Can YOU tell the difference in quality?

Yaayuh! · 3 Jun 2015 at 09:00

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

Interesting, give it a go.

Paul11 · 3 Jun 2015 at 09:14

interesting...

you have to listen very hard and over again quite a few times to tell the difference, but i can tell (or i was just very lucky)

GinG · 3 Jun 2015 at 09:18

2/6 times

However on crappy mobile broadband so the sounds were stuttering and just got annoyed lol

FerretBoy · 3 Jun 2015 at 09:42

Has it been confirmed that the only difference is the fact that some are compressed. Also exactly what compression is used?

branddaly · 3 Jun 2015 at 10:20

1/6, always picked the 310kb mp3. That was through a pair of wireless headphones, which for some reason today have interference.
Mp3 has improved immensely since the 90's. I remember the first mp3 song I heard (Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield), it was very swirly.

Zefan · 3 Jun 2015 at 10:37

3/6 aint bad

RoyMi6 · 3 Jun 2015 at 11:02

1/6 - but that was pure luck that I got one.

No difference to me for any of the tracks really.

Randomface74 · 3 Jun 2015 at 11:07

1/6 - I could tell a difference, but which sounded 'best' to me was usually not the uncompressed version.

Spacedeck · 3 Jun 2015 at 11:17

I got 3/6 but I had the potential to get 4 (Katy Perry track, could hear it, just wasn't night and day like the others)

For me, Suzanne Vega - Toms Diner and Murray Perahia & The English Chamber Orchestra was the difference between night and day.

I did this on my Note 4 using my Westone W30 earphones.

JoeF1 · 3 Jun 2015 at 11:32

2/6 Could tell the difference with the Toms Diner one especially.

Not worth the extra money though.

Vinno · 3 Jun 2015 at 12:40

I can't tell in the slightest. They sound exactly the same to me. I guessed a couple right but it doesn't really count

Jano · 3 Jun 2015 at 13:25

4/6, Heir audio 5.0's into a dragonfly dac plugged into my laptop, pure guesswork though and there really wasn't much difference between the 320 and uncompresseds to be honest, except for the Jay-Z track which sounded equally awful on each

ash888 · 3 Jun 2015 at 14:08

5/6 not really much init though to be fair, so not a great test

Quartz · 3 Jun 2015 at 14:37

In between my tinnitus and my poor headphones, I can't tell at all.

lsg1r · 3 Jun 2015 at 15:02

3/6 but I picked the 320kbps mp3's on the others.

HEADRAT · 3 Jun 2015 at 15:06

I picked 320kps on all of them

Rroff · 3 Jun 2015 at 15:09

Edited post to make it a little less messy - was having trouble telling them apart (while I don't have the best ear for it I can usually tell the difference between 128kbit/s mp3 and FLAC more distinctly than that) pulling the samples out of temporary files and playing them back through my normal media player I was much easier able to hear the differences than in the browser - not sure whats going on there.

joeyjojo · 3 Jun 2015 at 17:18

Spacedeck said:
I got 3/6 but I had the potential to get 4 (Katy Perry track, could hear it, just wasn't night and day like the others)

For me, Suzanne Vega - Toms Diner and Murray Perahia & The English Chamber Orchestra was the difference between night and day.

I did this on my Note 4 using my Westone W30 earphones.

Same here. Suzanne Vega, Murray Perahia, and Coldplay were easy. The other three, no idea.

Yamaha HS80Ms attached to an AMB γ2. (Also an MS309i - made Kanye and Katy sound pretty damn good.)

.:SAmSuNG:. · 3 Jun 2015 at 18:16

3/6 right. All wrong ones were the 320 mp3's. Listening on Aune T1 Mk2 and AKG Q701's.

Rroff · 3 Jun 2015 at 18:20

.:SAmSuNG:. said:
3/6 right. All wrong ones were the 320 mp3's. Listening on Aune T1 Mk2 and AKG Q701's.

I've got a feeling something isn't quite working right with that test or atleast not for some people - I swear the 320 ones sound "better" subjectively from a listening perspective when listening from the browser and quite hard to tell the quality difference - though it might partly be due to knowing which was which once I'd pulled them out of the temp files to compare outside the browser.