Sound quality lost on the new generation?

I can consistently ABX MP3@320 and FLAC correctly, it's really not too hard. But I don't think being able to hear a difference means there is an actual quality difference. As it's never changed my experience of the audio. When you actually start to starve a track of audible bits it's another matter.
 
AbsenceJam said:
But I don't think being able to hear a difference means there is an actual quality difference. As it's never changed my experience of the audio. When you actually start to starve a track of audible bits it's another matter.
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Ya what?

Those were some of the most confusing sentences I have ever read!

Is it me being slow here?

EDIT: What do you mean? From my pov, being able to hear a difference automatically confirms there IS a quality difference? Surely?

Do you know how MP3s compress the original digital audio? The algorithms they run over the original audio is designed to cut out frequencies which are deemed 'unimportant' to the human ear via the use of 'perceptual coding'. This is mostly to do with physchoacoustics (spelling?). Obviously, this is a moot point with lossless formats like FLAC as (correct me if I'm wrong here) there are NO lossy compressing algorithms in place to "starv a track of audible bits" like you said.
 
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I've never met an "audiophile" who could tell the difference between ~192kbit MP3 and FLAC in blind testing... tho most can tell 128<>FLAC but then even I can tell that.

What I find more shocking is all the kids who have ripped music from youtube on their players, etc. at like ~64kbit mono even in some cases and are quite happy with it... a friend who does some DJing gets quite frustrated when they give him CDs of tracks to play at parties and its all terrible rips with distorted bass/treble.
 
hughythomas said:
Ya what?

Those were some of the most confusing sentences I have ever read!

Is it me being slow here?

EDIT: What do you mean? From my pov, being able to hear a difference automatically confirms there IS a quality difference? Surely?

Do you know how MP3s compress the original digital audio? The algorithms they run over the original audio is designed to cut out frequencies which are deemed 'unimportant' to the human ear via the use of 'perceptual coding'. This is mostly to do with physchoacoustics (spelling?). Obviously, this is a moot point with lossless formats like FLAC as (correct me if I'm wrong here) there are NO lossy compressing algorithms in place to "starv a track of audible bits" like you said.
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The latter thing - "starve a track of audible bits" - I just meant reduce the bitrate. I'm slightly insensible tonight. ;)

To FLAC and MP3. A different sound doesn't necessarily mean a quality difference (a loss or gain); think about equipment. Say two good solid state amps, you can probably differentiate their sound but you're unlikely to find one to be objectively satisfying than the other to listen to. I find the same with MP3 vs. lossless, I can differentiate when I ABX but it doesn't affect the listening experience.
 
For a while, i've been ripping CD's in full hi-quality WMA lossless, then playing back on a Xi-Fi music extream on good'ish headphones. You can definity tell the difference over this and typical mp3's.
 
Ahh ok now I'm with you.

I will of course disagree but this is purely from my own personal point of view. But again, I am not an 'audiophile' in the usual sense in that I don't spend all my resources trying to obtain the best hi-fi equipment I can. Instead, I spend it on the best recording/mixing gear I can get my grubby mits on.

I CAN tell the difference between fixed rate MP3s and FLAC and re-encoding my entire music collection to FLAC was one of the best things I ever did!

What I will say is that I don't think we can compare like you said, amps to each other as an analogy for comparing lossless to lossy digital audio formats. I appreciate that amps are never giving you a 'true' representation of the original sound as, in order to make the music sound 'exciting', they will colour the frequencies with certain accentuations/attenuations across the spectrum. This is typical of your 'rock' presets with a 2dB boost to 80-100hz and the same @ 12-18kHz (Bass and Treble respectively).

My point is, the stark contrast in audio quality which I hear personally between lossy file formats and lossless is far greater in its scope than going between different amps for example. MP3s have a 'sound' to them (or lack of!) which is difficult to describe - (how on earth would you try to describe what a colour looks like to a blind person?).

The best possible way I could describe to you what I hear is most obvious in the upper frequency range (normally where the overhead microphones are mixed on a acoustic drum kit). This is typically a sort of 'swooshy', 'sheening' on the cymbals but is not necessarily restricted to cymbals as other instruments can and do reside naturally and unnaturally (in that the engineer has deliberately EQed them in) in that area. MP3s (irrespective of which bit rate) produce this sort of 'mushing' of frequencies which literally puts the hair up on my neck!

Anyhow, at the end of the day I think what we have again established is that music (being such a personal thing) is totally subjective and again, with music production and audio quality the same thing applies. I mean, blimey, the mechanical process by which audio enters our ear canal is the same but our inner ear plays a huge role in converting these waveforms into neural stimulus for our brain to understand. The way my brain understands these is no doubt different to yours, which is different to the next mans etc etc.

Again, I am happy to do some blind testing but I will refrain from hijacking this thread any more haha! Send me a PM guru if you want to sort this out and we'll start a new thread on it!
 
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For a while I was paranoid over these things but eventually came to the conclusion that after a certain point, trying to improve your listening experience becomes pointless because there's no reliable way of controlling how your brain changes your perception of sound, other than long periods of training where you essentially become aware of how your brain works (a bit like calibration, maybe).

My point is, as long as you have well encoded music, a decent source, amp, headphones etc your brain is usually is good enough to change the sound to your liking, given enough time ... ironing out the creases so to speak.
 
Agreed - plus when you're listening to quality albums like El Cielo by Dredg it doesn't really matter what equipment you play it on...it just always sounds phat as hell!

Man, such a shame aboot that band I can't listen to anything after Catch Without Arms.
 
hughythomas said:
Mate - spot on.

I posted in another thread regarding digital audio sample rates on Windows - some of you might find it interesting:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18098909

@Guest2 I agree with you but you ever heard of DVD Audio?...Thought not cos it never took off. These were higher quality masters of audio original recorded @ 96kHz/24-bit (the professional recording industry has been using these high fidelity sample rates/bit depths for years) but frankly, it will neverr take off because (like this thread has demonstrated) most people can't tell the difference! It's only people like myself who work in pro audio day in day out who can and what percentage of the retail market do you think we make up?!



@Gurusan - I've been classically trained since the age of 5 but don't fall into the trap I did before I started audio production of assuming that because you have a good ear 'musically' you have a good 'technical' ear for production...it simply isn't the case. It took me YEARS of ear training to be able to tell the difference between MP3s @ different bitrates, let alone sample rates and even the sound frequency spectrum itself. These days - I can tell exactly what sample rate (and bit rate) has been used and even what frequencies make up the sound of say a snare drum just due to familiarity. It's like the 'perfect pitch' of the musical world but for us engineers/producers!
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I was wondering when you'd post as remembered the old thread we both posted in . Btw I'm ex-music industry myself - Ex-Sound Engineer
 
hughythomas said:
Agreed - plus when you're listening to quality albums like El Cielo by Dredg it doesn't really matter what equipment you play it on...it just always sounds phat as hell!

Man, such a shame aboot that band I can't listen to anything after Catch Without Arms.
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Wow, another Dredg fan! I'm not too fond of the new album either. But I haven't listened to it too much. And yeah, El Cielo I usually use for audio testing when I'm messing around with a new set of ear phones/speakers/whatever. Generally sounds phat and awesome whatever you're playing it through. Drew's bass is nuts on that album!

And I've been using FLAC for PC playback, and I specially bought an iRiver H320 back in the day because it played Ogg Vorbis files. All my music is a mix of 192/224kps Ogg Vorbis, and on my average quality earphones, sounds close enough to CD to justify the amount of extra albums I fit on my 30 gig player (replaced the HD...) over higher bitrates :P

And 320kbs mp3 is POINTLESS. V0 all the way, since it's basically scaled the to the same quality level as 320kbs (eg, as high as mp3 will go), but uses less space.

Modern V0 is actually ****ing good for mp3. I'll happily download a V0 album if I want to sample a band, and often put it on my mp3 player if I'm not done sampling. Thank LAME though (which - if you don't know - stands for: Lame Ain't an Mp3 Encoder -- fancy that?), it's really improved over the last 5 years or so, and the last time I messed around with the newest version (a year or two ago), it'd got better than the time before that!
 
i've used lame v0 for years because i didn't want to compromise on quality and was too lazy to ABX. but then out of sheer boredom one day, i decided to transcode all my music to ogg q5 (~160kbps) and i honestly can't tell the difference on my portable setup (sansa clip/fiio e5/sennheiser px100). so loads of space gained which means more room for music.

(the transcode was from my flac source, obviously. :p)
 
Yer El Cielo is "the one".

@ Sansa Clip boy - of course you can't tell any difference I had a hard time myself when playing back through that device!

I personally went from 320kbps (constant bit rate) to FLAC on my Sansa Clip to and couldn't tell much using Sennheiser headphones...it is all dependent on what audio gear you run!

In all honesty, this is why I am so confident I will pass ANY bitrate listening test on here...simply because I spent more than a grand on Genelec monitoring in the control room of my studio. Not to mention acoustic panelling and bass traps...

On speakers like these you'd be half deaf not to tell the difference...no joke!

My point is - although I still stand by my belief that hearing a difference between digital audio file formats is personal and therefore subjective, I do agree with titaniumx3 when he said:

"As long as you have well encoded music, a decent source, amp, headphones etc your brain is usually is good enough to change the sound to your liking, given enough time ... ironing out the creases so to speak."

Ie. You do still need a decent setup to 'hear the difference' between bitrates/samplerates and audio file formats (analogue or digital).

Irrespective of this last point I can still distinguish between MP3s and lossless on crappy £20 speakers but this is thanks to training.

Lastly, all I want to say is in relation to the original post, is that yes; for people like myself, I take my audio very seriously but only as my knowledge of music production increased over the years. However, I am extremely pleased to see other people who don't necessarily work in the music industry appreciating higher quality audio as it gives people in my profession a reason to get up in the mornings!!
 
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hughythomas said:
that device!
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well it's the only time i use lossy codecs so there's not much point testing them on anything else, is there? only a ****** idiot would bother wasting their time with lossy codec/bitrate experiments on high end kit. well not unless space really is an issue. :p
 
I only buy cd's, I've bought 5 songs from itunes becuse that band had only released things on there.

That way I can rip them again in the future if I need to.

Currently I just rip at 32-320vbr, I can't tell the difference between that and FLAC on my ~150 quid setup, so can't see the point in wasting the space. IMO
 
Rroff said:
I've never met an "audiophile" who could tell the difference between ~192kbit MP3 and FLAC in blind testing... tho most can tell 128<>FLAC but then even I can tell that.
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I love how the people saying you can't tell the difference have as little (or often less) to back that up than the people that claim you can. Just ancedotes about how their personal experience of how "those people" can't tell.

I use FLAC for my music folder now.
Why? Well, I'm tired of having to re-encode everytime I upgrade equipment.

Here's a short history of this process:
I started using 128kbps mp3s, everyone used them back then, I got better equipment, suddenly I realised how truly awful they sounded.
I switched to 192kbps mp3s, I consider these "okay" (they do not butcher the piece like lower bit rates). I started ripping FLACs here
I got better equipment, started noticing some difference between 192kbps and 256kbps. I began thinking that I was hitting some limitations of the codec when comparing it to the source. I had played around with Vorbis in the past, this sparked the thought in my mind.
I got better equipment again, tried 320kbps and V0, noticed really no difference.
This time I decided to compare a high bitrate mp3 and Ogg Vorbis. It was really quite a noticable difference especially with for example acoustic guitars (sharper, more detailed) and more generally extreme highs (especially highs) and lows.

I have now settled on 224kbps Ogg Vorbis and FLACs for storage. I cannot tell between them currently. In 5 years time? Who knows, I may have better equipment again. I don't think it's as clear cut as people often make out.

I've had a lot of people come out with the typical "you can't tell the difference above 128kbps" - back in the days of napster and more recently 192kbps and i'm sure it'll be higher again in the future. All you have to do is spend a few minutes looking at the trend and it becomes obvious that it is for higher quality and directly correlates with people getting better equipment.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people that claim to have equipment they do not have (lol internet) and incorrectly state that there is no discernable difference above the arbitary bit rate of the day.
 
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It will be a sad day if the music CD is stopped because the mass of people downloading MP3 is so great, the production cost of the music CD cannot be justified. I don't how likely that is to happen. Can lossless music be bought and downloaded legally?

I have never bought any music through download, in the past the price of MP3 albums are a joke compared to what a physical CD costs, which contains lossless music. There is something great about owning something physical. Would a stamp collector rather collect pictures off the internet of stamps, rather than having something tangible? Not likely.

Are MP3 albums roughly still the same cost as a CD?
 
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