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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.
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.
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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.
The difference is the ability to transcode to different bitrates and formats without losing anything from the original source.
Mine goes to fiveier.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
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's like asking "can you win a race against a Toyoda?" where do you even start with that....?
Since Akio Toyoda is 30 years older than me, I'm pretty sure I could beat him in a race.
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...
I listen in the truck with a blown exhaust and whilst getting high on the fumes, lossy or lossless? I have trouble noticing if the car radio is even turned on.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
You jerk! I clicked on that link!
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...