etc.
And that's mostly why we're in the state we're in the pop/rock loudness wars.
Although there's no excuse for a mastering engineer to re-release a rock album and completely destroy it (Telephantasm, I'm looking at you)
All you need is entry-level prosumer monitors, like KRK's RP6 G2. The difference in staging and bandwidth is obvious, even if - like me - you're over 40.
You just have to be listening while sitting motionless in an isolated room with nothing else to produce background noise.
Sounds a lot like a coffin to me, though, and I prefer to mix my music with the rest of my life. I won't hear whatever loss there might be in an MP3 because I'll be making too much noise dancing.
I'm willing to bet anyone can hear the difference between lossy and lossless once you've edited and saved both over 100 times ;-) . If you just save a file once, it doesn't matter, because you typically can't hear a huge difference. If you're editing/remixing/recoding or doing anything creative the little losses start to stack up over time and become big losses. That's where lossless comes in.
The same is true for using lossless versus lossy image formats when photo-editing. Intermediate files should (once again) be lossless, because in those situations, the losses *do* stack.
After nearly 20 years of life in data centers, NOCs, etc with the constant droning of fans in my ears, I couldn't tell the difference at all. Heck my ears are already ringing just thinking about it.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
There are some really strange cases of the Placebo effect, for example getting subjects to use Placebo opiates for pain relief for a week or more and then giving them an opiate inhibitor without telling them, and having it turn out to inhibit uptake of the fake opiates. There's some old research that can't be replicated now because of modern ethical guidelines (Which raises the question, is it still science if it becomes irreproducable, not because of a technical limitation but because of increased moral standards?). After reading up on some of these oddities, I've come to the opinion Science does not understand the general Placebo effect nearly as well as individual researchers think they understand how it applies to their special cases. It's fair to say double-blind studies have proven many times that people are claming auditory abilities they simply don't posess, but that really doesn't necessarily mean we can jump from that point to conclude there's some aspect of the Placebo effect involved.
Who is John Cabal?
I was in college before CDs came out, so the audiophile types had vinyl, fancy-for-the-time turntables, high-quality cartridges and needles, etc. One of my housemates liked classical music, and said that once he had a medium-quality stereo system, it didn't make sense to spend more money upgrading the audio quality - it was a lot more important to get records from better orchestras with better conductors. His system was good enough that he could pretty much hear what they were playing, and if you were listening to Beethoven you wanted the Berlin Philharmonic, not the 101 Strings, and you probably had opinions about whether you wanted Furtwangler or von Karajan conducting, and getting rid of that next-to-last bit of distortion wasn't going to fix a lousy recording.
I mostly listen to music in my car. A decent MP3 is close enough to CD quality when played over road noise, and it doesn't skip when you go over bumps.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Test 320kps with Apple's AAC.
If you can tell the difference, submit yourself to Hydrogen Audio's blind testing because nobody else can.
Some people think a 320kbps mp3 is perfect, but its not.
Yes, sometimes it is possible to achieve transparency with mp3, but not with complex samples, especially those involving percussion in high frequencies. It is a format limitation, and can not be fixed without abandoning mp3.
Other lossy formats such as vorbis, are not limited in this regard; so if a passage (sample) is too complex, it can simply bump the bitrate as much as it needs until transparency is achieved. Of course, this needs extensive encoder tuning, but the format is no longer a limiting factor.
Unfortunately with mp3 you can't put frames above 320kbps, and the samples that fail, will fail and 320kbps cbr can't help you, so if you use mp3 you might as well use a more cost effective vbr choice such as lame -V2; otherwise you are simply wasting space and not achieving transparency anyway.
Furthermore, different lossy formats have different properties, and some can actually achieve transparency, given enough tuning a lots of abx testing and data gathering.
While lossless might be wasting some space compared to a perfectly tuned lossy, it allows you to have a safe, clean source to test all those existing and emerging formats to begin with. Think of it as archival quality; from which you can then lossy compress in whatever you need.
Also you should not transcode something already lossy compressed into another lossy format, every time you do this you introduce artifacts and reduce quality.
Those deeply interested in the subject should visit: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/ and read the many years of quality discussion archived there.
Pychoacoustics (used to tune lossy encoders) introduce another factor. Aside from different people having different hearing abilities; you are supposed to equalize your listening environment for a "flat" response. People not only rarely ever do this, they bump the settings to make it sound how "they like"; ie lots of bass or treble getting away from the average perceptual "flat" eq curve; which is what lossy encoders strive to keep; resulting in poor perception. Raw/lossless has more data able to help this real time audio modification. Ie, a lossy encoder discarded something you would have normally never listened to, but with your misuse of eq, you were expecting to hear.
Note: its not actually flat, but "Equal loudness contour" which is an average of how humans actually perceive tones.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
With one song or album on it that has all the quality of the master.
My understanding is that 256 or 360kbps AAC is, for all intents and purposes, highly accurate.
Something that the discussions don't really cover are "lossless" formats like DTS and Dolby Digital HD. These formats tend to use about 6-1000 kbps, yet don't incorporate the phase-changes that MP3 and AAC do. From what I understand, the resulting sound is more accurate than merely decimating 24bit to 16bit.
No, I will not work for your startup
Scroll down a bit. I think someone in that linked discussion posted a link to another long discussion among very qualified individuals.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
40 years of exposure to loud music has probably damaged their hearing enough that they really don't know what they are hearing.
Hearing damage presents as a loss of range for human hearing, not that the ear suddenly starts scrambling what it can hear. Maybe they can't hear anything about 13kHz. Doesn't matter. That has no bearing on what they thing for sound below the 13kHz range.
The difference here is they are musicians. They have spent much of their lives dedicating themselves to perfecting their sound. Tweaking things subtle picking different instruments or slightly different strings to get the exact sound they want. Chances are you don't even know they are playing different guitars in different tracks. They do.
My mother is a classic example. She can't tell if my guitar hasn't been tuned (I can) but she can hear me if I fart in the back yard so clearly her hearing is just fine. I'll take Dave Grohl and Neil Young's opinion any day over anyone I see wearing a set of Dr Dre Beats heaphones, or anyone wearing white ear buds.
For the tone deaf, don't listen for it in the high end. Listen for in the kick drum. If you go back and forth between ANY lossy comp and a CD, for example it will sound like the CD drops an extra octave. Also in the echo. Half the echo is gone on lossy files. Very noticeable.
I don't think these guys understand how wavelets or the mp3 algorithm work. Therefore, they have no idea how much "data" of the original the mp3 file contains. If you have a picture of a red background and I save one red pixel and one instruction to repeat over the canvas, I only store like 0.1% of your data, but I can reconstruct the original image with 100% veracity, so really I'm storing 100% of the data, just using 0.1% of the space.
Does anyone else think these musicians simply don't understand the difference between the content of their music and the digital space required to store it? Are they always going to favor the largest file sizes, or what?
A 2 TB hard drive costs $100 and will store 3000 CDs uncompressed. If you're archiving, you don't want to lose the ability to have good quality as your playback equipment changes.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
As I said the setup is highly subjective and the differences are certain when you are very intimate with the source material. The degradation in the quality and sound field can be heard.
Mp3 for example is anyway and ancient format created for the bandwidth and storage limits of the time. Suddenly back then the linear progression in the quality of mass produced consumer sound went backwards (vinyl - c-cassette - cd - mp3). Now it seems quality is coming back to at least where it was left.
Are you suggesting some people can't?
Lossless sounds better and analog/vinyl better still on good equipment.
I was working at Brookhaven with a fancy-pants laser-driven time-of-flight mass spectrometer. We needed (ideally sub-)nanosecond resolution with as close to zero variability as possible (at that point you need to account for things like cable length to the cm and "refraction" across connectors). The kind of technical minutiae that gives audiophiles hard-ons and makes One Billion Dollars for the cable companies.
We used...high-quality oxygen-free copper cables with gold-plated BNC connectors. Certainly not the $5.99 bargain bin from Staples, but we were paying ~65 for a one-meter stretch. It's not like I was dumb enough to fall for Monster's schtick before that, but it made the point in a way I don't think anything else quite ever could.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Sennheiser HD280 Pros. No fancy bells and whistles, no big-name musicians attaching their names, and especially a dead-flat frequency curve so you get out of them exactly what you put into them - they don't have some "inherent warmth" but if you play with your EQ you can make them sound however you damn well please. There's a reason they're in just about every recording studio on Earth.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
iTunes doesn't sell MP3 they sell AAC.
but he knows jack about compression
You can loose a lot even in high bitrate compressed audio, there are even detractors for uncompressed PCM (WAV, AIFF, CD). The device used to produce the analog audio is the next hurdle. Even the cleanest best uncompressed format played back through an ipad headphone jack is going to sound exactly like crap because the hardware is crap. I travel a lot a carry a huge library of music and sound clips, and space is an issue so most of the files are high bitrate MP3 or highest quality VBR MP3. When I play this back from my computer through a professional interface at 24bit/48kHz, which is far better than what the file format is capable of, It is amazing how much better it sounds than someones IPhone or IPad, or the headphone jacks on computers. The outputs of these portable devices are optimized for the Impedance range of headphones, usually a couple of hundred Ohms, while line level inputs are 1k to 10k Ohms. This by itself destroys the usefulness of headphone jacks to patch into a sound system. Obviously the next hurdle is the sound system, a good studio amp from the vinyl era probably won't even produce the highs and lows we are used to today. Cheap mixers can destroy the quality of the sound, impedance and capacitance in long wire runs can dramatically alter the sonic quality, and then there are the speakers. Every speaker made, even the best, are a series of compromises layered on top of each other, each one interfering with all of the others.
The truth is, we are lucky it works at all, and if you are happy with whatever sound you are listening to, then, enjoy. We typically like the sound of the formats that were used to reproduce the music that we most enjoyed, regardless of the quality of that system. Today's youth are tending to prefer the sound of MP3's, not because they like the quality, but because they like the artifacting that mp3's generate. http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html , its a highly subjective area, and if you don't know what uncompressed undistorted sound sounds like, then you will not likely notice the difference, most likely because the system you have chosen to reproduce it, can't. I suggest if you want to hear amazing, uncompressed, uncompromised sound, go listen to an acoustic set (unamplified) of some music that you enjoy, get close enough to the instruments to hear the direct sound in a well tuned acoustic space, and you will begin to realize that everything ever recorded is basically a lie or an approximation and a series of compromises.
I almost did -- I actually went to look at it, I figured it went to an older, archived discussion.
Speaking of which, have you heard about TvTrope's forray into producing a TV/Podcast series? http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/JustForFun/AvatarAndTheAirbendingFellowshipOfVampireSlayers
It's actually several years old now, with spin-off "books" and "comics" (web-based, of course)
You can be trained to hear the lossy compression artifacts. But trust me, you don't want to be. Once you can hear them, you can't unhear them.
But there are qualifiers, some of which others have mentioned. - Your playback equipment has to have sufficient resolution to be able to reproduce the differences. On my high-end Quad ESL / Quad II system, it's not all that hard to hear differences between even FLAC and WAV, all things equal. But over my car system, the only difference I can hear between a 128Kbps MP3 and uncompressed CD audio is the MP3's digital clipping on overmodulated peaks (mostly percussion hits). - You have to understand what you'd be listening for, and that is sometimes a function of the type of compression. Even lossless FLAC can compromise audio in subtle ways, but most people would not be able to put into words differences that they hear in parameters like soundstage or ambient detail. MP3 is easier because low bitrate MP3 produces pretty gross distortion that's hard to miss and you can train yourself to hear the difference by comparing the same pice of music ripped at a range of bit rates, starting as low as you can. Take ten minutes to give your ears a chance to hear what's going on and you'll never ask another question like the one that started this discussion - Remember that most people who have opinions on this topic are full of merde. Maybe me too, but I've tried to many years to confirm that I'm not merely believing my own BS (degree in physics, a life time of audio engineering readings, a lot of listening to high-end sources, 10+ years writing audio reviews for two mainstream print magazines, and hundreds of hours of benchmarking audio gear & comparing measurement results to what I hear). People like Neal Young, OTOH, I believe, generally overestimate their own competence in this field. For example, wtf does he mean by "15%"? Although I'm not a big fan of the commercial CD (and that's an understatement), I can play you CDs on entrepreneurial music-lover lables like Chandos & dmp that make any analog Neil Young release sound muddy and artificial. And don't start me on Dr. friggin' Dre and his devil-spawn headphones. So before you believe what anybody tells you -- including me -- about audio formats, analog v. digital, tube v. solid state, vinyl v. CD, just take the time to investigate yourself. If you can't hear the difference, it doesn't matter. If you want to be able to better hear the differences, take the time to investigate yourself. - And maybe the most important point: There's an increasingly popular impression today that concerns about audio quality is elitist technobabble motivated by cultish geeks with too much money. Nothing could be further from the truth. The bottom line for any audiophile I know has always been the music. A great sound system with well-recorded source material allows great music to shine. Even the most compelling source material can be uninvolving, or even fatiguing, when played over crappy headphones or recorded with too much bass and compression. If you don't have the experience or vocabulary to describe the inaccuracies you hear in reproduced music, you would likely assume that the music itself is not so good. It's no coincidence that general complaints about how "artists are simply not producing new music as good as what we used to hear" begain to gain traction at about the time that the industry started seriously screwing around with commercial recordings. But even if you don't like classical music, listen to one of the superb 1960s Living Stereo orchestral recordings ($10 all over eBay) on a good set of headphones and you may find yourself amazed by how lifelike the experience is.
maybe you have seen those pictures that can look either like ... or ...
example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Duck-Rabbit_illusion.jpg
my question can this also "happen" to ears ..errr... listening?
And I can understand why it could - in theory - matter for speaker cables. I mean, there's analog signal running through so if our ears had the resolution - and the speakers the capability to reproduce it - I'm sure it all could make a difference. Not at $50k, but still. Not mentioning our ears don't have the resolution. But power cords? Really?
Some people have too much money.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
It's not just what you hear, and what you consciously notice, it's what you DON'T hear and don't consciously notice. Subharmonics and Ultra Harmonics, above and below the range of human hearing, and the complex harmonics that are left out [and of course the smooth analog wave, as opposed to the stacked cubes of of digital with varying degrees of density]. I'm no expert [very far from], but from the little I know about, this is part of the subject of psycho-acoustics.... and yes, while you may not be able to CONSCIOUSLY tell the difference, your nervous system certainly can, and it is DEFINITELY not the same experience. You do not experience music solely with your frontal-lobes and language centres. I love dig. for it's convenience, but many acoustic worlds and experiences are lost.
I'm a trained mixer with many thousands of hours of listening experience. Here's my record of telling apart 320 kbps MP3 files from the original CD audio, which is what losslessly compressed audio is as well :
Once, in a specific enviornment.
The material was high dynamic range mix of orchestral and eletronic music. Well mastered IMHO and pleasant to listen to over longer periods of time. I listened to it in an accoustically well-treated room that housed the working gear of a composer and music mixer. The speaker system was a set of professional monitoring speakers, namely two Dynaudio BM15A full range speakers. These are the kinds of speakers the folks use to make the material all you audiophiles listen to.
I didn't expect to be able to tell a difference but I did. It wasn't very subtle but in this excellent listening environment with an excellent reproduction system, it could be heard by trained ears. I seriously doubt I could say the same for material with the dynamic range of a sine wave, as is the case so often today.
For most material, I'd only trust a proper ABX test, but I do not see the point in doing so. It's just one batch of material I listened to and it's pointless to argue when so much music is beyond screwed in terms of distortion and dynamic range.
Also, it's a fact that most rooms people listen to music in are anything from ok to bathroom-terrible. The accoustics are by far the biggest influence you'll ever encounter in a listening environment. Even in a good environment or with very good headphones does it take training to even detect those differences when comparing the original audio to a 320 kbps MP3 encode of it.
Really, there's nothing to gain from this but "I feel better using Flac".
I don't want to open a can of worms to refute the mysticism you're laying on here, but I will point out that you can't hear a "stacked cube" digital waveform. It has to be converted to analog by a DAC and transmitted through analog wires, analog magnets, analog speaker cones, analog air molecules and your analog eardrums before you can perceive it. All sound is ultimately analog, though the recorded signals are not.
That's what she said.
You need to go deeper.
That's what she said.
I have a decent sound system in my car and if the bitrate on a lossy compression is high enough, I can't tell the difference. I'd say 192 KBps and above and I'm good. Streaming Pandora on the same audio system is very "tinny" and I can definitely tell the difference. I still think that a high quality digital system is better than vinyl, even though I might be considered the audiophile's version of the antichrist for saying that. Our ears just aren't as good as we think they are, especially when we get older. Digital audio has the potential to sound exactly the same from one playback to the next, whereas vinyl doesn't.
I've got the same problem with CRT televisions, less so with monitors. Because of the annoying high-pitched tone coming from them I'm glad they're going the way of the dodo.
I did do a test of which I don't know whether it counts as double blind, with a track in wav and 44.1/16, 48/24, 96/24, and 192/24 flac formats (I think from Linn records as testcase). All from the same high quality master, I played them a number of times in random order, and then checked whether I recognised them correctly. I found that 96/24 was noticably better than the lower rates, but I could not discern any difference between 96/24 and 192/24.
That said, I did do a hearing test a few years ago, which surprisingly told me my hearing was very good for my age (then low thirties). I did suffer from a sudden prolonged bout of tinnitus about seven years ago, and have repeatedly had short episodes of tinnitus after attending metal concerts (before this happened).
I'll give kudos to HDtracks for offering a service I would actually pay for, but I find their 192kHz/24bit service a bit idiotic and the people who buy from it are gullible.
When you purchase an HDtracks file, it is the same quality as a store-purchased CD.
-https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php?file=staticpage&pagename=faq#1
So what you're saying is that somehow I get more fidelity when a 44.1kHz/16bit digital audio source is upconverted to 192kHz/24bit? Perhaps they should give more detail on where their actual music is sourced from. Saying how the artist originally mastered their work is just snake-oil unless they guarantee that was the source used to derive the hidef copy they are selling.
At higher bit rates I'm not bothered by lossy compression. I can be bothered by the results at lower bit rates and if I am aware how the track is supposed to sound.
Back in early 2000, I ripped much of my earlier collection using 224 kbps ABR. I was a big Maximum PC reader, and one of their multimedia issues recommended using VBR for MP3 encoding. Not understanding too much about encoding, I used ABR for compatibility, and "stereo" as I found "joint stereo" butchered cassette rips. I played these tracks mostly through my PC & laptop so I didn't notice any issues. I used CD's on my main system anyways and never used headphones.
When I purchased a Grado headset for a new (and first) iPod, I found differences in many of my CD rips. This bothered me to no end. For example, Thievery Corporation albums had distorted flaws in echo decay, and highs were harsh. Strings in some classical music seemed butchered while piano had detectable warbliness. High hats seemed wrong in my rock recordings. Choral music vocals sounded harsh. Similar experience when iTunes finally came to Canada, I bought a couple of Iggy Pop tracks. They were aac's encoded at 128kbps. The tracks were clean but the guitars and cymbals were so harsh, I had to stop listening after only a short while. Once I bought the "New Values" album on CD, I didn't experience the fatigue with the same tracks.
Most of the issues mentioned above dropped with properly set command line in Lame with significantly higher bit rates. I do notice a difference. Once I set up a media server all the old rips had to go. I re-ripped my collection. I notice very minor differences with Lame V0 tracks, and 320 kbps CBR, compared to CD's but they don't prevent me from enjoying the music. If I buy tracks from eMusic, ignorance to the original recording is bliss. At their low prices and with tracks ripped mostly with Lame V0 to V2, I can also accept the cost/quality trade off.
I have a couple of DVD-A and SACD discs. Aside from a slightly better sound stage, I would probably fail an A/B comparison test. Either my 40 year old hearing or my equipment would fail me. If I'm being charged iTunes prices, I would still opt for the CD or FLAC equivalent for my music, and hope sound engineers trend back to recording quality.
I can definately hear the difference. It just depends what are you listeing to it on. Most flac and mp3 listeners are listeing their stuff on computers with integrated sound cards and cheap computer speakers. This means the data gets compressed and decompressed several times by OS and sound card and so on.
One step you can take is to use WASAPI or ASIO drivers that take control of the soundcard and blasts the data right the sound card without the unnescessary tasks of compressing and decompressing and decompressing to a suitable format. If its not a cheap sound card and the speakers are allright you can definately hear the difference.
As I said the setup is highly subjective
In other words, it's not real.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There is tons of research out there, and no one has been able to distinguish LAME -V0 from PCM in blind studies. You're the one who is claiming it's possible. Produce the data.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There is a long discussion among very qualified individuals on this subject. You can read it here
Hmm, I'm worried that the HTTP compression used for that discussion may have resulted in the diminished quality that I can see. Can you please provide a copy of it on pen and paper for me so that I can read it in the way the authors originally intended?
I personally can't tell the difference between V0 mp3 and FLAC. But I'll still spend the download time and storage space on FLAC just because it gives me a warm feeling to know that I'm getting all the bits. An irrational pleasure is still a pleasure.
Episode 2 has a fantastic demonstration of why the signal peaks don't have to "line up" with sample times, and why nothing falls "in between" samples, starting at about 20 minutes in. When he shifts the phase of the square wave and you see the lollipop graph of the samples shifting with it, plus the exact reproduction of the original band-limited waveform on the output oscilloscope, that settles the debate right there!