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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."
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.
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.
... 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.
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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.
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We recently discovered that human hearing beats the linear response assumptions used in lossy codecs. So yes, their criticisms are scientifically founded.
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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"
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.
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.
We still like XKCD around here, right?
This signature is false.
The difference is the ability to transcode to different bitrates and formats without losing anything from the original source.
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.
Mine goes to fiveier.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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.
it doesn't matter how lossy or lossless the file is if you're listening with shitty white earbuds.
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
Or not using Monster Cable
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
This is the real point: People are so used to listening to music with no dynamic range, on ear buds, in crappy acoustic environments that they wouldn't know where to start listening for a difference.
No sig today...
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
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'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.
This is the real point: People are so used to listening to music with no dynamic range, on ear buds, in crappy acoustic environments that they wouldn't know where to start listening for a difference.
Nor can they afford any better so while they are listening to a lesser quality, they couldn't begin to purchase equipment to give them what these artists say they are missing.
Good point. Sadly, my $3k hearing aids don't seem to help either.
Bitrate doesn't matter much if your ears are the lossy part.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
Look, you want your 0's and 1's to look like stupid Comic Sans 0's and 1's or like high quality, stylish Zapfino 0's and 1's?
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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
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You need to go deeper.
I think the real point is that there are known limits to human hearing and many audiophiles fantasize about their hearing being superhuman. It just ain't so. Dynamic range compression is one thing, but perceptual compression, sample rate, and bit depth are a different matter. No audiophile has ever heard the difference between FLAC and 320Kbps mp3 audio in an ABX test at a statistical rate that is better than guessing.
Any time this argument starts, I refer people to this well written article that lays out the limits of human hearing compared to the specifications of recording formats...
"I think the real point is that there are known limits to human hearing and many audiophiles fantasize about their hearing being superhuman"
No. The difference between a live acoustic instrument or human voice and a recording is immediately obvious, even to people with significant hearing damage. Waving paper cones around in boxes is not a great way to reproduce sound, it's just all we have with today's technology.
Audiophiles are not trying to get the last few percent of reproduction quality, they are trying to get some improvement on the terrible quality we have today.
I say that as a studio engineer with 30 years experience. I do my best, but we are still in the very early days of recording and reproducing sound. Matters have not improved for so long that many people have forgotten how much of a compromise audio reproduction currently is.
As ever, the hard part is the transducers. Wide bandwidth storage is practical now, but microphones and speakers generate huge amounts of distortion, and have bizarre phase responses and radiation patterns.