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.
Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
I've encountered this from my friends (Score:5, Interesting)
I have found that though I can tell the difference between a FLAC and 128Kbps MP3, most of my friends can't. Most of them, if I play the same song back to back, one FLAC and one MP3, they will almost always pick the MP3. :( Thus far, except for me, the only reason I can justify ripping things to FLAC is because I can then convert the file to whatever loss compression format is needed, MP3, AAC, OOG, etc.for portable music players (yes people, the iPod is not the only music player), without the double compression loss.
It depends (Score:3, Interesting)
It all really depends on the bit rate of the MP3, the type of music you are listening to and the equipment you are using to listen to the music with. It also depends if you know what you are listening for. For example between 128Kbps and 192Kbps MP3 I find the former flatter than the latter.
The hiss is where it hides (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure I can tell 128 MP3 is not so good. it's sounds a bit hot to my ears. Oddly perhaps this happens especially when there is clipping in the music (see for example green day) or shreikin trebles ( "battle without mercy" kill bill sound track). At first this seemed counter intuitive to me since you think that adding more distortion would be the most easily hidden during distortion, right? My rationalization is that whatever the MP# psycho acoutic model is, it's best for music with harmonies and tonal trajectories in different registers (base, tenor, trebble) and not music that has all sorts of aliased frequencies randomly jumping around in volume. I dont' really know but I can hear it. With normal music you may not hear the change in intonation because it simply sounds equally good even if it is altered.
But By 192 MP3 I cannot tell the difference. 128 AAC seems to be about as good.
No different than people's attachment to LPs (Score:1, Interesting)
This isn't surprising at all. The so-called better sound of LPs isn't really a higher fidelity recording but an artifact of the way records are played (and amplified). That people are more emotionally attached to music with "flaws" should be kind of obvious by now. Entire genres (glitch being the most obvious but certainly not the only) have developed out of this understanding. People don't always want perfection. Sometimes they want character.
There is a reason for it... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a reason for it, and it isn't what most people think.
It's related to how the brain handles white balance when it comes to colours. Your brain compensates for missing, or contradictory information. After a while you get used to it and don't notice it, and then when you are presented with something closer to 'perfect' you may, or may not recognize it as being all that different.
Sat Radio has relatively poor quality, but after listening to it for an hour or two the artifacts get filtered out by my brain (all but the worst ones anyway) and I don't notice it; but expose somebody to it for the first time and they will cringe.
I've been saying this for years. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been saying this for years - it is not hard to reach a point where an MP3 is indistinguishable from the uncompressed source, "even if you have top notch equipment and well-practiced hearing skills."
It is basically scale of bitrate vs odds that the recording will be indistinguishable at that bitrate.
My personal experience tells me that most songs are audibly degraded at 128kbps, some songs are audibly degraded at 160kbps, few songs are audibly degraded at 192kbps, and nothing I've yet experienced is audibly degraded at 256kbps. And this is being conservative... with a superior modern codec like LAME, MP3 may be even harder to distinguish at 128kbps than you might expect. Other codecs besides MP3 could be even better, but I don't have enough experience with other codecs, so I can't comment there. Plus, VBR makes the situation even better. You could have a lower average bitrate but still achieve a signal thats indistinguishable from the original with VBR.
Nonetheless, I just rip all my music as .wav now for archiving. To me its not even worth the effort to convert that to FLAC or other lossless codecs, because that just means an additional decoding step if I ever want to use the music for purposes besides playing it live in Winamp. An $80 1TB hard drive can hold $19,000 worth of uncompressed CDs. Sure... in flac format I could store more like $60,000 worth... but who has a $20,000 CD collection let alone a $60,000 one?
Anyway, the primary counterarguments I've heard are either from neurotic audiophiles that think "mathematically lossy" means "audibly lossy." People from that same category justify multi-thousand-dollar power cables to their amplifier and claim night and day differences, so their opinions can safely be ignored.
The other end of the fence says low bitrate stuff sounds "perfect." In my experience when presented with a reasonable comparison, even audio-ignorant people can tell the difference between a crap 128kbit mp3 and the original, but that difference might not be immediately obvious on, for example, built-in laptop speakers.
It depends on the music. (Score:4, Interesting)
With most real music (as in not coming out of a sequencer with the highs already filtered out), yes, you can tell if your upper frequency hearing is toasted by too many rock concerts. You can tell most definitely with some specific songs that sound like crap even in the vocal range if it's lossy ("Sad To See the Season Go" by Cowboy Junkies, in particular).
Hi-hats or any other cymbal, bells, glockenspiels, etc., all sound like shit in anything below 256. I can't describe the distortion other than to say it sounds hissy. Go ahead, listen to ANY Police tunes in low bitrate. I defy you to not cringe at how MP3 ruins Stuart Copeland's percussion.
The only music that doesn't suffer badly from mp3's lossy distortion is electronica and its related genres. Erasure sounds just fine at 192.
--
BMO
Recording Bias (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:2, Interesting)
When you master certain tracks together, there are subtle changes that take place when you use actual tape. You no longer have two, three, or more distinct tracks, but rather they blend together in a way that Digital music equipment has yet to emulate, which is why Tape is still so heavily used. When you merge these Digital tracks together, you lose some of those subtle combinations and equalizations that you get when you use old-school Tape.
Over time I do believe Digital will be able to emulate these differences very precisely, but as of yet, especially at lower-end studios, you certainly lose some of the mastering capabilities with digital tracks. Think about the first generation digital cameras. They stunk compared to high quality film.
Amateur rocket scientists... (Score:3, Interesting)
I did a study myself... One at a time, I took people off the street, and told them to make a rocket that could go into space. None of them could. The result is clear: space travel is impossible.
Lossy audio coding is an area of intensive scientific study. All the comments here amount to a bunch of 6 year-old kids debating where babies come from...
The answer to the question is quite simple, and has been known since the 1980's. The rule of Perceptual Entropy is that you need a minimum bitrate of 176kbps for 44.1kHz stereo. If you're encoding below that, it can't possibly be indistinguishable from the original. ITU-R BS.1116-1 testing has proven that simple fact out over and over again.
And don't bother claiming your 192kbps MP3s sound perfect, either. MP3 is certainly not the ideal audio format, so it doesn't come that close. But much more importantly, it (like all low-bitrate audio codecs) is a frequency domain codec, making it impossible to avoid pre-echo and the like AT ANY BITRATE. MP3, AAC, Vorbis, et al. just can't possibly do it.
The only possible competitors for indistinguishable (transparent) lossy audio coding are time domain codecs, primarily: MPEG-1 Layer II, and Musepack. Some hybrids like AC-3 exist as well.
Amateur testing is pretty pointless... You're no longer judging which sounds more like the original, you're picking the one whose distortions you like more. Low bitrate codecs often throw in a relatively small amount of noise, which masks artifacts, and simply sounds sufficiently different that it's no longer the same audio. Compare a song (from a CD), to the same after normalizing the volume, and you'll have the same problem... You'll probably pick the modified version as sounding better, even though both are lossy, and at first glance, the same audio.
I can certainly imagine the next generation of lossy audio codecs will pitch-shift music to an octave people generally prefer, to get a higher rating on such "tests". Cheap igital cameras often do the same thing... over-correcting gamma to make every picture more white (bluish, really) and turning up the contrast to make it more vivid, so much so that it looks "better than the real thing".
Re:Ugh (Score:3, Interesting)
Intelligent audiophiles don't fall for the $1000 cables, etc.
When you want to listen to a lot of movies at dolby reference levels without any noticeable distortion in a larger room you are going to spend a lot more on speakers because movies frequently output levels below 20hz (even if you can't hear the sound it is outputting you can feel it and definitely hear the port noise on the subwoofer)
The problem is a lot of the people who think they are audio knowledge gods will buy the $1000 cables even if lab equipment can't detect any difference.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:2, Interesting)
When I first heard the difference (Score:5, Interesting)
and certainly not in a typical house room, car, bus, or bike.
I had been buying things from iTunes (128kbps AAC) and noticed no problems in my car or with my cheap computer speakers (with various computer noises in the room). I had, however, burned a few disks from iTunes and played them on my low end component system. Again, all was reasonably well until I played classical music that way.
When I first played downloaded classical music on that system I thought that something was broken. It was truly and horribly unlistenable. It took me a while to isolate the problem, but after other disks played fine and this disk played "fine" in my computer and car I finally figured out what the problem was.
Between that time and the introduction of iTunes+ (256kbps AAC) I stopped getting compressed classical (and some jazz) tracks.
What was so surprising about this experience is that (a) I hadn't set it up as a test of my hearing, but I noticed the difference entirely spontaneously. Indeed it hadn't even occurred to me that this might be an issue. And (b) I don't at all consider myself to be an audiophile. My hearing really isn't all that good.
The lesson is that what matters is what you hear with your music in your listening environment. In my most common listening environments it's all good. And with most of my music it's all good. But with a small subset of my music in one of my listening environments, bit rates can make the difference between unlistenable to perfectly enjoyable.
Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I think you missed it, regarding wine -- you have it backwards. Quality is rarity. Poor quality stuff is very common. Higher quality is usually a fortunate circumstance of a particular harvest of a particular grape in a particular area of a particular vineyard, and combined with a good vintner's touch. So high quality is a rare thing. Its not the rarity that makes it pricey, its the fact that high quality wine is remarkably rare and therefore pricey.
Re:Not Really (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ugh (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Amateur rocket scientists... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but music is not a square wave. While there is some variation in "compressibility" (Kolmogorov complexity) the differences between various types and genres are not terribly significant. 88kbps/channel is the value established by Johnston while at AT&T, and it has held-up to all scrutiny quite well.
No. If you model the human auditory system, you can figure out every possible masking technique that can be used, to determine which parts of complex sounds can be discarded without being perceived. After you've done that, it's a (relatively) straight-forward question of mathematically establishing the amount of entropy (randomness) in what's left of that hacked-up but otherwise uncompressed audio data.
Try any compression algorithms you like on the output of /dev/urandom and note that you get NO compression at all. I'm afraid the issue with audio compression is the same (boring) solved problem. The work has been done to determine the maximum theoretical compression you can get, by experts, and the only way to exceed that compression ratio is to discard audible information.
It's tube amplifiers all over again (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of your audiophiles will tell you that tube based amplifiers produce less distortion than transistor based models.
The truth is that they often produce MORE distortion, only the distortion that they produce is pleasing to the ear, where as the distortion created by transistor based amps tends to be unpleasant to listen to.
If listeners are rating MP3's as superior to FLAC, it is most likely because the psycho-acoustic models used by the codes are introducing artifacts that improve the sound of the music, at least according to the subjective opinion of those listeners.
What you have to realize is that there is no perfect recording of music or any other form of audio data. All music is distorted as compared to what it actually sounded like in the studio. Some of this distortion is deliberate, which is why you have all those knobs and dials on the mixing console. A lot of music nowadays is compressed, which creates more deliberate distortion. Encoding that analog data into a 16bit digital stream stream at 44khz produces yet more distortion.
At the end of the day you have to figure out what sounds best to you because all of it will have distortion of some sort or another.
Re:You're accidentally correct (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all people who purchase Monster Cables, Gold Plated Cables, and all that crap are utterly clueless. The gold is plated and only a couple or angstroms thick, in other words it is worthless.
A thing or two about cables...
For carrying the output of the main amplifier to the speakers, ANY cable that can handle the power load without overheating and starting your house on fire will work fine. We are talking high voltage and current levels.
Signal cables... We are talking millivolts here. They need to be well shielded and well built that is about it and the mechanical connection needs to fit securely.
In ANY audio system there are two critical components: A. The device that produces the music from the source ( tape, phonograph, tuner, cd player ). and B. the device that takes the amplified electronic signal and turns it back into sound waves and those are the speakers, everything else is BS when it comes to all those flowery terms that audiophiles use.
The Pre-Amplifier ( often sold as a seperate component). If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power output ( measured in millivolts ) with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum and performs the correct equalization according to the RIAA specifications ( especially critical for vinyl ) then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Amplifier. If it produces and undistorted wave form from it's minimum to it's maximum power ( measured in watts ) output with a flat frequency response in it's specified spectrum rating then it will introduce nothing to alter the sound.
The Speakers. If the speakers produce the same wave form, without distortio then it will not alter the sound.
The biggest problem with almost EVERY music system being built today is the fact that the power supply is inadequate and that the components are quite often under rated for the power that the amplifier is specified to produce. If an amplifier is designed to put out 100 watts of audio power then it's power supply should be able to provide at least 1000 watts to the final amplification stage to handle transients, especially in the lower frequency ranges and the components of the amplifier should be able to handle ALL of that power, and the amplifier will never clip and distort your signal.
So the moral of the story is.... Spend the biggest portion of your audio budget on 1. The Speakers and 2. The sound source component, if you listen to vinyl, spend it on the best turntable and cartridge you can afford, if you are a CD person I suggest Creek Audio ( over a thousand bucks for a SINGLE cd player, but they simply are the best ). As far as I can tell, no company is manufacturing tape recorders other then Nagra which are mono and are used pretty much exclusively in the film industry. You can still find good reel-to-reel and some professional cassette equipment on ebay and there are companies still manufacturing tape for at least reel-to-reel.
Re:You're accidentally correct (Score:5, Interesting)
Vinyl is the only format of the three that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear.
I'm sorry, but this simply isn't the case. Vinyl absolutely cannot "contain" any loud low frequency stereo signal - at least, nothing that was put there intentionally. The groove would become so shallow the needle would pop out of it and go skidding across the platter. You might be able to record a very soft low-frequency signal onto vinyl, but given the way human hearing works, that would almost certainly be masked by louder low frequency signals further up the audio spectrum in the music. Unless you like to sit around and listen to the output of a pure tone generator, this isn't really much of an "advantage" for vinyl.
Vinyl's inability to handle even moderately loud low bass is the reason why the sound of dance music changed so much starting in the mid-'80s - eventually resulting in things like house music - as CDs became popular and suddenly you could record deep bass at maximum volume and deliver it to consumers unaltered. I recall hearing Pet Shop Boys "I Want A Dog" in 1988 or thereabouts on a high-end sub/sat system at an audio dealer and thinking, "Holy crap! How did they get the bass so loud?" It felt like I'd swallowed a subwoofer it was so loud. You couldn't physically deliver anything like that on vinyl - you would have to roll the deep bass off by many decibels or the groove would literally go flat. Even most consumer tape formats would have had trouble handling that much low-frequency signal, especially given the tape duplication methods used at that time (although at least they'd fail less spectacularly, with tape's fairly warm-sounding saturation).
Discos in the '70s could pump out that kind of deep bass, but they did it using a gadget from dbx called a subharmonic synthesizer, which would produce a note exactly an octave below whatever you fed into it. They'd feed your typical vinyl recording with its anemic bass into the device, and get this pulsating, throbbing audio out. But until CD came around there was no way to deliver that to the home, maybe short of half-speed mastered reel to reel or (possibly) metal cassette tape.
You do get all sorts of low frequency signal coming off of vinyl when you play it, but it's mostly noise - rumble from the motor and pickup in the turntable itself, the scraping of the needle in the groove, low-frequency resonances induced by the playback speakers, and harmonics and low-frequency noise etched into the master itself when that was being cut. All of that garbage robs power from your amplifier and causes scads of distortion in your speakers, screwing up the real signal you're trying to reproduce. It's just another way in which vinyl is not only an awful audio format, but a spectacularly awful audio format. It's not just awful because of what it can't accurately record, it's awful because of all of the noise and artifacts it introduces which cause further distortion of what it has managed to accurately record.
As for high frequency data, yes vinyl can record signals higher than the 20kHz limit of CD, but if you're over 13 and live in the West it's unlikely you can hear any of it. Worse, each time you play a record the needle actually damages it, and the high frequencies are damaged the first and the worst. That's one of the many reasons why the old discrete quad format failed back in the '70s - it used ultrasonic multiplexing to record the quad signal, and that signal rapidly degraded with every playback. Whoops! (The matrix quad formats - which didn't rely on ultrasonics - failed for other reasons.) Beyond that, the vast majority of what signal there is over 20kHz on most vinyl records is pure unadulterated noise which has absolutely nothing to do with the original signal that was recorded. It's hiss, it's harmonic distortion induced in both the cutting head and in your pickup's needle by lower-frequency signals, it's from clicks and pops caused by dust or by imperfections
Re:Any good audio engineer will tell you- (Score:3, Interesting)
Give me the most highly rated Zinfandel and I probably would give a pretty low reguard compaired to a more moderately rated Shiraz, the same goes for region, I personally think the highest quality Australian or South American wines pale in comparison to the mid-line quality wines from Sonoma or France.
Obviously this is a matter of taste, but personally I'd have to disagree, at least with regard to the Australian stuff. Several mid-range Australian wines (e.g. Penfolds Bin 389) compare favourably with similarly priced Californian and French wines in my experience. I don't have the experience with the higher quality wines to make the comparison with those, but I can only assume that as there are numerous wines that have received better reviews than 389 that they are actually, at least in some fashion, better.
This is true of more than wines, go check your top shelf vodkas, most of them taste just as good as a $25 bottle of "lesser" vodka.
Depends what you want from your vodka, I guess. If you want it to taste "pure" (as is generally the case for mixing) then you definitely want the cheap stuff, which usually has an ingredient list that reads "water, ethanol, glycerol" -- i.e., it's synthetic vodka with no flavour other than the alcohol and the slight sweetness of the glycerol. _Real_ vodka has some trace flavours remaining from the source grains. Some people don't like that flavour.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:5, Interesting)
'Actually, a large number of people rating MP3 higher than FLAC suggests that they noticed a difference between the two encodings and preferred MP3.'
Which has in fact been claimed to be the case, at least with younger people:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html [oreilly.com]
Loudness Wars (Score:2, Interesting)
What size listening space is being used? (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it really disturbing that no one ever brings up the fact that these results will vary widely depending on the size of the listening space.
.jpg .tiff file of the same photo. Yet when we take these same two files and print them at 5' x 12' billboard size, the jpg file will appear so grossly grainy and pixelated, .tiff file will maintain a much more coherent presentation of what the original picture looked like.
While my own experience is that at home (Genelec 1031A, Shure EC530 in-ear monitors, etc..) or in a small studio it is somewhat difficult to pick those
differences out, as soon as the same test is conducted in a larger acoustic space, they jump out to the point that it is obscene and hard to ignore.
As I have already said many times in previous posts here, we can sit here and argue all day long about which looks better on our laptop's LCD monitor, a 65 Kbytes
or a 82 Meg
while the
In other words, large-scale sound systems tend to act as magnifiers for these minute artifacts and differences which lossy audio compression introduces, and there is no
question in my mind that when the same tests are performed in an auditorium or a reasonably anechoic concert hall (in open air even better because no reflections) it
does immediately become quite apparent how much the lossy encoding process actually messes with the information.
It is not merely a function of frequency response, distortion and other lab specs, rather a more fundamental one of the poorly-understood characteristics that give music its
inner dynamic, the 'punch' in the low frequencies, the cleanliness in the top end and tails of reverbs, as well as many times the resultant waveforms of many combined
harmonic sounds in the midrange, probably a bit more so on acoutic instruments, but not always necessarily so.
I would welcome similar tests done on a reasonable sound reinforcement rig, like a typical line array system with 50,000 watts of power in a room which can accommodate
1,500 people, a pretty standard setup for concerts and DJ gigs. (keeping in mind that in such systems there is a digital processor in the chain through which the sound will pass)
There are much deeper implications to this, such as the fact that vinyl and open-reel while flawed to some extent still offer the human ear a much smoother experience
in acoustic spaces of that size, as CD and DVD players do a very poor job of reconstituting the the 'slices' of digital audio after D/A conversion, yes great master clocking will
make the signal sound more bearable, but there is a continuity between the waveforms which analog seems to do much better than most digital systems ever can at the sampling
rates they are currently working at, and which I am sad to report haven't really changed a lot since 1981 when the CD spec was developed, SACD being a step in the right direction.
That these older analog formats are not even included in the tests means pretty much the equivalent of the one-eyed man being crowned the leader of the kingdom of the blind.
Which is why to this day, many of the top professional DJs insist on playing from analog sources such as vinyl, which while they have certain inconvenient artifacts of their own, do offer
something else that the human ear craves for, and is really keenly attuned to: continuity of sound, and the smoothness of a natural waveform. This effect is clearly demonstrated by making
an high-quality open-reel tape copy of a CD, and playing the two side-to-s
It's the same with audio equipment (Score:3, Interesting)
As many people have said, a lot of this is just what you are used to.
An anecdotal tale from my previous life as a shop-floor assistant at a hi-fi store. We used to sell cheap consumer stuff alongside the serious amps and speakers but probably about a quarter of my customers genuinely preferred the sound coming from a cheap boombox to a more serious setup. It'd make my ears bleed it was so bad but it was the sort of sound they were used to and they liked it.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:3, Interesting)
I know the SR60s/SR80s win a lot of awards, but I've not been a fan of them. They don't have enough presence, and in any slightly noisy environment they got completely drowned out - either down to their not keeping ambient sound out, or not packing enough punch. In isolation, they are pretty good. They're also not as comfortable as a good sennheiser, for me, I find the foam a little scratchy. I'd like a comparison of the 80s with the 225s, though.
The Sennheiser 500/600 series (by budget) are universally awesome, though a bit big for travelling with. If your budget stretches that far, AKG 701s or the Denon AH series are also great bets. I'd thoroughly recommend you try some of those, the Senny 600/650s, the AKG 701 or Denon AH-2000 or 5000.
(I also have no fiscal interest in any headphone companies, just like good quality headphones!)
Don't know about "we", but I can (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it means a large number of people thought the MP3 is what it *should* sound like. Most people are use to crappy music encodes these days, so wouldn't realise higher quality encodes as it should sound like.
Doesn't help that the DAC/ADC etc are pretty poor in the common mans PC too, and the higher quality ones of those also have some awesome DSP that can help get over some of the deficiencies in the encoding. I wonder if that USB card they used allowed them to totally deactivate all DSP. My ASUS D2X allows me to do such, but most cards do not.
If it was true that people just couldn't tell the difference the results for choosing one over the other would be roughly equal.
Re:You're accidentally correct (Score:1, Interesting)
EQ and compression!
This is bullshit, bass reproduction is not so constrained by the playback media as the playback equipment. A 15" loud speaker delivers more low frequency content than 8x10" loud speakers. However, 8x10s [ampeg.com] move more air so they are subjectively louder and deliver a better defined sound -- something most people hear as "more bass". Stand in front of a typical dub sound system and you'd not know from the bass content if the source material is on vinyl or CD (unless there's obvious low end stereo which, as you obviously know -- is not possible on vinyl).
Typically they'll roll off above 16k, but there's program content well beyond that. I can hear a discernable difference to the harmonics of many instruments if I apply a 24db/octave low pass filter at 16k and I've played in rock bands for 20 years.
Not really, it's entirely subjective if a distortion characteristic is audibly pleasing or not. I'm not an audiophile; I like transformer balanced input stages, I like valve amps, I like transistor based distortion, I like tape saturation and I like vinyl. We call it character or color and spend a considerable amount of time trying to impart digital recordings with such pleasing technical imperfections. Thus, the surface noise and distortions inherent with vinyl conspire to make something like the Who's My Generation sound fucking awesome on 7" vinyl. By comparison, that same track sounds relatively dull and lifeless on CD.
Re:The hiss is where it hides (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, an equal number preferred the 320 Kbps MP3 and the FLAC encoded files. It was the 192 Kbps MP3s that was preferred by a higher number of people than the FLAC, by a margin of eight to six. So the 192 Kbps MP3s also received more votes than the 320 Kbps MP3s.
As others have stated, people have become accustomed to the sound of MP3s encoded at a lower bit rate, and people tend to prefer something that's familiar. That's why your kid will turn his nose up at that gourmet meal you worked your ass off to prepare and ask for a Big Mac instead.
The part of the article I found most instructive was this:
Your ears will always be the most important part of the signal path when it comes to judging fidelity.
I think it's also worth noting that there are other reasons besides audio fidelity to consider other formats. The MP3 format introduces a small amount of silence at the beginning of the track track as it encodes - and decodes - the file. Because the standard has no way of accounting for this padding, it can not be removed during playback, resulting in annoying gaps between tracks that can ruin your enjoyment of live, classical or prog rock albums that really need to be listened to as a continues piece of music. Ogg Vorbis was designed to account for this padding during playback, and lossless formats like FLAC do not introduce padding in the first place, so for that reason alone those formats are preferable over MP3.
As others have suggested, the best scenario would be to encode your library of music in a lossless format like FLAC, then encode those files as needed in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis for listening on portable devices.
Re:I get headaches from listening (Score:2, Interesting)