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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."
You are 100% correct, I have sat in a $100k studio with $5k reference monitors and heard my tracks played back at both 192k and at 44.1k and honestly? Couldn't tell the difference, i really couldn't. And while my midrange hearing may not be the greatest I'm picky as hell when it comes to low end and that is usually the first thing that goes when you compress but standard 44.1k? Couldn't tell the difference which if there was gonna be a difference i would have heard it on that system, it was top notch. I'm sure many here can bring citations showing double blind tests which i have no doubt show its all placebo, because if I can't hear it in a nice studio with the actual live instrument right beside it i doubt seriously anybody is gonna hear a difference with home gear, even high end home gear.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It could be dependent on the gear that playback occurs on and the quality of the listener's ears. In watching Stan Lee's new show about "superhumans" it becomes clear that some people have, by training or genetics, better reflexes then the bulk of humanity. On my home gear I can't tell the difference above 160Kbs, but I'm more then willing to believe that some people can, either because they have much better gear to listen to, and/or they have superior hearing.
Well to be really REALLY fair I have noticed it also matter if the original music was recorded in analog or digital, as I've taken some tracks we've cut in a classic studio with the analog 8-track and its really fricking hard to get those to sound really..."right" for want of a better term as its really hard to describe, when it is compared to digital.
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? Its kinda...artificial sounding? That was the trouble we had, the tapes sounded nice and warm but trying to get that to switch over to digital was fucking hard, frankly it was easier to just cut the tracks again in a digital studio than it was to get the analog tapes to really convert well.
Sorry if I'm not describing it correctly but music is one of those things where my terminology often fails me, its so hard to describe feelings and emotions and music for me is an emotional expression so I end up having to try to describe how I felt as I listened or played and my vocabulary fails me, the analog was a little fuzzy but it was warm and lived in feeling while trying to convert that to digital something was lost in translation, no other way I know how to say it. the same tracks recorded natively in digital sounded great, analog sounded great, but putting the two together was just something we never could get to work.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
OT, as a choral performer:
Classical music has a stupid wide dynamic range, more than any other genre I know of, and (in particular) soprano sections have a nasty talent for pegging meters that were supposed to be set with plenty of headroom.