Can We Really Tell Lossless From MP3? 849
EddieSpinola writes "Everyone knows that lossless codecs like FLAC produce better sounding music than lossy codecs like MP3. Well that's the theory anyway. The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files. Very interesting, if slightly disturbing reading!" Visiting with adblock and flashblock is highly recommended, lest you be blinded. The article is spread over 6 pages and there is no print version.
Not Really (Score:5, Insightful)
and certainly not in a typical house room, car, bus, or bike.
It does depend on the recording (Score:5, Insightful)
128bps is certainly not enjoyable for certain classical pieces. By the time you've hit 192, it's fine. At 320kbps I can't tell the difference. If that means I have "tin ears" I'm thankful for them. They save me thousands of dollars in high end equipment and they save me using obscure poorly supported lossless formats and then having to convert to mp3 half the time anyway.
Apart from a new survey of an old topic is there anything new here?
Re:It does depend on the recording (Score:5, Insightful)
There's your problem. If you had spent more on your audio system you'd hear the differences.
Even if there weren't any...
Impaired hearing from concerts and headphone (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
I kinda find it funny that you need to have adblock and flashblock to visit a site named TrustedReviews so your browser doesn't go into a tailspin... It's like having Sid Fernwilter smile at you and say "Trust me!"
Anyway, 192kbps MP3's is good enough for most people so I don't really see the point with FLAC unless you are an audiophile which means you don't touch encoded/compressed music anyway.
Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, absolutely. There is no doubt that the biggest problem, by far, is the upfront engineering, not the file format. I have plenty of DDD CDs and other items where the digitization of the data involves essentially no loss - but are still terrible recordings that are painful to listen to. Only when everything else it darn near ideal does the compression method/bit rate even become detectable. And the vast, vast majority of cases, and as far as I know never for any portable device, are the conditions ideal. A crappy 128K MP3 of a good performance with good engineering can be a joy.
The results are not at all surprising to me. And of course the "audiophile" community is "stuck on stupid" in some cases. ANYONE who thinks information recorded in tiny wiggles in groves and played through a bunch of springs (stylus, cartridge coils, tonearm, not to mention the non-trivial compliance of the record itself) and then amplified by two-three orders of magnitude is a more accurate representation than a full digital string (almost independent of bit rate) is deluding themselves.
Brett
Re:Can we stop with the anti-ad sentiment? (Score:4, Insightful)
Operating a site with good content costs money. Most good sites are run for profit. If you visit a site and don't like the content, don't visit that site again.
Misses part of the point (Score:5, Insightful)
A good part of the reason that people use FLAC et al is NOT to listen to, but to avoid re-ripping CDs or transcoding when switching lossy formats.
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
The small size of lossy audio was an important factor when storage capacity was limited. This is no longer an issue, so there's not much reason to bother with lossy music when dealing with the storage capacity of current devices. 100GB of music would be an absolutely massive collection, yet that would only occupy less than 10% of a US$100 1TB drive. The 16GB common is portable devices is enough for more FLAC than you would listen to for even a fairly lengthy journey. It's certainly still of use in streaming media, but the bar for quality isn't usually set very high in that area. Full CD quality FLAC streams should be usable on home broadband within 5 years, I would hope...
The reasons to argue against FLAC just aren't that relevant anymore. Bits are cheap, who cares if you save a few?
Re:Kids prefer that cold, dry, digital sizzle. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think a large part of it is also how the music is recorded. The older recordings are recorded at a much lower level, taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the medium. The newer recordings are all packed into the loudest little bit so the dynamic range is compressed.
Add to that the simple fact that most people today listen to music that's digitally encoded on tiny little earplugs.
Now expose them to a full orchestra in a well-designed sound hall. They simply have no basis for hearing the range of sounds.
As with everything else, listening to music takes practice. If all you hear is 128Kbps mp3s then your ears will not hear any of the richness of a concert hall.
Not saying one is better than the other, but practice makes perfect and listening to modern music, which is fairly limited in both dynamic range and instrumentation to begin with, compressed into a tiny bit of the bandwidth available, on tinny earphones is a poor way to develop a critical ear.
Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
Audiophiles have known for decades that most listeners cannot discern excellent from mediocre music. Most people think that if there is lots of bass and the music is loud without obvious distortion, their system is great.
Most people have known for decades that audiophiles are full of crap. Every single time I've seen a double-blind test to see if they can hear the difference on what they claim they can hear, turns out they can't. Hey, good for the people selling them $1,000 audio cables.
That said, there's a good reason to go with FLAC. Want to re-encode a lower quality version for your storage-space-limited device? You can do that without additional quality loss, just like re-ripping from the cd. Want to change your collection to ogg because it sounds better at lower bitrates? Again, go ahead.
Basically, it's nice having a hard drive copy that is lossless, because you can re-encode it into the lossless codec of your choice for whatever device you want without introducing further artifacts.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:5, Insightful)
The bandwidth "ceiling" also has the deplorable effect of not giving the tracks room to "breath"; certain otherwise audible higher frequencies can get "lost in the sauce" (listen to an older recording and you'll hear the difference). The result is often akin to the difference between quietly closing a door and slamming it.
Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes flaws improve art, like in the case of a film grain or desaturation can improving a particular photo. But you need to be sure that you're not just recreating a flaw because you're USED to it.
In the attached article, if people could distinguish between an MP3 and FLAC, it was because the MP3 was good enough no flaws could be detected. That's fine; people can't distinguish good compression from the real thing. However, if they COULD distinguish an MP3, but preferred to the flac, it was because they found the error pleasing... just like you and tapes.
Re:Not Really (Score:2, Insightful)
99.99% of the people who claim they can "tell the difference" are full of shit.
Re:Recording Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't recall any hiss or static in mp3s. Maybe you're thinking of the hiss and static that is inherent in analog recordings?
Re:You're accidentally correct (Score:1, Insightful)
> I'll start by saying that I'm an audiophile. ....... that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear. ....... you can feel it, physically with your body
>
>
Do you honestly believe this? You are deluding yourself. Enjoy vinyl, please, for how it makes you feel, perhaps nostalgia for days gone by, for the album covers, or whatever. All this is real, but please don't try to explain your feelings in terms of the audio, with mumbo jumbo pseudo-techno-babble.
Re:ABX Just Destroyed My Ego (Score:3, Insightful)
At 128Kbps MP3, it sounds horrid, even on mid-range hardware and headphones. Bump that up to 160Kbps and it's passable, or go up to 192/256/320. Whichever gooses your willies.
Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise there's no reason to say that a $100 bottle of wine isn't better than a $1000 bottle just because someone is willing to pay for it. Frankly anything over $30 is a waste of money. All your paying for is rarity, not quality.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare flac vc flac and look at the results. You can get all sorts of false information from this type of test. The 192kbps MP3 being distinguished from the FLAC could be just as significant as the Flac vs Flac graph
Re:No different than people's attachment to LPs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah ah ah!!!
From the story:
The reality is that most of us can't tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC. In this quick and dirty test, a worrying preponderance of subjects rated the MP3 encodes higher than the FLAC files.
Rarely if ever you can find such a contradiction right in the summary. If most of us can't tell the difference, how come subjects rated the two encodes differently?
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:3, Insightful)
A $70 pair of SHURE earbuds has made all the difference in how I listen to music
Sorry, but no earbuds are worth $70. They are simply evil and will destroy your hearing. Get yourself some proper earphones, something that cups the ear and ventilates.
Citation needed.
I haven't seen any convincing evidence that earbuds damage your ears any more or less than any other style headphones. It's all about how loud the music is and how long you listen to it. Maybe the trick is that the big headphones are too clunky to take with you everywhere so you don't use them as often.
My Shure buds came with a little guide for how loud you should let your volume get for different listening durations. Of course, it's hard to tell how many decibels are coming out of your headphones.
You Don't Know Nothin (Score:5, Insightful)
The present study suffers from that methodological malady known in scientific circles as being "fucked". Please bear with me as I explain this technical term.
The question posed in the text is 'can we tell the difference'. One assumes from this that the answer is yes or no. Testing this question would require playing two versions and asking whether they're the same (can't tell the difference) or different (can etc.).
But that's not what gets asked. The subjects get asked to tell which version sounds better. The question assumes they can tell the difference. Even if they can't tell the difference they are forced by the design to choose one over the other as if they can.
Since they are forced to say which sounds better even if they can't tell the difference (something impossible to determine from this design) then they are simply guessing or picking one arbitrarily, and there is no way to determine if or when this occurred. Thus, the results are not only unable to answer the original question, they are unable to answer anything because the data do not even necessarily represent answers.
The design is so fatally flawed that there is nothing that can be pulled out of it. It's complete garbage.
As an aside, I'm not familiar with the musical pieces used, but I'm betting they're fairly new. For years now recordings have been increasingly compressed by the engineers. Most popular works produced in this decade are already so compressed that you can't tell much difference between the original and a recording of it having been compressed yet again, no matter by what method.
To tell the difference between compressed versions one should start with an uncompressed source. And for a person to be able to hear a difference in two versions, they should already be familiar with the original in uncompressed form so they can try to say whether one sounds more like the original than the other (the alternative being both sound worse or both sound like it). If they have no clue what it's supposed to sound like, any attempt to say which sounds better is badly broken due to having no reference with which to compare them.
No attempt was made to determine whether the subjects even had normal hearing. And I don't mean just asked (though that should be done) but tested. People can have frequency drop outs that they're unaware of and that would affect the results.
There are so many problems with the study that it is completely useless. The problems were of the authors' making. Thus, they did not know what they were doing. This is what we mean by "fucked".
I want to know who determined that 'trusted' was a good name for the magazine/blog/honey wagon in which the article appears. I wouldn't trust them to test light bulbs to see if they're burnt out.
Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:4, Insightful)
No, seriously [youtube.com]. Heck, if you really want to blow your mind, consider the fact that a Honda Odyssey - yes, a minivan! - handles objectively "sportier" [grassroots...sports.com] (i.e. has more grip, more acceleration, more top speed, etc.) than roadsters from the era of vinyl. Of course, it's not as much "fun" to drive a dependable minivan as it is to drive a two-seater with tiny tires and an engine that overheats after ten minutes, but, then again, it's not as much "fun" to listen to digitally reproduced music compared to the nostalgic experience of picking up a piece of vinyl and gently placing it on a record player.
Does that help?
Because they are supposed to be hard to tell ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fraunhofer spent considerable time and effort to build a lossy codec that was indistinguishable, to most listeners, from uncompressed music (44.1/16-bit) files. mp3 codecs (and the improved codecs that followed, such as AAC or Ogg) all craft the file in such a way as to make the parts "thrown out" the least noticeable and the parts "we keep" the most important cues. Unlike other digital audio compression methods that preceded them, mp3 codecs are built from the ground up to retain most or all of the music signal that human hearing and the brain need to enjoy a satisfying musical performance, and to concentrate on discarding what seems unnecessary to that end.
That they succeeded is hardly groundbreaking news. That some listeners can tell the difference is also hardly groundbreaking news; there were a significant minority amongst Franuhofer's listening panels who were almost always able to discern which was which. At some point the majority of casual listeners were not able to do so with any consistency. That's when they said "OK, we'll use this method, then."
There is nothing wrong with well engineered lossy codecs, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with sat radio or mp3 via computer or music player can easily attest. To say there is no difference, or that an mp3 is "CD quality", is the kind of hyperbole that can't go unchallenged. To be a bit more honest and say "it sounds pretty good" or "I like the way it sounds" is fine, however.
Most people are OK with some form of lossy codec; in the environment we most often listen these days, it's limitations are not drawbacks, and possibly not even evident (i.e. in a car; there is plenty of extraneous sound to mask most limitations of compressed audio; and as anyone who has ever used a sound pressure meter in a running vehicle on even a deserted road can tell you, the low-frequency noise of any automobile just going about it's business is very high and much of it is subsonic, which we can't normally hear but none the less masks lower-level detail information on music we might be listening to). It's not a crime to say you're OK with mp3, even if you can tell the difference between lossy and lossless formats.
There's a saying in the sound industry: "Musicians have the worst stereos". And, generally, they do. The reason has more to do with how they listen than what they're listening on: musicians will mentally fill in the sound by following the notes themselves, and things like the beat, the rhythm, the tone, and the timing of the players and their instruments. It's as if they are playing the notes themselves, in their heads, and they need only the elemental cues to do so.
If you love a song, you don't have to hear it under ideal conditions to enjoy the performance. These are the kinds of things Fraunhofer concentrated on making sure remained in the mp3 after compression. It's supposed to sound good; that was the whole point, and that's why the Fraunhofer codecs succeeded, despite the royalty payments due.
All that still does not take away from the enjoyment of uncompressed formats, reproduced competently by accurate equipment, in the appropriate environment. Your car or via earbuds on the street are not those types of environments, and mp3s etc are perfectly reasonable compromises between quality and the need for reduced data footprints. There is a place for both uncompressed and compressed formats; they are not mutually exclusive.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:2, Insightful)
A large number of people rating MP3 higher than FLAC would then suggest that a large number of people chose randomly...
Please turn in your random number generator at the door.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:3, Insightful)
Because they were under the impression that one was better than the other, so they chose the one they thought would be better as per random chance. I'd actually like to see some real testing done to find a statistically significant difference with a large enough sample size. The audiophile shit has always been tainted by a sense of superiority. The thing with the MP3s however is that chances are there is at least some subset of the population that can tell the difference.
Re:Recording Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not really a static or hiss issue. Generally, the issue is a high-frequency warble as the compression picks different frequencies to hide the compression noise. If you listen to a 128kbps MP3 for a song with loud cymbal crashes, it becomes very noticable (and once you hear it, you always will). Personally, I can't hear this on 192kbps or higher MP3, but it's likely still there in small amounts.
Of course, when listening in noisier environments (car, earbuds, etc) the other sounds mask this, at least enough to be unnoticable consciously. Then the familiarity of the compression takes over and you prefer what you normally hear.
Re:You're accidentally correct (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll explain this effect to you: you just like to think you're superior, some kind of Ubermensch. That's all there is to it.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:2, Insightful)
Such a shame that your CAT5 cable passes a digital signal, not analog.
Common mistake, CAT5 passes an Analog Signal that is interpreted as a Digital. It does this by establishing analog ranges of what it sees as 0s and 1s. There really isn't anything close to a digital signal in our analog world, unless you get down to the single Electron/Photon level. Shielding and better cabling can be important in "digital" cables, but anything past what can meet the error tolerances of the analog ranges is unnecessary. Every wonder why there is a difference between Cat5 Cat6 and Cat7? You would probable say speed, but it is quality. Faster transfers have smaller analog ranges and tighter error tolerances. Cat7 has less interference and noise because of shielding and tight tolerances making it suitable for faster "digital" transfers.
Re:Normalization could be it. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's of my understanding that when you rip CDs to WAV or FLAC, you don't have an option to normalize your audio like you do with MP3s
There's no need to; they're bit for bit identical (well, wav is, flac or shn are after decompression). Your wav or flac or shn will sound exactly the same. Your MP3 or OGG won't.