Hearing difference in Audio Quality

dancook

dancook

dancook

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I don't subscribe to any music streaming services and tend to rip and play what I buy - not at the highest quality though.

I started a Tidal subscription today and I got thinking, can I hear the difference? I have no real base line.. then I found this

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

I could hear a clear difference in the Suzanne Vega vocal in #2 and the Piano in #5, and identified the uncompressed Wav
I also identified the correct Katy Perry #1 uncompressed WAV.

I had a hard time with #3/#4 to the point I had to stop because I was annoying my wife with the repetitive nature of it.

But it was interesting.. still not sure I'm interested in forking out £20 a month for Tidal though!
 
At least you know that you're not getting music that's been overcompressed.

I couldn't tell the difference in any of the Murray Periaha snippets either.
 
will have to listen when I get home, but on a windows laptop+its speakers though its volume mixer at 48KHz/16bit not so different between samples.

- but the HQ lossless tidal stuff 96KHz/24bit available for some albums or, lossless 44.1KHz/16bit=cd, versus the AAC lossy,
should be more distinguishable, if, you can download the tracks and play them back directly w/o volume mixer via an external dac/better system
 
jpaul said:
will have to listen when I get home, but on a windows laptop+its speakers though its volume mixer at 48KHz/16bit not so different between samples.

- but the HQ lossless tidal stuff 96KHz/24bit available for some albums or, lossless 44.1KHz/16bit=cd, versus the AAC lossy,
should be more distinguishable, if, you can download the tracks and play them back directly w/o volume mixer via an external dac/better system
Click to expand...

Mine was PC HDMI straight to my amp and to my sound system, with windows 'dolby atmos for home theatre' option enabled
 
dancook said:
Mine was PC HDMI straight to my amp and to my sound system
Click to expand...
in tidal you have exclusive mode (and force volume) then afaik 'bits' go directly to sound card/hdmi out.
BUT if you listen to samples on a web-site, they will be re-sampled by windows and volume mixed before being sent.
(no apparent exclusive chrome mode, although casting inside utube should work I think, as I do for chromecast audio)
 
sounds has many factors.

how good your hearing is.
how good the source is.
how good your DAC is.
how good your AMP is.
How good your headphones / speakers are.

that is 5 variables. so it's not surprising when some people don't heat what you hear when you listen to the exact same thing.

like when I'm playing CS:GO i'm like what are you doing dude could you not hear his blatant footsteps to the left of you? then you have to remember some people will be using £2 headphones on a £100 PC using built in sound. so they can't hear anything but the basics.

so if you have decent equipment and listen to music a lot then something like tidal will be worth it. however i do believe spotify also has high quality music.

the law of diminishing returns hits with audio too. human hearing is such that everything can be put into an 16 bit file. the benefits of 24 bit just takes the 16 bit file and expands it you cannot hear anything extra.

so there is a lot of snake oil out there too. there gets to a point where you have to stop and say no there is no point me spending this amount of money to get 0.01% improvement, etc.
 
Does a DAC really make that much of a difference? I have some Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO headphones for PC use and own some Westone W40 that I'd use with my phone.

I think I'd love to try a DAC to see if my headphones/earphones really do perform well but then I also wouldn't want to want one incase it's simply a waste of money.
 
What do you mean by DAC? pretty much any digital audio source will have a DAC stage. The integrated audio in most motherboards, phones/tablets, average consumer audio device etc. really isn't that great but getting a higher end external DAC isn't guaranteed to be better - but some devices definitely are.

EDIT: PS I've done the test in the first post before and with some browsers it is really hard to tell the difference while extracting the files and playing them via a desktop player showed a bigger difference.

End of the day though it isn't enough just to have a lossless format the music needs to have been recorded and mastered in high quality as well - way too often you'd got like so-so 16bit 44.1KHz samples being used that already are close to 128kbit MP3 quality even before the music has gone through final production and been output to an MP3, etc.
 
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dancook said:
I don't subscribe to any music streaming services and tend to rip and play what I buy - not at the highest quality though.

I started a Tidal subscription today and I got thinking, can I hear the difference? I have no real base line.. then I found this

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

I could hear a clear difference in the Suzanne Vega vocal in #2 and the Piano in #5, and identified the uncompressed Wav
I also identified the correct Katy Perry #1 uncompressed WAV.

I had a hard time with #3/#4 to the point I had to stop because I was annoying my wife with the repetitive nature of it.

But it was interesting.. still not sure I'm interested in forking out £20 a month for Tidal though!
Click to expand...

This test for me essentially confirmed what I always thought. I can relatively easily tell the difference between low quality compressed and high quality compressed music, but lossless is..... lost...... on me. Using that test I got 4 / 6 correct on my first attempt, the two I got wrong I identified the 320kbs stream instead of the losless one. This is through logitech Z906 speakers connected to an Asus Xonar D2X so whilst not the highest end setup by far it's a decent chunk above entry level PC speakers.

Looks like I'll be sticking to high quality spotify and encoding my CD rips at 320Kbps :)
 
Rroff said:
EDIT: PS I've done the test in the first post before and with some browsers it is really hard to tell the difference while extracting the files and playing them via a desktop player showed a bigger difference.
Click to expand...
do you recall which browsers were good ? .. thanks had not realised these samples could be downloaded
 
320kbps LAME MP3 or 256kbps AAC (more efficient compression so same quality) are basically good enough that there's no real point to having lossless streaming - it was only the days of 128kbps mp3 where there were obvious differences - and the more important issue is the mastering. 9/10 if a service is using a more modern remaster (usually 'classic' albums receive this unwanted treatment) it'll probably be worse for it, and it's not uncommon for some albums to have two different masters for CD and vinyl release, with the latter usually being given a better job since the target audience are deemed to care about quality more.
 
Somnambulist said:
320kbps LAME MP3 or 256kbps AAC (more efficient compression so same quality) are basically good enough that there's no real point to having lossless streaming - it was only the days of 128kbps mp3 where there were obvious differences - and the more important issue is the mastering. 9/10 if a service is using a more modern remaster (usually 'classic' albums receive this unwanted treatment) it'll probably be worse for it, and it's not uncommon for some albums to have two different masters for CD and vinyl release, with the latter usually being given a better job since the target audience are deemed to care about quality more.
Click to expand...

Two masters is a must as there are frequencies that need to be dipped on vinyl otherwise the needle can skip (so I've been told by the guys who mastered my stuff).
 
Somnambulist said:
are basically good enough that there's no real point to having lossless streaming
Click to expand...
this is a bit like the 4K streaming debate, many folks now do not have a CD player and local media to make the comparison, plus you have the additional subscription cost for lossless (following free trial) and, can folks typically get the 4G bandwidth, to be able to exploit it outside the home.

I think it does depend on type of music too, whether lossless is discernible , on solo percussion/piano/guitar it seems more discernible.
cannot find the link, but if you see a frequency/fft analysis of lossy music it has distinctive siganture with the stripped mid frequencies.

(are amazon into lossless yet ? ..i would consider prime if they were, albeit prime increase)
 
Spacedeck said:
Does a DAC really make that much of a difference? I have some Beyerdynamic DT 770 PRO headphones for PC use and own some Westone W40 that I'd use with my phone.

I think I'd love to try a DAC to see if my headphones/earphones really do perform well but then I also wouldn't want to want one incase it's simply a waste of money.
Click to expand...

They're basically the new speaker cables... you've presumably got a sophisticated smart phone produced by a very large company like Apple, Samsung etc..? Digital to analogue conversion is a solved problem, it has been done for years. No you don't need an extra box to plug your phone into, there is a DAC already on your phone and it is already absolutely fine for doing the job... Apple is the biggest company in the world, they have a music service, they know full well their phones will be used for listening to music, they keep this in mind when producing them.

As for the source, anything above CD quality is generally not noticeable in double blind trials and again just something to extract cash from the golden ears brigade.
 
dowie said:
Apple is the biggest company in the world, they have a music service, they know full well their phones will be used for listening to music, they keep this in mind when producing them.
Click to expand...

Apple as a music business has gone backwards the last 5 or so years. The quality of the digital files has dropped. I'd also be interested to know how many of iPhone users actually use itunes.

As someone that has a pretty good audio setup at home, I'm not that fussed on how my phone plays music. Only time I use it is when I have it connected up to my b&w portable speaker.
 
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