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."

Comments

Depends on the source

[Stentapp]

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.

Re:Depends on the source

[Hatta]

44.1hkz 16bit audio is completely transparent to the human ear. No one has ever been able to detect when a 16bit DAC ADC pair has been placed in a 24/96 audio path.

Your preference for 24/96 audio as a listener is entirely due to the placebo effect. There are good reasons to master audio in high res, but for listening 16 bit 44.1khz audio is as good as anything.

Re:Depends on the source

[QRDeNameland]

kinda like 640K?

Unless you want to argue that human hearing is improving similarly to Moore's law, then no.

Re:Depends on the source

[nabsltd]

The closest I can get to describing it is this and sorry if you aren't a musician but they'll know of which I speak...you know how you have that great old tube amp for the guitar and it has that nice warm fat feel to it? Notice how the same amp when modeled digitally doesn't doesn't quite have the warmth?

The reason for this is that it's hard to capture distortion accurately.

That "warm sound" is a result of the inacurracies of the tube amp. You may like it better (and that's just fine), but it is does not accurately reproduce the original signal. For me, it's really no different than the current "loudness war" where re-mastered releases are much louder. Many of today's listeners like that sound beter, but it isn't accurate.

One word: YES.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 hear a slight difference

[jgtg32a]

I can't tell which one is better though.

No

[Hatta]

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.

I usually can, but I rarely care.

[Clueless Moron]

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.

It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It doesn't matter

[tuffy]

And you never have to re-rip physical discs. 128kb/s CBR MP3 used to be the standard. Then 192 VBR. Then AAC. And so on and so forth. So by keeping a lossless archive, one will always be able to transcode to the latest-and-greatest lossy codec without a lot of hassle.

Re:44.1khz ought to be enough for anyone...

[Hatta]

Unless you have people that can ABX the difference, no their criticisms are not scientifically founded. An actual blind test beats any theoretical reasoning any day.

Re:No

[rudy_wayne]

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.