Can You Really Hear the Difference Between Lossless, Lossy Audio? 749
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."
Depends on the source (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
One word: YES. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 hear a slight difference (Score:5, Insightful)
I grew up listening to music on the radio (Score:4, Insightful)
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [cnet.com].
I usually can, but I rarely care. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
In traffic, a VW will get me someplace (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Depends on the source (Score:5, Insightful)
44.1hkz 16bit audio is completely transparent to the human ear. No one has ever been able to detect when a 16bit DAC ADC pair has been placed in a 24/96 audio path.
Your preference for 24/96 audio as a listener is entirely due to the placebo effect. There are good reasons to master audio in high res, but for listening 16 bit 44.1khz audio is as good as anything.
Difference is not in the listening. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is the ability to transcode to different bitrates and formats without losing anything from the original source.
Re:44.1khz ought to be enough for anyone... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you have people that can ABX the difference, no their criticisms are not scientifically founded. An actual blind test beats any theoretical reasoning any day.
the answer is obvious, isn't it? (Score:4, Insightful)
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....?
Sure, you can tell. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Nope, normally. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Will hi-def be mastered properly? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Depends on the source (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, you've never done an ABX test and are just spouting ill-informed supposition. The ABX is the gold standard, get back to us once you can distinguish those sources that way with a 95% confidence level.
Re:Depends on the source (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
And you never have to re-rip physical discs. 128kb/s CBR MP3 used to be the standard. Then 192 VBR. Then AAC. And so on and so forth. So by keeping a lossless archive, one will always be able to transcode to the latest-and-greatest lossy codec without a lot of hassle.
Re:44.1khz ought to be enough for anyone... (Score:5, Insightful)
44.1khz ought to be enough for anyone...
Body:
human hearing beats the linear response assumptions used in lossy codecs. So yes, their criticisms are scientifically founded.
These have nothing to do with each other.
Re:Nope, normally. (Score:4, Insightful)
When you listen to music on electrostatic speakers, you can hear things you couldn't hear before. It makes normal speakers sound muffled as if you're listening through a pillow. So the speakers can mean the difference between hearing the mp3 compression and not hearing it.
Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say it depends on what you're listening to.
Most people, including most slashdot armchair pundits, who listen to Lady Gaga or some similar shit will never notice the difference. However, if you listen to things like Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture", you will notice just how crappy lossy codecs really are. Especially towards the end.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Depends on the source (Score:5, Insightful)
kinda like 640K?
Unless you want to argue that human hearing is improving similarly to Moore's law, then no.
Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say it depends on the person. Much like there are people who can see more colours [wikipedia.org], I have no doubt that there also exists people who can perceive subtle differences in sound far better than normal people. In fact, I assume there's probably a term for it, but I don't feel like looking it up.
So while a lot of audiophiles (or perhaps most) are just saying they can hear differences between lossless and virtually lossless... I assume to look "cool", or whatever the appeal is of self-identifying as an audiophile, there's probably a handful that actually CAN. Not to say those $10000 audio wires aren't a complete scam, but it would be foolish to say that there aren't people who have no problem telling the difference between 256kb/s and lossless.
I may be wrong of course, but for a while people didn't think tetrachromacy existed either. And like tetrachromacy, synesthesia [wikipedia.org], or hyperthymesia [wikipedia.org], I imagine there's a number of people who possess these traits, but simply aren't aware that they do, assuming that everyone does and that it's normal. Although for the last, I imagine that would be a lot easier to determine.
Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a very apt description. Genetic factor, age, absence of damage, training to understand the difference/subtleties of overtones, and of course the equipment to playback sounds truly. I found the wired article about Peter Lyngdorf and Steinway building speakers good enough to detect the difference between an American and German manufactured pianos a fascinating read. http://www.wired.com/reviews/2012/10/steinway-lyngdorf-model-ls-concert/
Re:Depends on the source (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to do a personal ABX test when there are many others who have done them and confirmed his statement. In fact, it's a much more powerful statement citing many others than just yourself. One is a statistic and the other is an anecdote.
And for a MUCH more exhaustive and scientific discussion than any post on this article will ever make (anther post in this thread already linked it, but you must have missed it, and it's a great article): http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html [xiph.org]
Re:Better question (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Depends on the source (Score:5, Insightful)
The closest I can get to describing it is this and sorry if you aren't a musician but they'll know of which I speak...you know how you have that great old tube amp for the guitar and it has that nice warm fat feel to it? Notice how the same amp when modeled digitally doesn't doesn't quite have the warmth?
The reason for this is that it's hard to capture distortion accurately.
That "warm sound" is a result of the inacurracies of the tube amp. You may like it better (and that's just fine), but it is does not accurately reproduce the original signal. For me, it's really no different than the current "loudness war" where re-mastered releases are much louder. Many of today's listeners like that sound beter, but it isn't accurate.
Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not mutually exclusive. Some of us manage to listen to more than one type of music..._including_ classical.
Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say it depends on what you're listening to.
The people who care about the difference aren't even listening to the music. Totally different goals.
Normal people use their stereo to listen to music.
Audiophiles use music to listen to their stereo.
Re:Better question (Score:3, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Depends on the bitrate (Score:4, Insightful)
ignore the DAC the amp the source and everything... ...except the speaker drivers themselves. even the best in the world are wildly non-linear.
and then there's the air between your ears and the speakers
another non-linearity
Best source? .0001% THD. best amp? .0001% THD. Speakers? 1% THD haha good luck.