Audiophile or Audio-Fooled? How Good Are Your Ears?
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- Опубликовано: 11 окт 2017
- In this video, we explore the differences between MP3s, WAV, FLAC (lossless), AAC and whether you can tell the difference? or if it even matters? Discussion on mixing, listening, monitors and audion file formats.
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The reason why audiophiles prefer high-resolution audio up to 24bit, 192kHz, is because of the *loudness war.*
@The Turd Reich of Mar-A-Lago Exactly 24bit will give you more headroom, and it seems like it's necessary now, because the loudness war or volume radio standards will NOT go back to 80s volume standards anymore, and the loudness war will always be a never ending quest, this is life, i'm sorry...
I'm so sick of people saying that 24bit is placebo when in the first place they're listening with a INCORRECT headphones and equipment, or unfortunately people may be unhealthy and/or uneducated, or unable to hear/see *real* world subtle details.
But high resolution audio definitely benefits on loud recordings, not to loudness war but loud enough like Daft Punk's last album.
But this is WHY Hi-Res audio exist, because musicians refuse to lower the volume or stop overcompressing it's music, in favor of quality. Humans cannot hear over 48khz, but it will remove the harshness and the distortion of the recordings.
@The Turd Reich of Mar-A-Lago And finally, the MASTER matters at 95%
@MF Nickster So Hi-fi is dead in that case... Since 1995
@MF Nickster 24bit straight from studio or bought from Qobuz it does... If it was all like you said in the first place Hi-Res and DRM won't be a business in the first place.
As a speaker builder I can say that the audible difference between various SPEAKERS is MUCH greater than the audible difference between lossy and lossless audio files.
firecloud77 true. Speakers, the room you're in, the positioning of the speakers in the room, your positioning regarding to the speakers in the room, even the lighting or your general mood... all much more important than the actual audio format.
in my experience, most people can't hear the audible difference between lossy and lossless audio files either, many don't care or don't have high-quality music systems ... they just want to hear their music and that's fine
@janminor1172 so is level of sobriety
Yes, that is probably the reason why they used puny headphones, to make their test irrelevant.
Even the slightest difference in the crossover performance of the two speakers has far more influence on the sound than all other characteristics of the system put together, due to comb filtering. That is why you have never seen a graph of a stereo system performance. Only a single channel.
I got 6 out of 6 cus I figured that if you cycle very fast between the songs, the one that takes the longest to load is the uncompressed song :D.
dosduros work smarter not harder
LOL well played :D
lol
I came to that same conclusion (longest DL= the uncompressed WAV), but Rick is right. Is there any sonic difference between the samples? I didn't hear any.
@@hellbent1567 I heard differences in 4 out of the 6 tracks, but even then I had to not only use the best gear I had but also focus so hard on the individual sounds there was no way i was enjoying the music at the same time.
I loved Steve Guttenerg’s definition of an audiophile...”An audiophile is someone who listens to music without multitasking”. Just listen!
and then there are electrical engineers who actually understand the theories and applications of a component. "Audio-fool" actually was invented by engineers.
Oh and also there are scientists who agree with engineers.
@@ragilmalik By the way they are the same people who make 10k+ power cables lubed with snake oil.
I think a better one was, "Normal people use equipment to listen to artist's music. Audiophiles use artist's music to listen to their equipment."
@@a_lonely_moderate8449 Probably the best comment i've seen on this subject yet..... 👍👍
Some people listen to SOUND, others listen to MUSIC!! 😉
@@conan5885 some listen to both...
I love the conclusion. Ultimately music pleasure comes fro feeling it rather than being a purely physical matter. Let’s not forget that Beethoven composed most of his best music when virtually deaf. I bet he enjoyed listening to it
I like vinyl because the art is bigger.
That's very true. If you're lucky the inner sleeve has photos or lyrics.
love vinyl too
Yeah, good for 50+ eyes 👀 😉
i like download music file for free
@@sandechoir and look at the pictures on a 1440p screen
I like vinyl because of the expense and the inconvenience.
Good video Rick. Very interesting. When I was a teenager (45 years ago😢) I found the same thing you described was true with speakers. You even touched on that. My advice to people - Buy speakers that sound good to you! Knowing the specs are nice and use them as a guide but ultimately buy speakers that YOU like!
Vinyl compresses the audio dramatically as the needle radius becomes less. The best way for a consumer to listen to recorded must is open reel tape.
My vote goes to the inconvenience. That little ritual does something, builds expectations, commitment, it's like signing a contract. The two of us for the next 20-25 minutes, then I'll flip you over for another round. Makes me a better listener. :D
I love vinyl because of the snaps, crackles and pops -- takes me back to my favorite childhood breakfast cereal.
@Abe Froman Hopefully you'll get over the naive nostalgia for a pain in the ass.
Just to let you know: the "warmth" of vinlk is DISTORTION. What we DON'T want in fidelity is DISTORTION.
I remember making that same "mistake" with the Coldplay song / files first when I took this test. The lossy files (or was it only the 128 kbps one...) had actually removed some burned in (clipping) distortion (mostly in the high frequencies) that were present in the WAV file. So judging it better was kind of obvious the first time around.
I dont know what those things are, but I guessed 128 on coldplay, and got 4/6 on the rest. Your innocuous comment here might be the reason I upgrade from my m40x, I am curious how much better headphones get
@@Ckwon117 Honestly, not all that much... Really, the main two factors that make a headphone good are sound signature and the actual comfort. There's going to be some qualities that aren't picked up by the sound signature, since they're not perfectly linear systems, as well as because of the quirks measuring rigs still have, however, they do get it mostly right.
@@Ckwon117 If you want different, get a Hifiman, I recommend the hifiman he400se, in my opinion it's more friendly than the Sundara, definitely has better bass.
I got 5/6 right, the coldplay song was the one I got wrong, chose it too quickly. Also I only had 356 kbps max, cuz I was using my iPad.
I have tinnitus. Everything sounds like crap
Bless your tinnitus, made me chuckle hard
@Dio Dio you don't?
I have tinnitus as well, but maybe not as bad as yours. The differences were subtle to my ears. I had the hardest time with the voice (I think I got it right just from guessing . 😂).
I also have tinnitus, with some WEEKS of spikes. :( Very bad situation.
Still, in a good day, I can spot the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. Very rare, only in a very good days.
Anyway, if I not pay attention, I cannot say which is which. (as the guy say)
@@cristic767 hey dont feel so bad. Half of Daft Punk had tinnitus too, and that...makes it...uhh
Yea i hope y'all recover soon
As a 52 year old drummer/live sound tech I know my hearing has been compromised. As much as I love hi rez audio I'd happily trade all the hi rez in the world for music that has dynamics again.
Yes, dynamics is what is missing. Not frequencies we cant hear (higher than 44.1 sampling frequencies), or dynamics that will cause permanent hearing damage (bitrate of 24... although in a soundproofed room, 16db of dynamics, will only make the strongest sounds strong, but in a normal listening situation, with background noise, using the full dynamics of CD and adjusting the volume to hear the weakest sounds will cause pain...).
Some hi rez files are based on better mixed sources, and some vinyls are as well compared to the CD version, and therefor might sound better.
But CD has all the technical capabilities we need.
+Jon Holstein Quit spamming the comments Jon
hell yes, dynamic FTW i'm sick with these new mastering. why on earth todays vinyl has more dynamic than CD in fact technology wise it should be the other way around
Absolutely. Perhaps that is my main reason not to listen to the crap played on most radios these days.
Yes! Everything after 96' is compressed to shreds. And even today's indy bands, first record always has great dynamics, but as soon as they get a little popular, second record is compressed much more.
Watching this was a great relief for me. I have been working with audio my entire life. I'm now 74. When I was young I could hear somewhere in the range of 16 KHz and above. Many years of loud music with headphones, and speakers loud enough to walk the crockery off the shelves, my hearing has deteriorated to where 8 KHz is now my highest limit.
In the last decade or so I have been working a lot with filmmaking, which involves not only editing images, but sound as well. I was beginning to get a little worried that my hearing deficiencies could seriously affect my ability to work with sound effectively.
Your final remarks here have shown that maybe it really doesn't matter.
Thank you so much for your experienced and invaluable opinions.
I can’t remember who said "Musicians use their stereo to listen to music. Audiophiles use music to listen to their stereo."
Late to the party here. Hard to tell the 320 from the uncompressed but there's a big difference between those and the 128s. It's not just the sonic range, it's more the way they communicate the ambience of rooms, the timbre of voices and instruments...all these make the experience more immersive, whether people are aware of them or not. When I'm listening to a song I love and I get distracted, it's usually because the playback quality is in some way degraded or subtly dissonant.
Good point. The best way I could describe the difference between 128 and 320 is to make a comparison using color. It's like having the same picture with the same colors but in the 128 version the colors are muted or faded compared to the 320.
I'm not an audio file.
But your voice could be...
Ha funny.
ArgoBeats I have never been impressed by any headphones or speakers but today my sound system impressed me
audiophile
you call me an audiophile I think I am different all the speakers I use is cheap car speakers if my cheap car speakers is better then the most high end speakers then that means all you guys are not smart
Sound quality isn't only about frequencies. To me, the easiest way to distinguish uncompressed audio is to listen to clarity in stereo image, and listen to dynamics. This made the NPR test somewhat easy to me. Only challenge was Suzanne Vega's acapella singing, because that clip didn't really have much stereo image nor dynamics.
And 256 kbps can sound better than 320 kbps if the encoding was better, so that stereo image and instrument positioning has been maintained better.
you fool
It’s the combination of experience, training, hearing and God given music discernment ability that makes a great producer/mixer
At 71, after 50 plus years of playing and recording, my left and right ears have totally different response curves, in some cases there are frequencies missing from one or the other. My audiologist told me that the brain would compensate but I haven’t found that to be the case. Add to that my tinnitus is so loud that I have to crank the volume up to get over the noise that it becomes a vicious circle, adding to the damage. I’ve just recently accepted that I can no longer do a good mix. While I can still track well everything else is off the table. I guess it’s time to find a good mixing house.
Back in the day, I could hear up to 23KHz, but more importantly, I could hear detail. I was literally a "golden ears" consultant to high end audio stores. It was less about frequency range and more about a natural, three dimensional soundstage. If the trumpet player takes a step forward (and the recording and playback are good enough) you can hear it. OTOH, if blindfolded, I shouldn’t be able to tell where the speakers are. Obviously, rating sound quality in that regard through headphones is pretty much impossible. But I bet I could still tell the difference between uncompressed CD sound and its MP3 counterpart with audio levels matched to
@@EdHorch what amp/speaker do you use?
@@sionevans8370 AR turntable with a Linn Basik arm and a Signet something-or-other cartridge, feeding the preamp section of an NAD 730 receiver, into an Adcom 555 amp. That all goes into a pair of Theil 02 bookshelf speakers and whatever I feel like hooking up as a sub. It's above mid-fi, and anything better would be beyond what I can hear any more.
I’m in the same boat
I’m good with soundstage, separation and definition to a degree. But the wife has to tell me the coffee pot beeped.
And I’ve had Hyperacusis hit about the same time as the pandemic.
With my tinnitus I find protecting my ears from wind helps as well as less caffeine and try to envision faders to try to bring it down in my heads mix.
Some days are good, some nights can be hell.
I got all of them,
My secret: very bad internet speed
@DADOU OMÉGA you guys are liars nobody other than musicians and people in the recording studio's music business can tell by listening?
@DADOU OMÉGA nope I didn't know it was a joke.
@@marksantucci4230 Stop drooling on yourself.
The secret is how long the files take to start playing, assuming your internet speed is slow or you click them really fast, there's way of cheating without listening. I think that's what Jose meant.
I was listening through my studio monitors through my computer. You got 1 out of 6 correct! But I am almost 70 and spent a lot of years in front of huge amplifier stacks in the 60's & 70's. I do have a documented >25% hearing loss of high frequency and wife talking!
I would blame at least 25% of those 30% due to this "wife talking". :) But seriously, i am not surprised, that you got 70% correct with actual decent speakers instead of their headphones.
I guess I can hear 20k (I can say that 18k I hear 100%), but in music, I can’t hear difference between 320 and flac. 128 and 320 - yes, sometimes music lost “air” and “freshness” in high and punch on bass and kicks. Main question is - it’s worth it? If you really hear difference in blind test and you ready to spend money for this - it’s for you. Once my friend can’t hear difference between Gibson Custom Shop and Chinese copy, but still want to have original. When I asked him:”maybe, you just want to know, that you guitar is expensive and see the Gibson logo on a headstock?” He said:”yes, it’s just warm my soul”. Be honest for yourself.
Agreed but 128 I can hear distorted Cybols and the Sax sound suffers. but yeah 320k and Wav, I cannot tell, even with a superior system and specialized listening room. it is still about 4 to 1 compression. best compromise
I can hear from 14Hz to about 15.5kHz, my ears are freaking old, like Beato old and I've sat behind a drum kit for 40+ years. I'm totally with you regarding 128k and 320k, the difference is noticeable with all genres but electronica. But I'll be damned if I can tell the difference between 320 and FLAC.
@@Darrylizer1 wow 14hz is low!
You need a big sub tuned low to hear that! Could it be you're hearing/feeling resonances?
@@sionevans8370 No I could hear the tone, anything under that though I really couldn't hear. I did the test with Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro headphones which have a frequency response from 5 Hz - 35000 Hz.
I can spot differences between 128kbps and 320kbps most of time. But 320kbps and .wav sounds the same for me..
Trash uncompressed is still trash! Seriously though it depends on a few things, many artists make the songs for lossy formats ahead of time since 99% will be listening in a lossy format, top 40 and popular music are simple and made for sales have no artistic value, older songs arnt made on computers so a wav would make no difference, type of music: rock tends to the same on everything because sounds is heavy blended on the other hand electronic type music is really noticable, lastly Balanced armature iem's is were you really notice quality . Ironically most audiophiles are hipsters with overpriced equipment that is lower quality then some $50 iems.
Perhaps you can side by side, but can you walk into a high end audio store and be able to tell what bit rate a random song is just by listening to it all by itself, with nothing to compare it to? Or even if it's digital at all?
@FireLion you should be able to hear it any sound device provide it isnt a mp3 or flac in a . Wav container. Wav PCM16, 24,32 have their full dynamic range, encoded music(mp3 or lossless) do not. Just turn the song up
@@Thanatos4655 and dynamic range is better on old recordings
I got 5/6 correct. Got all correct except Neil Young's ‘There’s A World’ in which I could hear imperfections in the sample which were jarring. Not a good studio. I chose the 320k sample.
I've always had annoyingly good hearing (not so god at listening). I hate CRT monitors and glad they're gone; they produced an ultrasonic whine that nobody else could hear.
I also have $200 BGVP DM6 headphones and an MPOW filter, but didn't use an amp.
The 128k samples were all awful to my ears.
A small point worth adding, especially for anyone claiming audible difference or lack of it, is that mp3 encoders are not created equal (the same applies for newer popular compression formats).
Mp3 specifies how to format the data, but not how to encode it. Encoders have to make "choices" about what to filter out or even transform, and some are better than others. Unless you have a good mathematical background (in which case you might as well understand formulas by yourself), here's a fairly simple analogy: there is a yellow post-it on a table (the music to encode) that a few people (encoders) are asked to describe in as much details as possible (encode), using either 128 or 320 "english words" (format, mp3). You then read them. 320 words descriptions will probably give you a better (and near-perfect) idea of the object than 128-word versions, yet some will be better than others even among the 320-word versions, simply because some people are better at writing descriptive sentences using fewer but better words (which obviously I am not).
same holds true for decoders
@@jimkerrigan1888 The same is not true for decoders. All mp3 decoders will produce the same output with the slight caveat that there may be rounding differences which are negligible.
Mp3,flac,lossy/lossless are the same at any bitrate, they arint the original. bitrate isnt the same a bits . uncompressed wav playback is 1440MBps( 1400 MBps = 1400 Megabytes =11200000 Kbps flac/mp3 you need this bitrate to match the original) quality is pointless a 900kps lossless compressed flac has 1% of the songs data, they the bit upscale(litteraly fake bits) at decoding attempting to predict what the original sounds like, this is impossible since 99% is gone. Audio quality is unmeasurable since it is software decoding.
@@Thanatos4655 Well even wav file can vary in quality depending on the sample rate and bit depth. But a lossless compression algorithm can be set to reproduce the original signal.
@ThanatosXRS You made a little mistake man. The standard audio CD format is 16-bit, 44.1KHz
44.1 kHz = 44100 Hz (44100 16-bit samples for second)
44100 * 16 = 705 600 bps (bits per second)
For 2 channels (stereo): 2 * 705 600 = 1 411 200 bps
1 411 200 bps / 1000 = 1 411.2 kbps = 1.4112 mbps (mbits per second, not MBytes per second!)
1.4112 mbps / 8 = 0.1764 MBytes per second, but not 1400 MBytes per second.
You are wrong with about 7 936 times ;)
Audio CD contains about 74 min audio:
74 min * 60 sec = 4 440 sec
4 440 sec * 0.1764 MBps = 783.216 MB on a CD
If you were right, one CD would fit:
783 MB / 1400 MBps ~ 0.56 seconds of music :) :)
320 Kbps bitrate is exactly 4.41 times less than uncompressed CD audio,
or in fact there are 22.68% of original data.
Respectively, 900 Kbps are 63.78% of original data.
Please, be more careful with bits(b) and Bytes(B) - mathematics can be a two-blade knife if misused.
I'm an about to retire audio/video engineer who worked worked for Philips mastering the first CDs in the early 80s, and took great pride in making the best possible sound we could produce. I recently met a wealthy gentleman in California that bought amplifiers for his home theater for $900,000 (I'm not joking) to listen to MP3 quality music. I could almost cry when I think about the care we used to take to make such high quality recordings when I see what has become "good enough" today. In my opinion audio quality improved from Emil Berliner in the late1800s until the 1990s when it peaked, and has gone downhill since then.
Would love to hear some stories from that era, mastering the first CDs in the eighties 👍
A bit like listening to some classic rock recordings from the 1970-1980’s on Spotify - what on earth have they done with it? I have vinyl records and know them well.
$900,000 to listen to MP3 quality music...what a travesty! I'm trying to conceive what those cardboard-crap files must've sounded like. Horrendous I'm sure! .
The guy bought one Ferrari to use as a sofa!!!
@@Marcus_C51 900,000 to listen to anything!!!
It's very selfish of him.............I could have used that money to spend on nonsense and gobldygook
I don't think if there is any single channel that has taught me as much about music than this amazing channel. Thanks RB
You're right Rick. Dude I am one of those snotty dudes who wants everything to sound as good as possible, born in 1971 and went to music school in the 80s. My entire music collection is in FLAC, but all the mobile stuff is 320 because I'm not crazy, I am just like your assistant, I can only tell the difference about half the time. And that's normally when I'm remembering exactly how something specific went in a track. Anything lower drives me nuts with artifacts but at 320 were pretty golden.
I have the odd FLAC on my mobile, but most of my audio is 500kbps OGGs - a bit over the top, but my main music source gives me OPUS files, which I love and would use save for the fact that support for metadata is abysmal - it can do it, but few music tagging softwares will recognise it. As I don't want to end up double-compressing I crank up the quality on the OGGs. Still get a decent filesize nonetheless
Same for me. I can only tell If I really know the song and then its a very small difference between the two. The WAV just sounds a bit more full and slightly clear. I have a tidal subscription and I download what I can find in Masters and the rest is 320. I have a really quality sound system and I just want to get the best out of it and I want to hear it how the artist intended.
The artifact that drives me most crazy is the "shimmer" in mids and highs with poor-quality encoding.
That Coldplay album is compressed to hell (brick wall amplitude compressed) and sounds dreadful on a good system. I'm not surprised she couldn't tell which version was MP3 compressed on top of that. You need to use good dynamic recordings to notice the differences. It's a pity that it's getting harder and harder to find good recordings among main stream artists.
Damn you Wall of Sound!
Wanted to write the same with coldplay....from the 6 I had only 1 correct LOL
She probably recognized the poor quality version as best since that sounded the most familiar. Radios and streaming services hardly try with quality
@@MiDnYTe25 Bingo! ...and just to add another point that brings in the OP's mentionings, because of the loudness war at play, the higher frequencies would sound less harsh due to the filtering out @ 128kb mp3. Thus, consequently pushing forward the midtones around 1kHz-3kHz tones where our ears are most sensitive and usually, the louder these sound, the clearer due to just how our ears work.
Yup. In *many* instances it doesn't matter; garbage in, garbage out. But in the instances that it *does* matter, it matter a *lot*.
An audio engineer once gave me the best advice you can get about enjoying music: The technical specifications of your setup don't matter. What matters is how close they are to the gear the audio producer was using when he decided that the song was ready.
And not always so either. You may find you prefer how it sounds on system X rather than what the audio engineers ears were listening to
That's why when I used to make my own instrumental hip hop beats I would tour my friends houses to listen to whatever I made on their set ups before releasing lol from those having top tier audiophile equipment to those having regular speakers.
But the key part is " when he decided that the song was ready" Another engineer would have a different standard. Which means the hardware and format don't matter. Its just what that 1 fool things is ready
@@RennieAsh True. A good portion of what separates a good mix from a bad mix is just personal tastes.
Not necessarily, an audio engineer’s job is to mix a song to sound well on the lowest common denominator (Bluetooth speakers, phone speakers, gas station earbuds, etc.). They likely use headphones/speakers that prioritize neutrality as a reference so that they can accurately tweak the EQ of the song to sound good on the majority of playback devices. The problem with these headphones is they often times sound “boring” and “analytical”, because they have to be, and they aren’t enjoyable to listen to music on for most people. That’s why the majority of playback devices emphasize the lows and highs to make whatever audio is playing through them more exciting. So you probably won’t enjoy music on a pair of Phillips SHP-9500s as much as a pair of Beats by Dre
To defend a bit the audiophiles, some streaming services that call themselfs Hifi, actually don't only offer high frequency files but often different masterings of the same record. And then you DO hear a difference. Is not about the frequencies though, it's about the mastering.
Also, some fancy high end speakers not only go very high on frequency, but also very low. You will certainly hear a difference between a speaker with a lower frequency of say 55Hz (bookshelf)and another with 25Hz (columns). Maybe even feel the difference depending on the volume you're playing.
Frequency range says zero about the quality of the system. My best system (Altec 515C, AER BD2, dht amps) would only hit 40Hz-18kHz, yet my pc speakers say they can do 25Hz-25kHz and sound like total crap.
I still play CDs. When CDs are outlawed, only outlaws will have CDs!
When CD Rom Will be dead they will sell cd at higher prices telling us that is vintage technology 👺🥴🤏
@@napomania i seriously wouldn’t doubt it. Look how damn obsessed people are with vinyls.
I've spent a lotta $ on CDs. Still have all my vinyl, too. That stuff BETTER work.
You'll take my cds from my cold, dead hands!!!
I still have my CD's too vinyl is the new holy grail and that's why they're not cheap anymore it's almost like jazz music for the nerds when i bought lps in the 80s they all were at a reasonable price so i sometimes went home with 3 lps being a happy man what really killed music old and modern was the death of the record store so you could no longer have a chat with people you didn't even know but the passion for music made it easy to communicate with a lot of people and maybe they would recommend you a band you've never heard of to expand your knowledge it was just more simple times back then and the artist got percent of the
record sale and that was more fair cause artists use their time and energy to create something we all can enjoy it's better to get out and meet people cause it's very isolating to sit behind the computer and just streaming
Hearing loss above 10kHz is not a loss of 50%. There’s only one octave from 10kHz to 20kHz. You’re only losing some of the sizzle in the cymbals and upper harmonics of a few instruments. The other (approximately) NINE octaves humans can hear lie between 20Hz and 10kHz, so I’m not too bothered not being able to hear above about 12kHz. The tinnitus can be annoying at times though.
Timothy Reeves - All very good points.
Appie Demir by hearing people asking him about tinnitus he developed it through his subconscious .🤣
goofyfoot2001 wrong thread
goofyfoot2001 it’s tinnitus not tittitus. ;-)
Timothy Reeves Humans can certainly hear well below ONE Hertz. Otherwise tuning musical instruments would be impossible. So you need to add four or five octaves to your nine. And the claim in this video that MP3 encoding is inaudible rests entirely on the original research, which was done on the usual pool of 20-yo psychology students being paid five bucks a time to participate in random experiments, which incidentally invalidates most of the psych experiments of the 20th century,. Not on musicians, recording engineers, audio guys of any kind. While at university I had dozens of opportunities to participate in psych experiments, and I turned them all down, as did nearly all of my friends. So hardly random samples, let alone expert samples. Few things in hifi have less basis than MP3.
I agree with all you've said that it's on on your ability to hear. What's amazing is I'm 57 years old and I "hear" mp3s as lass bass rather than less highs (I'm an electric bass player of 43 years). Time to subscribe to the Beato Ear Training course 🙂
Actually it depends on the program content more than anything else. If you listen to a good piano recording, its much easier to hear the losses of MP3. The problem is for most of us, all we here is MP3, so we get accustomed to it. Secondly it depends on the filtering. Most of the time, the filters are going to hack off the HF anyway, so it won't matter.
Rupert Neve built a console specifically designed for vocals. There was a knob he labeled"air" which had a 15 db boost at 30kHz. No one can hear 30k. Tape machines don't reproduce 30k. But it made a difference in how vocals sounded. This was back in the 70s.
Back in the 80s, I was working on an Amek Angela. The engineer had always complained the console never sounded open. I discovered the main output stage was designed incorrectly, resulting in a 2 db loss at 20kHz. Once I changed the design, the engineer said the high frequencies sounded much smoother and open. We informed Amek regarding their design error, which kind of raised some eyebrows across the pond - especially coming from a 26 year old tech with no real credits to his name.
I don't obviously hear a frequency difference. But there's an undeniable dynamic/spacial difference with hi-res audio at an uncompressed 4+ Mbps vs. 320 Kbps even at 44.1. What people don't get is that you also need a DAC that supports 24-bit or higher to properly decode bit-for-bit digital files (unless it was recorded in 44.1 anyway). The original file must be recorded, mixed, and mastered in hi-res all through, otherwise there will be no difference. Playing hi-res audio on a normal 16-bit DAC will negate anything better than that even with speakers/headphones that can. It's like trying to see high definition video through an S-video cable. Another culprit is the shitty compression of today. Listen to an early Fleetwood Mac Rumours CD or record for example compared to the "remastered" version MP3. I agree 100% that higher frequencies don't make a difference. It's the bitrate, mastering, and data in the file that makes for a better sounding recording. Also that site doesn't state only certain browsers can playback uncompressed audio properly however, it does in the source code for the NPR page. Odd.
Stage B Very well explained. Thank you.
One of the comments you made really struck home with me was about how these engineers might not be able to hear above 14,000 KHz but can listen deep into a mix and hear things the average listener probably wouldn't. It reminded me of another video you posted some time ago where you were pulling out some of the different sections of Yes' "Roundabout" and it made me realize what a lazy listener I can be a lot of the time to music. For me it was a real revelation to actively engage with a recording and listen to it in different ways, sometimes maybe concentrating on the bass, sometimes percussion, etc. I've always been a huge and eclectic lover of music and I feel like that and other things I'm learning on your videos has really deepened my appreciation of what I listen to. I just want to thank you so much for these videos and giving me and all of us this gift! I wish I'd learned some of this in my younger years instead of at 52 :)
Education is as important as natural talent. We may both see the same painting but the educated artist will be able to point out what make it so special or so mediocre.
Excellent post. I have a trained ear but not great hearing...I listen deeply and carefully to instrumentation and then lock on to a particular instrument and "mimic" it in my head ("pa-tingggg!") As if I'm going to imitate it vocally--i know it doesn't make sense but I really focus on isolating and memorizing a specific part of the mix, then A/B against that, then another part, etc.
Recently I compared two universal disc players with a SACD. I heard a percussion instrument using the newer player that was simply absent in the older (but more expensive) player. Then I compared a DVD-A of a different album and could not discern any difference.
My conclusion was that the newer player probably had a better implementation of the SACD decoding chip, which wasn't applicable to the DVD-A. Is that correct? I don't know, but the SACD difference was very clear to me while the DVD-A was identical to me.
Just sharing some personal, non scientific experience about some of the factors that can affect my listening experience. Great discussion.
Well said.
Tim Hall SACD and DVD-Audio are criminally under appreciated formats, what a lost opportunity for the music business, I was set to repurchase hundreds of albums, if not a thousand in high-resolution before the future turned cloudy and they lost support.
Educated listeners here presumably have had the phenomenal engagement with 3 particular high-res must-hear discs: Fleetwood Mac Rumors (DVD-A), Elton John Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (both) and Pink Floyd DSOM (SACD) in 2-ch and surround mixes. Unbelievably emotional experience.
Acoustic Sounds is a great place to buy now that big box guys no longer carry for $12-$15. Does anyone else know of high-res disc sites?
That is precisely what makes Yes, Yes... Same thing with Rush. People often do not appreciate complex music because it is overwhelming
The problem is the majority of listeners targets is some headphones with extreme bass plus compressed streaming audio, not someone who spend some money and effort to get the best sound quality, personally I love to hear that crisp and mid well balanced. Am I an audiophile? IDK ✌️😁
I think you can tell the difference most when the track is really loud such as through a massive sound system.
Like when you're at a party and one DJ plays mp3's and then the one after plays wav and you go oooo yeah thats really gooooood
Totally! I remember my first experience DJing with Mp3's and uncompressed files. After that night I deleted all the Mp3's in my stack. Uncompressed good quality audio just feels more relaxed. It's effortless, the same way a master musician makes his playing seem effortless.
I'm almost 67 years old. I'm old enough to recall hearing CD's for the first time in 1984. I especially recall the superbly mastered Beatles White Album which I picked up in Tokyo, since there weren't any CDs available in the US yet. I was amazed by the lack of vinyl noise, like dust pops and other artifacts. But the best sound I ever heard was top-quality analog well before then; it was 2 inch analog first generation tape, through Stax headphones while sitting on a Paradigm subwoofer. I could even hear every bass drum pedal squeak and the click of the keys of the sax. It was like I was right in the recording studio with my ears simultaneously placed where where all the mics were. It's an amazing memory. Sure I more recently listened to a lot of MP3 compressed stuff, even worked with Karlheinz and Juergen at Fraunhofer IIS for a while. But by then my hearing was not so good, due to congenital loss and dead hair cells from too many loud concerts when I was young.
I don't agree with is the emphasis on bandwidth. Sure high frequencies help the sound a bit. But duplicating natural transients and having lots of dynamic range also matter, maybe even more than the presence of steady-state high frequencies, which is what the specifications measure. Nevertheless, nice video, Rick. Your explanations were impressively clear and more accurate than most.
Well said. I think audiophile "critical listening" isn't strictly a function of frequency response. To me, after years of listening to audio both analog and digital, I can spot lossy formats and tell readily what's missing. To the average listener it could be analogous to listening to mono car speakers then getting a 5.1 mix on SACD. I have access to an Anthem unit out to Paradigms and it's quite clear, but even with beyerdynamic headphones and an xduoo amp, I can hear it. Rick is correct about frequency response, mostly, (some do hear outside 20-20k) but what intake issue with is that lossy formats do compress in very dicernible ways, even at higher bitrates.
Transients *are* in the high frequencies....
Well actually, the sharper the transient, the wider the spread ... but definitely extending into the high end.
@@RogerBarraud In order to avoid confusing the issues, I specifically had said: "...the presence of steady-state high frequencies, which is what the specifications measure." Namely, I meant the notion of bandwidth which comes from usual long-term estimates of frequency response. Sure, broad frequency bandwidth is necessary for good transient response. An AM radio does not preserve sharp transients since it has less bandwidth that high fidelity systems. But since usual long term bandwidth estimates do not directly measure transient response, broad frequency bandwidth is not sufficient for good transient response.
Which means: 1) Frequency bandwidth is not the only thing which is important for fidelity and quality of sound preservation. This has been known for decades. It's why, for example, some people are careful about phase alignment, where usual phase misalignment does not reduce a systems frequency bandwidth, but it does distort transients. 2) Transient response is hard to capture as a single specification. There is no agreed upon measure of transient response, which is why it is not seen much. Yet there are systems, including human ears, which can recognize quality differences between different systems with the same frequency bandwidth. Sometimes big differences.
Remember when sampling audio it has to be apple to apples. That said, the tape was obviously at a higher quality that exceeded the CD capability. Nevertheless, its biggest negative is that like vinyl, it will deteriorate in quality with every pass.
You had bad ears also back in the 80s. The first cd players sounded horrible since the manufacturers didn’t know about jitter and the importance of an accurate clock.
I took the test, got it all right.
The slowest loading one always had the best quality. heh
Isn't this the same technique as the comment above?
I have 1 gbps fiber connection :( they already loaded before fully pressing the play button.
lol so true
I also got 4/6 listening for subtle differences. The differences really are microscopic but it's also mindblowing to really listen for those sharp, subtle tonal qualities that are more developed and pronounced than in their compressed counterparts. Not something anyone would notice consistently but it's cool that it's there.
On all 6 I could consistently hear a difference, however identifying which one of the different sounds was "better" was very inconsistent on the first go around. After taking notes on the differences and repeating the test (they re-randomize the order when you refresh the page) I could use the previously identified differences to consistently identify the correct answer
On a low quality MP3 you can usually hear the difference in white noise like cymbal crashes or applause. This is because the bitrate quickly becomes saturated because there is no place to duplicate the multiple different frequencies. It’s like a low quality JPEG. Blue sky or white walls looks fine but fine details like trees and hair etc often get chunky.
But a good codec and higher bit rate makes them all but disappear.
To Rick's point, you still have good hearing. Congratulations.
Poorly made point, you have the visual analogy backward, the white noise is analogous to white walls. In jpg compression it is the smooth areas of constant tone where you see problems first because the jpg noise is discernable against that continuous tone, the high detail areas in fact hide the artifacts, they are lost in it. When you what to check picture quality you examine a smooth area like the sky.
Bartonovich52 - EXACTLY!!
@@johnsmith1474 This guy knows whats up.
@@wpgspecb - Yes I do, thanks.
Interesting test! I found that I can usually find the 128kbps, but couldn't tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and 44.1kHz wav. And great point re: the difference between physical hearing and ability to mix.
I didn't even find any difference between 128kbps and the wav 44.1kHz. I guess all those teenage years listening to loud music on my cellphone's screwed my ears.
@@j.lucasdecastroaraujo761 I found that the high frequencies were what gave it away. Have you tested to see what the highest frequencies are that you can hear? I can hear 15kHz but nothing beyond that.
@@NickChase Yes, good points. I was using a Universal Audio Apollo X6 and Beyerdynamic DT880 Pros.
@@j.lucasdecastroaraujo761 I'm a senior citizen with hearing loss in both ears , and I can tell the difference between those two...on a good system.
You can subtract the wav file from mp3 to get the error signal. Ideally this error signal should be a stochastic noise with no deterministic information.
The first time I listened to classical music( Intro to Sheherazade) on my B&O Advanced, my first thought was: how glorious must the choirs of heaven sound! Changes the way you listen to music.
And back in the day you had to make sure your mono mix was spot on becauses many songs were on AM radio and FM. There are hit records that sound great in stereo and lifeless in mono and vice versa. I do my mixes for my Iphone these days, I want to hear how the sound punches through on speaker and adjust from there as I hear many kids listening to them just like a transistor radio back when I was a kid. ( What goes around comes around)
I can confidently say I won't hear much different on rap or pop song,but when it come to ochestra or jazz it's easy to spot on the compressed or uncompressed.
I just found this today, but I took that same audio test a few months ago. I got 3 or 4 right, one of the wrongs was a 128k... And it was the classical piece. All three of the classical pieces sounded virtually the same to me. I also have super sharp hearing, as the tester here does. It has to come down to some experience with the material. I don't listen to much classical, and I don't remember the last time I would have heard it live. I notice none of the examples where any kind of hard rock or metal though. I would imagine the differences there are even more difficult to pick up due to the inherent distortion in the styles. I'm guessing cleaner audio makes more of a difference in the perception. The dirtier the sound, the more difficult.
@@NeoRichardBlake the reason why you couldn't hear the difference in the classical piece is you don't listen to classical music and you don't love it so you it won't even occur to you what the clarinet is subtly but magically doing in the background when it plays, you probably will barely even notice it.
Sorry but that super sharp ear is wasted on you if you're not even listening to classical music.
@@motherofallemails That's a pretty pretentious opinion that my sharp hearing is wasted if I'm not listening to classical. I enjoy classical. I just don't listen to it much. And when I do listen to it, I enjoy the complex pieces more. I pick up more nuances when I listen to it more. And that's what I meant when I said it has to do with experience with the material. Study and familiarity makes nuance easier to find. I also listen to a lot of metal and hard rock, and I can hear more nuance there than people who don't normally listen to it. My poorly worded point was that the video is right. Sharp hearing doesn't necessarily make you an expert listener. Getting depth from music is more about familiarity and study than with specific hearing. I constantly notice things others don't in sight as well. Most of it has to do with one's attention to detail, and sadly many people don't pay very much attention to things. Music is background for a lot of people. That's why simple sounds with a catchy beat become the most popular. Pieces that require study to fully appreciate fall by the wayside of society.
@@motherofallemails Yea... that was pretty pretentious. You are not better by listening to classical music and it's definitely not a "waste" of any sort by not listening to classical music. This is coming from a big fan of classical music... Let's not form any hierarchy of taste
I strongly disagree. It absolutely depends on the production and quality of the music, regardless of the genre. From that audio test, the only song that I got consistently right was the Jay Z track because it utilized a lot of different frequencies, and I never listen to hip-hop. I listen to a lot of jazz and classical and I can tell you, for older recordings and poorly engineered recordings that dont have a wide range of frequencies anyway, it is extremely difficult to tell the compression. But that's just my opinion, I could be completely wrong. I dont wanna come across as thinking I'm definitely right :)
From my experience, it doesn't matter about the files the music is put to (FLAC, WAV, or MP3), it's all about the mastering and how the music was mixed in the studio. If you want your music to sound clear and open, it needs to be mastered as such. My favorite example to name is Electric Light Orchestra's Time. I've listened to the album on both Tidal and Qobuz, and it sounds so compressed regardless if it's at 16 bit/144hz or 24 bit/96hz. HOWEVER, my 1990 CD copy sounds clear and crisp, and I was shocked to find that it had such a noticable difference.
Tidal butchers audio files. A RUclipsr called Golden Sound made an excellent video exposing the massive scam that is MQA. He also shows that Tidal doesn’t even offer the CD quality that they are advertising.
Probably a vote for Qobuz…
If you brought the various files and came and played them on my dad’s audiophile stereo, you will be able to hear the difference. And is isn’t just down to the quality of the speakers, it is the whole system that is important.
The lossless formats have a tinny quality. The human ear may not be able to hear particular frequencies singled out, but they may play a supporting role on the frequencies you can. Just like in a recipe where one ingredient you may not be able to taste individually, adds something to the whole, that if omitted you know tastes different but can’t put your finger on it.
6 out of 6 using Sennheiser HD560s, directly from on-board Realtek HD sound card.
6/6 on a 70$ usb gaming headset.
3/6 using a sennheiser HD25 out of a focusrite audio interface.
6 out of 6 using the laptop speakers.
6/6 using cellphone speaker while driving my hot rod!
6/6 pressing f12 and reading the correct answer
4/6, but I'm 53 and commuted on a motorcycle for 6 years. My strategy was listening for the quieter elements, like the reverb in Suzanne Vega, the snare in Coldplay, the BG moan vocal in Katy Perry or the glockenspiel in Neil Young. I know I can't really hear the high freqs anymore, but I can still hear the improvement that comes with increased bit depth. Sorta!
The thing is the songs she got right are all the ones not affected by the loudness wars
This video is so important actually :).. to show reality to all those fancy acting guys who keep saying ‘I am an audiophile and I listen only flac and I can hear the difference which is incredible, how can you not hear’ .
I think 4/6 is pretty good and shows that she could tell more than half of the time. I also think that even if you don't consciously notice the difference of lossless, that doesn't mean you aren't getting a better experience seeing as though music brings with it an emotional experience and having a better quality file could heighten those emotions. I know it does for me when I listen to a favourite album in flac for the first time. Music is all based on vibrations and they will change based on the quality.
I've noticed that really old recordings like from the 30s, 40s and 50s don't often seem to benefit at all if only very slightly but in situations where the mixes are great, there's a richness to the sound, especially in the bass but also the crispness of the highs gives me an experience similar to mediation where it's like I'm getting benefit from the vibrations of the music without the compression.
I think I'm more sensitive than the average person however and I'm 29 years old so I may get to the point where I can't notice a difference at all like you assume the producers can't. Obviously you don't know for sure they can't hear the difference but based on logic and statistics that makes sense.
I took the test and got the same result as Michelle. I took the test again using better headphones and a high quality DAC on my computer and got a perfect score. And I'm 59. Hearing matters, but so does quality equipment.
Now repeat the experiment with a few other audiophiles, and we'll see. Science is all about repeatable experiments
invalid conclusion. Anyone repeating the test will finally get 100% correct since you need only concentrate on the samples you failed in the previous trial and you have a 33% chance of simply guessing with each listening.
I believe you but hey...you are probably talking to people listening to music from downloaded files through their computer speakers... And they will tell you you're wrong. Ignorance is a bliss.
@@WeWereYoungandCrazy No. Rushed dismissal on your part though. The test reorders the samples so if you repet it you always start from scratch.
"I can't tell the difference between an 320MP3 and a FLAC file, yet I paid $10,000 for a 10ft speaker cable." -Audiophiles
So true. That's awesome!
Because it can sound more pleasant and can color the sound to your liking.
@@Mr.Manson No, it doesn't, that's complete and utter nonsense. The ONLY thing about a speaker cable that CAN have an effect on how the Audio sounds is if the cable is insanely poorly shielded against interference from other speaker- or power cables you might have running alongside them. And it is very hard to even find such poor cables.
I bet you that in a blind test you couldn't tell the difference between a stupidly expensive cable, the cheap stuff you can get at Home Depot or even a metal coat hanger used instead of a cable.
Next thing you are probably trying to tell me that Gold plated contacts on a HDMI or Optical cable will make any difference beyond how they look.
@@Soonjai If the speaker cable is long it will affect the quality of the sound, and if it is thin (unless of course it is very short). Speaker cables aren't typically shielded.
@@corybarnes2341 What the hell are you blabbering about? If you get Speaker cable on a roll to cut it yourself to length you need it will be shielded the same regardless of length. And I hope you know you are fooling yourself with your statement about the cable length thing.
A couple of years ago I work at a company that installed car Hi-Fi Systems, and the Speaker cables, regardless of length where NEVER the reason why the systems picked up unwanted noise. Most of the time it came from the Power cables for the Amps because the Generators of some, especially older, cars didn't have filters build in to cut out RPM depended noise. Simple In-Line Filters where able to remove those noises in above 98% of the cases. In some rarer cases we got unwanted noise from the Antennas when the Radio was used, but that was usually eliminated by simply using a different Antenna.
TL;DR: The Speaker cable is, from own experience, never the issue, power- and / or Antenna can be.
Thank You Rick! So well sorted this out. Never thought about the mixing engineers you listed in this video. Thank You. :-)
People on the autism spectrum have a spiky cognitive profile and some are music savants with hyper-acute hearing. For lack of a better term, I'll call musical intuition -- which means feeling and almost becoming the music (sometimes seeing it in colors) without training. Studying music destroyed me for about a decade -- it forced me to look behind the curtain to autopsy the wizard, and it was utterly traumatic. I know I'm not the only one who has experienced this..I can't be. Decades later after internal work on this and other issues, I can finally enjoy your videos and appreciate the theory. That being said, I maintain there is something in music that is immeasurable and undecipherable. Like God's presence (or some would argue existence), you can't measure or explain it to anyone else, but you know it when you experience it for yourself. There IS something more..something divine...which is absolutely present in analog music and utterly absent in virtually all digitally-authored music. I can't verbalize it any other way.
My favorite video of yours. My dream in college was to mix/edit sound. My favorite class was 'The Physics of Music'. I ended up in TV operations, which is great. But I lost normal auditory perception from a stroke in July, '18 and it's nearly ruining my career because I can't always perceive sounds accurately. It's frightening and fascinating at the same time.
None of this matters when everything is compressed to hell with no dynamic range
if you are listening to terrible music it is your own fault.
less complain and more make please
it really does matter, some mastering engineers use compression that sounds beautiful which can be totally ruined by a lossy format :( maybe that because of the less dynamic range the frequencies are much more prominent - making the loss of frequencies sound worse in the lossy format ?
Well, not all music needs wide DR, but when it`s lower than 10, just about anything sounds worse. My best are movies soundtracks, they usualy have 14-15. That`s enough.
Well this did occur to me with the choice of test tracks, in my experience, Coldplay recordings are a harsh, garbled mess, and as for Katy Perry.🤣😂
She got the other ones right.
I trained my ears to tell the difference by abx testing in foobar. For me, there is a slight difference between certain echos in the high frequencies in some songs. The head-fi forum has a topic on songs that, for some odd reason, don’t mix well with the mp3 algorithm, so you can hear this ‘mp3’ compression sound for yourself. I did this purely for my audiophile ego of course, and I still can’t reliably identify AAC or OGG Vorbis compression (used by Apple Music and Spotify respectively).
Additionally, if you’re using Bluetooth headphones, the sound gets compressed twice, and recompressing to a different generates even more artifacts. This became a whole thing when Apple Music added lossless streaming, and when using Apple headphones songs played on their own music app sounded better then the same song on Spotify.
I really like this video because I was searching for some true answers about audio quality and I love how good you say it, thank you so much, greetings from Perù!
Personally I don't believe you can hear any difference in audio quality to a degree, but you can feel it. The pressure differences, how it changes to rooms to the overall sound environment of the studio or place it was recorded in and the pressure of that place translated into your space. The physical make-up of the individual instruments, imaging and staging and separation. I can definitely tell the difference. And I believe if your set-up is in focus you can too.
This test has been done in Germany already back in 2000 with only 256kbif and very skilled people in a very good environment. ( m.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html ). It turned out that it was more guessing than knowing. Musicians who claim to be cool, skilled and professional always say they can hear the difference, but none of them managed to get through my short tests. Then they usually say it was due to not ideal listening conditions. This discussion is as crucial as "but I CAN distinguish between a Kemper amp and the corresponding real amp", which always turns out not to be true - especially in a band context. Mythos - never dies! Funk on
Danke, super aufschlussreich, und schmerzlich zu sehen, dass selbst die 128 kb mitunter besser als die CD eingeschätzt wurde!
TAILORmoves gerne. Ich vermeide mittlerweile Diskussionen zum Thema. Ist halt zu viel 'Glauben' und 'Coolness' dabei.
+Doggy I'd be able to tell the difference between a Kemper and my Engl SE in a second: the Kemper wouldn't shriek past 3 gain because of (probably) old tubes going microphonic ^^
lol .. okay, that way ... ;)
But one of my guitarrists has a Kemper with the very same Profile of the amp he has ( I think it is MesaBoogie Mark V). And it is hard to tell the difference ;)
It depends.
Look for archimogos blog.
He conducted a similar test, which was more lossless vs lossy, including different formats of each using quite a few test subjects with varying backgrounds.
It turned out the "audiophiles" who claimed to hear a difference had the greatest number of people who could tell between lossless and lossy.
It's understandable, given that a lot of them have trained themselves to discern between subtle differences as a hobby would be the group which has more people which figured out what differences there are.
From what I have heard, it's not a tone or timbre difference (meaning pitch perfect doesn't matter).
They have said that it's the decays which differ. It's more obvious with tube amps where decay is typically longer due to the harmonic characteristics and it's a bit easier with headphones.
I can't comment because I haven't actively tried to do this myself.
My guess is that the algorithms which do lossy compression pick up some of the aspects of sound related to decay as noise, but again that's just an assumption as I don't have the Knowledge to tell
As a fortysomething with loud hobbies, I'm lucky to still have almost up to 15k left. In my own testing, I can't hear any improvement in 24bit over 16 bit or 96khz above 44.1khz. I think I perceive something different, but I cannot repeat it and it's not demonstrable. I think I can hear a difference between 320k and a wav, but that's only with really great monitors or phones, no visual distraction, and complete focus. Even then, it's not a firm conviction that I'm truly hearing what I think I am.
The choice to release only as a 320kbps MP3 is perfectly defensible, because the difference is almost imperceptible under perfect conditions, and under the actual conditions 99% of us will listen, it's utterly undetectable.
Yes! The best video I have ever seen on formats, the ridiculousness of audiophiles and what actually matters in mixing and the actual end user experience. Like I used to say: I've always produced 16bit/44.1KHz-music, and nobody ever complained. Producing 24bit/96KHz is a waste of processing power, and it's meaningless to stream to end users. Apple streams some music at 24-bit/192 kHz(!) and even advertises with it. Madness.
Several years ago, I was riding an escalator up a floor in a hotel, enjoying a funky background music system's instrumental rendition of 'The Windmills Of Your Mind'. The higher I got, the better the music sounded, and by the top I was thinking, 'Damn, this system is amazing! How did they do it?' I was blown away by the exquisite fidelity! Then I arrived at the top, looked down the corridor and there, at the far end, was a live combo, all acoustic: drums, accordion and double bass. Since then, I have come to realize that no matter how good our technology, from mic'd performance, through the recording (analog or digital,) encoding and distribution, to the end user and their equipment, we'll almost never fool anyone into thinking they're hearing a live performance. I, at 75, can still tell that I'm hearing someone play a live acoustic piano, through an open window two stories up, while walking on a noisy street! We still have a long way to go, and I's suggest that all this discussion about encoding protocol comparisons does little or nothing to address the problems we have in recreating an original binaural experience, with young or old ears!
But please keep trying!
I don't think that one can re- produce faithfully music through a hifi system having heard live music is not the same experience.
Or you've just never heard a decent high end sound system, so there is that...
@@1wibble230 A live recording can never match a live event.The physics of the event are radically different.The best systems do a great job of fooling you but if you were present at the actual recording session you would always be disappointed with the outcome.Reality trumps recording technology.Thats why the argument that it's better to spend thousands of dollars over many years on attending live concerts rather than spending tens of thousands on audio gear makes sense.
@@brucegelman5582 As someone who has attented many live shows from orchestras to rock and dance bands, and also has very high end system, I can tell you technology gets amazing close! And indeed when it comes to rock/dance stuff I'd argue studio recording listening at home is by far the more pleasurable experience. Very rarely do such venues have a good well balanced sound that isn't ripping your ears off. For classical/jazz/small indie band stuff sure, live sounds beautiful, but with really high end speakers it is very close to actually being there :)
@@1wibble230 I agree.I have a wonderful and expensive system of my own.But I had the good fortune of working at Benaroya Hall in Seattle and listening to hundreds of live classical performances and spending time with the audio engineers helping them record and lending my mic placement expertise.Schoeps,Neuman, and Royer.I also had the luck of listening to rehearsals of YoYo Ma and Marc Andre Hamelin to name but two.I am really talking about orchestral works when I say it cant be reproduced on a home system.I should have clarified that.Nice to talk with you.If you like we can carry on.
I got 2/6.
Since the test changes the answers, you should run the test 10 times to see if she can get 66% again
yes, he should have run the test more than once. 2/6 is what you'd expect on average by mere guessing, so it's likely you can't hear the difference (with your setup).
also we should take intro consideration the guessing.
She said "yes!" for couple of time, so she was guessing, she wasn't sure. ;)
@@-morrow one file was of a much lower quality so she could discount that straight away, so it was a 50/50 choice and you would expect 50% by guessing, as other commenters have said there is no reason not to run the test 10 times and if you wanted more statistical accuracy you would also use multiple subjects.
plus-he said TOO MUCH about the qualities of sounds she would be hearing!
As a 62 year old with tinnitus and high end hearing loss from working in live music. ( once beamed by a mesa boogie that felt like a spike in my ear) and just purchasing a vintage Yamaha CDX 1030 CD player to go with my vintage Yamaha CR 1020 receiver. I’m not just looking for frequency response. Soundstage, articulation, separation, and definition.
And there are lots of very affordable CD transports like Cambridge Audio that you can run into very nice inexpensive DAC’s
If I’m not going to listen to vinyl I feel the next best thing is CD to a good Analog converter.
Funny side note.
Unboxed my CD player this last Saturday and ran it straight into my powered foster NX5A’s near field monitors RCA>1/4”
I played Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” to christen it. ( sounds awesome )
Thrilled to then See Joni Play Newport Folk Festival the next day.
It's super hard to tell between 320 vs uncompressed. Impressive she got so many. Even with studio headphones I only got 2.
Exactly: it's what a listener has trained their ears to hear. Listening is a brain function, not an ear function.
The thing is, it's so much more than just the frequency domain.
Listen to depth & detail. In most cases any lossy format will randomly affect transient detail. The other unmentioned aspect is that all degradation from lossy encoding is so easily CUMULATIVE. Rip a track to MP3, process it more, play it on the radio and in terms of audio quality all bets are off!
The fact remains: music artists do NOT release their music to be heard lossy only. And no RUclips viewers seem to complain about having CHOICE of video quality. See (hear) the problem?
If I'm paying for an album, I want the lossless file so I'm free to re-encode it to any format I want with minimum loss. And not have layers of re-encoding that I don't need. If I'm converting to AAC, Vorbis or Opus, I don't want a previous MP3 encoding on top of that. I think a CD Quality FLAC is good enough. At least I won't feel like we got all this technology but today we are getting less quality than what we got from a CD in the 90s. (MP3's vs CDs). If you are giving away a free album, and you want to offer it at 128kbps, than I can't really complain because it's free.
FLAC is not "good enough", it is a lossless format. Lossless means that every single bit of data in the wav file is preserved and if you convert it back into a wav you'll get a file that is binary identical to the wav. It is like compressing files in a zip file, they come out identical to the way they come in.
The other formats you mention are not compression, they use reduction -> some data is lost.
There are arguments whether 44.1 KHZ / 16 bit is good enough, but that has nothing to do with FLAC, as you can encode higher sample rates and bit resolutions in FLAC just fine too.
The stupid thing people miss is that even when you don't hear the sound , your ear still receive the wave therefore affecting the experience when you don't hear anything. I get why the first lady miss the last question because I heard there seems to be more details on the last file , and more details should be better quality file , seems like something strange is going on with mp3 there.
A wav file is like a digital picture of the sound wave at that resolution. An MP3 is an approximation of that picture by storing it as a sum of sine waves. Any wav could be done perfectly by this MP3 method, but at the extreme it would start adding in tiny sine waves that are only there to fix the tiny imperfections. These would tend to be the highest frequencies because they are specifically added just to fix individual samples in the sound wave. It isn't, in general, a system throwing out the specific high frequencies. Those just happen to be the smallest components in the sum of sine waves. It is possible that an MP3 could produce a higher resolution than the original, if the original was for example a sine wave. The MP3 would be a perfectly smooth sine wave, while the wav would be a jagged blocky image like an old low-res video game if you zoomed in. At a certain point, adding extra information is only artificially adding the jagged bumps. I hear audiophiles talk nonsense all the time regarding this stuff, but the truth is that if everything from the microphones to the final file is done in the frequency domain, the MP3 approach would be a better approximation than "digital". It's like "Re-analog-ing" the signal that was sampled into digital form, and could be even closer to the original air vibrations in the room.
We spend so much effort to make a song sound good and then people listen to it on their phone.
There are good phones though. Like the LG V60. F***ing 130dB SNR!! better than most PC sound cards!!!
Well, good produced record still sounds better in mp3 320 then bad produced record in wav 24 bit
I listen to them on my phone with my nice headphones, basically using my phone as my portable music player, and I can definitely tell the difference between 320MP3 and M4A vs FLAC/WAV, not just on my phone but my PC. I apparently have pretty good hearing, and as much as it can annoy me, I'm thankful I get to enjoy music in high quality while live concerts aren't a thing.
Yeah, but before that, it was AM radio, cheap BSR record decks and super bad quality pre-recorded cassette tapes! And don't get me started on the compression with FM radio!
@@sassuki True. I own a LGV20 as my DAP and It rivals my friend's $1000+ desktop dac amp setup lol
The test will be much more accurate if the result was shown to her after all tracks were completed. Because the immediate feedback will actually either reinforce positively or negatively on the next answer
@@pablopacca9458 Absolutely. A prior negative response will have her second guessing an initial response on a new track.
One thing you’ll learn in those tests refers to your own definition of a good sounding record. I made wrong guesses because the real sound belonged to a style that I didn’t like. After I realized how this music was meant to sound I spotted the better sound quality. Sonic tastes play a huge part in this and not just frequencies.
Also she may have been influenced by previous listens of "Speed of Sound".
@user name What do you think recorded those songs?
Yes, just been doing interval / note etc testing and I would prefer to find out how badly or how well (unlikely) I have done and not during the test itself. Like doing an exam and getting it marked as you go along .. would totally sway the result. Still, listening to the tests on RUclips, they sounded exactly the same (strange that)
My assistant and I were setting up our new $18,500 Bob Carver Amazing Line Source loudspeakers when suddenly the soundstage collapsed. "What the hell just happened?" and he replied, "I accidentally switched to 320 MP3". There would be little difference in midrange clarity but a noticeable difference in depth, openness and the sense of the venue. Frankly, my 10-year-old grandchild could hear the difference instantly and so could you if you were listening to a properly set up system. In fact, the majority of manufacturers in my industry, like me, are generally aware of this.
And as an aside, I introduced the first CD players from Cambridge, Onkyo, Denon, Dual and Hitachi who actually manufactured the latter three units, all on the same day, in the same grand ballroom, in the same hotel, through the same system for about 50 retailers. I believe was back in 1983 or thereabouts. After the show, we took the samples back to my home and we were very disappointed. We couldn't listen to more than three albums in a row without a headache. in addition to the lack of openness, they were shrill and fatiguing and this was before lower performing MP3 was invented.
Considering what my manufacturers had invested in this new technology, we all knew this would be our future, but something wasn't quite right.
Rick, you're a terrific musician, but there's a difference between CD-Redbook from manufacturer to manufacturer and dropping all the way down to MP3 will compromise the soundstage. in fact, in the last 10 or 15 years, there's been several jumps forward in CD level decoding and those improvements are audible despite the fact that none of these improvements have anything to do with MP3. Also, D Perry quoted Steve Guttenberg, a reviewer who loves our speakers, and I expect he will be in attendance at my next private show.
I didn't notice a difference between Mp3 and Flac with regular headphones, but as soon as I got audiophile headphones and a/b tested between them I could definitely tell the difference.
Exactly. Your audio setup is only as good as its weakest link.
Which mp3 vs flac? Because 128 kbps - OK. That's poor. But I doubt you can statistically significantly tell the difference between 320 kbps and flac.
Only way to tell if you can notice the difference or not is to do a blind test with a big pool of songs.
@Tweed Penguin No, if a blind test is done.
youtube can only do 256 kbps if you get true CD quality thats 1,411.2 kbps and if most of you havent noticed the only difference is that hi hats and cymbals sound a lot crispier and clear, theres more instrument separation as well, even if you only have mono audio its insane because you can even hear the singers lip hitting close together and you can most certainly hear sounds like "shh" a lot clearer, another thing that ive noticed is that the music tends to be louder in CD rather then mp3 320 kbps, now this may be due to the fact that its not just louder for the sake of being louder, i think its louder because the frequencies we were missing are suddendly being added back in suddendly the singer (if mastered correctly) feels like is in the room with you, not 1 room away behind a wall in the same position, and i think thats something most people miss when they first hear a WAV vs MP3 file
I agree with everything said in this video (especially regarding the quality of 320kb/s MP3), however MP3/AAC is not an archival format. When I purchase music, I want it in a future-proof format that can be transcoded without causing further harm to the audio. For that reason, please consider offering your music in lossless formats such as FLAC or WAV.
Archive purposes is really the only reason to download in lossless 👍
Exactly, I primarily download FLAC/WAV if it is available, or buy the CD to rip to FLAC in case it isn't for precisely this reason. Not offering it in 2018 because "you can't hear the difference anyways" is silly, when bandwidth and storage space is ever so expanding.
"So much of listening is based on what you train your ears to hear" pretty much sums up the whole video.
Thank you for this. It is at 9:00 that you get down to the most important part of people who are the mixers of music. And as one who is now older, I appreciate it very much.
I took the listening test and got 5 of the 6 questions right. But I confess that I had to repeat the auditions several times, until I noticed tiny differences, almost imperceptible, in the very high and very low frequencies (most evidently in the high frequencies). And I used a decent headphone, Sennheiser HD 380 Pro connected to a Focusrite Scarlett interface. The differences really are very subtle. I was happy because I'm 52 years old, and I'm a musician, and I was very exposed to loud sound for a long time. Great question!
What if she knew the coldplay song from an mp3 at 128 so that one sounded "best" to her because it's the one she's used to hearing? Would need to test more than 6, and try arrangements or mixes that the person hasn't heard before, or else the familiarity effect will influence judgement.
Exactly! I wrote this in my comment too. In this case, I also think she chose the version she had heard before and was used to the most. Also, it was close to the end of the test, and her ears (and brain!) were already a little tired. The test would be more reliable if there were longer breaks in between.
i don't think that anyone (except maybe an 'audiophile') would suggest that such a casual test as is demonstrated here allows us to reach any firm conclusions.
Somehow, that song sound really bad. I don't like the mix / mastering at all. I actually thought that it sounded better at 128 because less crap was reproduced by the mp3. There is some crakles noises in 320 and wav that I didn't ear at 128.
StoufSto yes, best is often what is familiar.
Yes her judgement was affected by the emotion that she expresses before listening that particular song. Probably she was influenced by her memory...
Rick, I am a fan, but with respect, when I get my students to put a 3 way PA together and we run a 20 metre multi-core up the centre of the hall, and we plug a CD player into the desk and we play for instance Yes 90125 and the Who Live At Leeds at CD quality and then we plug the student's Mp3's of the same tunes in , and crank-up the quality system a little, everybody in the room can tell which is better quality. I agree it is harder to tell the difference at low volumes. Kind regards Peter Bennett, Melbourne, Australia
With respect, you didn't mention what bitrate of mp3s you and your students were listening. That's quite important.
@@FinSynthMusic
Hi, for clarification of my comment, the details of the practical exercise my students and I used to do each year is as follows;
• 4 units of passive Electro Voice X5 at 4 ohms generating a potential 1100w each side.
• And 2 units of 15inch Wharfedale passive subs powered by a similar amp.
• Then we faced the 4 stage monitors which were the Powered JBL 15’’ Eons directly at the mixing desk as well, as there was no band playing it was specifically a listening exercise during a double class-time in the hall.
• The Desk was Allen and Heath MixWizard 16:2 with a multicore rolled out to about 20 metres.
• Some MXR EQ units were plugged in but were bypassed for the exercise.
• No mics were open.
• No effects were engaged.
• Essentially, we made a big-boy’s or girls’ hi fi system.
• The speakers were set up on the floor in front of the stage.
• There was no audience just about 12 or 15 students. I did the same exercise every year for 6 years.
• We used my Rotel RCD 1072 Cd player that I had bought from home, the school’s Tascam Cd player that was rack mountable with a speed variation knob that we didn’t use, sorry I can’t remember the model number and my little Sony Cd layer (kind of Walkman type) that I used to take to gigs to play music in the breaks.
• I had my copy of Yes 90125 and the remastered version of the Who Live at Leeds
Cd (Because I’m old and it’s the best) then I had 300k bps and 128kbps versions of the test tracks as mp3’s that I’d made in Steinberg Wave Lab that were played from my iPod player.
• Then I asked the students to down load or use their cell phones or iPod’s (which were still popular at the time), to call up the same example tracks.
• The point was agreed upon unequivocally. We cranked the system up like at a gig.
• I had given fair warning the days prior any student could then produce a comparison examples of their own CD music and Mp3’s for comparison.
• Their examples crossed a wide range of bit rates; however, I don’t believe any students had 300kbps mp3’s
• The whole point, which is only a simple one, was to prove that there is a difference between Cd quality and Mp’3s and that if you ‘’crank it up’’ you can tell.
Kind regards Peter Bennett (Melbourne Australia)
@@peterbennett4783 An iPod and most phones dont have digital outputs. So you were probably comparing the analog signal output of an IPOD/phone DAC+headphone amplifier to the signal output from your 1000+$ CD player (however that one was connected).
If you noticed any difference between 300k mps and CD with that setup, I would fist look at the obvious difference in hardware used to play the music as a cause.
For a fair comparisson, you would have to put a CD quality music-file onto the iPod/phone and play it from there.
For me, a mp3 through a big rig or good speaker sounds bad, the bass kinda floats, bass guitar notes come in waves instead of steady tone. Once you hear it, you can never 'unhear' it.. ;)
Rick is correct here. The CD format is the max humans can hear in terms of frequency response (sample rate) and dynamic range (bit depth). 90db is the maximum loudness range humans can hear (16bit). If the sound gets louder, eardrum protection muffles the sound so you loose the quiet sounds. That's why your ears ring after a loud rock concert. 320kbps mp3 encoded with LAME Joint Stereo, perfectly models what the human ear can hear from a CD quality sound source. Higher sample rates and bit depths are for audio professionals so you don't loose quality during processing. The final product is output at CD quality for humans. It's like graphic designers working on high res image files, then output to the destination resolution.
I am 57 years old, and have recorded and mixed full-time for 30 years. I can usually tell the difference between a 320kbs mp3 and its loss-less original. I can always (100%) tell the difference between the 320 and the 128 mp3. But I can never tell the difference between 16-bit / 44.1 against its mix at a higher format (even when the multi-track is recorded super high), and I am tired of anyone who says they can... because they can NEVER prove it. Oh yes... I'm right.
Don't even get me started about Monster-Cable!
"... because they can NEVER prove it [to you]." There are many reasons why live music sounds different from recorded music but one of those reasons is that the overtones are cut off. And even when they are not, in say properly recorded 96khz, people still can not hear it because 99% of tweeters are poor and / or do not go past about 20khz. If you compare a very high note on a violin on CD and the same note they will sound different. In part because of the extra information. The limit of hearing may be 14khz to 20khz but the frequencies above the limit of hearing go towards shaping the sound below. I believe this is true because it is the overtones that actually give the timbre to the instrument.
For what it's worth I'm forty nine. For me there is an audible difference in sample rates. It seems to be a phase difference that affects the stereo field. I've noticed that the difference is emphasised if the speakers are wired out of phase. Try it and see, maybe you'll hear it.
Nobody has to 'prove' anything to you. Either you hear it or you don't. I've auditioned high end DAC's playing 44.1k files vs 192k files and yes there is a sonic difference. Unfortunately you need very expensive gear to make that difference audible. For 99% of folks out there, they aren't going to detect the difference. Most folks are listening to Katy Perry on their laptops or iPhones - so none of this is relevant. Their gear is garbage so 128 or 320 will make not a lot of difference. I just replaced a low end Cambridge DACMagic with a damn expensive Bryston DAC. even my wife, who has shitty hearing, can detect the difference. One costs 10 times more than the other - is it 10 times 'better' ? No. Of course not. And the Cambridge will destroy any of the cheap 1$ DAC's in anyone's laptop or iPhone. So it's a case of diminishing returns for the amount of $$$ spent.
Great advertising. So-so product.
When I was a songwriter at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, they guys had in the control room some Voice of The Theater Speakers (Early 70's please note...) Pretty state-of-the art stuff, along with some 4311's... But Jimmy ALSO had a couple of small speakers boxed-up in small cabinets on the board that were intended for car radios. They would do the mixes with the Altecs and the JBL's, but would also listen to the sound from the "car speakers" to get a fuller understanding of what the average listener was going to hear. Now, I'm not actually sure just how much that helped them, but this bears down on the point that for a track to be a decent mix, they figured it had to sound good inside a car, and thus make that a part of their mixing protocol.
Those little near-field speakers?
Probably "Auratones"; known in the trade as "Horrortones".
For reasons that were obvious to those whose hearing had not already been smashed, by long, loud playback sessions rtc..
Switching to them from something like the B&W 801 is a bit of a jolt.
@@bruceinoz8002 Actually, bruce I think one of the engineers there just rigged up a couple of auto speakers in little boxes. Pretty primitive, but they were sort of like what somebody would be listening to in the Ford or Chevy...
Got 4/6 correct with Apple AirPods. The two songs I got wrong were the low sounding songs with less clarity in them. I do believe WAV uncompressed has a noticeable feeling compared to the rest. When music is a big part of your life, than you want to hear the best sound quality you can get.
If you used AirPods you didn’t hear the wav file. The AirPods are Bluetooth headphones and can not transmit wav files. You just guessed.
Dude, I love the way you think, and I believe this is the best place to go to for musical advice and inspiration.
This is the music equivalent of that 'You Don't See in 4K' video.
You *can* hear the difference, it depends on the equipment and the type of music. Especially if it's pretty reverb/drone heavy like the stuff I listen to.
Lol
I am an audiophile and didn't ruin my hearing. Ear protection
I am 59 and on my analog test tone generator I can hear to 14.8 khz.
My son a musician - 16.3 khz
The young boy down the street 19 khz.
I am heavily into music with a very resolving system. Nuanced listening.
Even with a poor system I can instantly hear the difference in an mp3, redbook 16/44, 24/92 and 24/192 sacd/blue ray. Analog rig - continuous waveform always wins.
The loudness wars issues and producers over emphasizing the top end with hearing loss are evident. Frequencies above 10k are mostly overtones and spatial energy. Some producers want an album to sound good on an inferior setup - ipod/phone/boom box/crosley - so it sounds way tipped up on an engaging and neutral system. Others the guy mastering the record and limiting dynamic range is at fault
Continuous waveforms??? My understanding is that the worst codec quality the more continuous the waveforms are... they are blunt, but for sure are continuous.. Regarding the ability to spot the difference, considering you can only ear up to 15K.. or any other human by the way... its very questionable, to say the least.
Done any ABX testing?
This is an argument I have had with many and the way I illustrate it is by saying that the bitrate is to music what megapixels are to a photo file. The difference is seen when you zoom the picture. If you are going to see the picture on a cellular phone you won't tell the difference but if you see them on a big screen you will. Now the same with audio files the difference will be heard depending on the output device ie speakers headphones etc. But here is the thing and this is my opinion the theory that removing frequencies that we supposedly can not hear is taking it that we listen to frequencies individually, however, we might not hear those frequencies individually but combined we do. What I have found to be the best way to determine the quality difference is when you edit the music by changing its pitch or removing aspects of the already fully mixed file. Just as in the high-resolution pixel photo the head of the needle will be seen in the high resolution whilst the low resolution will be blurry. This is basically in the dynamics so if you stretch the file or remove for example vocals etc there is a huge difference between doing that with an mp3 file even a 320k to a true a full quality audio file. In simple listening itself the full-quality file not only retains its stability when stretched or edited but if you listen to the bass and the treble especially the mp3 file sounds flat compared to the full quality wav file. Having said all this these differences are noticed when you play these files back to back and on the exact same equipment so unless you play them basically at the same time many will not hear the difference but yes there is actually a huge difference.
High frequency sounds above 12khz never appear as a "root" frequency, but as a part of more complex sound upper harmonics, I`ve lost ability to hear above 15khz, and in that sense I`m enjoying music more than before, it became less noisy and more enjoyable over time.
I do think uncompressed WAV sounds better. *One* example of this would be when singers say a word with "S", it sounds more realistic, sharper, has more treble and the whole song sounds "fresher". Maybe it is because I'm listening with headphones, but they were cheap.
Anyways I got 6/6 correct, so maybe I'm not crazy.
Maybe because mp3 cuts off higher frequencies which is generally where sibilance occurs?
The tonal response takes a toll with compressed files so YES - although it's not something obvious, it doesn't mean it's not there. It's more obvious with hi-notes so that's why you can hear it. The info in this video is total crap and the statements are pretty idiotic.
I recently tried Amazon HD music on it’s free 30 days trail during lockdown. I wasn’t expecting a massive difference to the 320kb Spotify. In fact, I was blown away at the difference! Much tighter, cleaner and the Bass didn’t distort so much at higher volume.
Try Tidal Master Quality and you change the standard of music streaming😂
tidal runs in circles around amazon's service
Especially the 24-bit versions, even at 44,1KHz. I could detect that an ULTRA HD file is playing blindly most of the time.
Sound feels more "alive" I would say. Kinda breathes. Hard to explain.
The same feeling I get only with very few "normal" CD-quality songs.
That explanation makes a lot of sense. I read the Great Courses Book on psychology and talked about some studies that involved the human ability to compare things and we are very subjective with thresholds that are more like percentages than actual amounts. The psychologist was Wilhem Wundt he was studying sensory perception and it was like this for sound, light intensity and even weight.
This still holds true even years after Rick posted it. As for my hearing, I treated it fairly well over the years, but by age 62 my left ear was losing higher frequencies, and at age 71 the left ear can't understand children and womwn with high voices. Now, for me, cutting down the background noise of women and young childred is a benefit, not a loss - a feature of aging, not a bug. Anyone I want to ignore I put over on my left side, then smile and nod once in awhile as if I can hear them properly.
Actually hitting most of the answers correct in short samples is a sign of the weaknesses of mp3. Even at 320 kbps you can hear a certain characteristics of the codec. AAC at 256kbits is much harder to distinguish from uncompressed.
I often actually prefer the aac/mp3 over the uncompressed files, since it sounds more pleasing and less harsh. I bet that’s what happened on the last song.
The difference between 16bit and 24bit files is often real, but not because of the bit size but because the 24bit file is mastered differently. For the cd version, the audio is compressed to 16 bit and dynamic is lost to gain volume (Google loudness war)
Often artists use hi-res files (or vinyl) of their songs to distribute a better sounding mix that’s more suitable to be played on hi-end equipment while the cd version is mixed to also sound nice on every shower radio.
If you were to take said hi-res files and encode them in 256kbit AAC, you’ld need an intense training to hear any difference.
4/6 isn't much better than random chance. She may have gotten lucky.
Thank you for sharing the video of *how* the test was conducted. It illustrates that the design of the test is inadequate (as are most published ABX tests that allegedly 'prove' most people can't hear the difference between compressed, lossless CD quality, and HiRes music). I will state unequivocally that I can almost always discern the difference.
The test as designed in this video is inadequate for the following reasons:
1) She didn't listen to the entire clip. Within a couple seconds she moved onto the next clip. It is not in every note in every second of the music that there is a discernible difference.
2) Not all songs and records illustrate the difference between comprised music and HiRes music. The song selection was suboptimal. R.E.M., Radiohead, and Pink Floyd are reputed to have sound engineering that maximizes the fullness of sound. When listening to compressed music the 'loss' of depth, richness of texture, and three-dimensionality (relationship of the singer and various instruments) of soundstage are better appreciated.
3) There as aspects of sight and sound that are subconscious. I am not suggesting any voodoo or magic or intangible crap. Studies have proven that certain background music in shopping malls makes people more likely to buy products. Certain colors in a doctor's office make people more calm and relaxed. If one plays the same music and directly asks the listener if he / she is more likely to buy the results will not be replicated. Asking a person to identify a response is not the same as observing the change in behavior (there is somewhat of a Hawthorne effect).
4) Some people need to be trained to 'learn' what differences to appreciate /identify. For example, simply hearing the song one may just get caught up in the memories (in this video, she said, "I love that song"). Then the mind overrides the ears. In Rachmaninov Piano Concerto 2, 2nd movement, there is a discernible difference in the way the piano notes 'hang' in the air when listening ti HiRes music. In George Michael's Symphonica, there is a discernible difference in how much it truly sounds like a live performance (versus a recording of a live performance). In Heart's "These Dreams" there is a 'thickness' to the texture in HiRes music. In Pink Floyd's "Hey You" the music comes 'at you' in almost a three dimensional soundstage. In Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" the 'layers' of string instruments are better appreciated (can identify left-right, front-back of the various strings) better. If one doesn't know to listen for these differences, one may not know which is truly HiRes. It's like those magic eye pictures: it takes some training in 'how' to approach the picture before one can truly see the image that is hidden. But 10 people tested who don't see the hidden picture doesn't definitely 'prove' the picture is not there.
5) Emotionally engaging: I don't have a way of fully describing what I am referring to, except that audiophiles who listen to music with their mind, emotions and body know what I mean. After several hours of listening at concert level sound, there is less listener fatigue with HiRes music. If it's just background music while doing chores or studying then the difference is negligible (at best).
6) Sound waves that are not discerned by the ear-mind are still appreciated (experienced at a molecular level, not just imaginary anticipation / expectation like a placebo effect). Sound travels through the body. The first time I heart Pink Floyd's "Hey You" on B&W 800 Diamond speakers, I could 'feel' the sound waves change my bodily reaction. This is a referent to the speakers-Amp combination, not the degree of compression (or lack of compression). But there is a similar (less intense) difference in compressed, lossless, and HiRes music: the sound waves more fully engage the body. So, even if one does a hearing test to demonstrate that humans have a low and high frequency limit, outside of which we cannot consciously hear the sound, it doesn't prove that we don't 'appreciate' the sound at a molecular level. Proof: subliminal messages in music that are not readily audible do in fact change behavior with suggestive messages. Sound waves also impact how we 'feel' the rhythm on the dance floor. Certain live performances can give goose bumps that are not necessarily elicited in the recording of the same performance (the live experience is more emotionally engaging).
7) Our hearing function is altered by our state of mind. If one is actively engaged in cerebral and mentally intense activities, and then suddenly sits down to listen to music, the mind may not be fully engaged in concentrating on the subtle differences. When driving home after work, try listening to music immediately upon arriving home. Alternatively, try doing slow breathing exercises for 5-10 minutes with eyes closed and then listen to the same music. Now try breathing / meditation exercises for 30-90 minutes! Compare the difference in how much subtle detail you hear in the music. The song, file, and sound system have not changed. Your ability to concentrate on small details has improved.
One might argue, if it takes so much effort to design a rigorous test to elucidate such difficult to appreciate differences, then is the infinitesimal difference worth the extra effort and cost? That's a separate question. That's the difference between a connoisseur (one who can appreciate art at an esoteric level) and a casual consumer. HiRes music is for the connoisseur, not the casual listener.
In my experience, the differences in audiophile music are best appreciated by the following (descending order of potency of impact):
1) speakers (B&W 802 D3 have dramatic impact on soundstage; Apple Home Pod versus B&W Zepplin Wireless can quickly be differentiated in sound quality, B&W P7 headphones versus Bose or Beats headphones are easily differentiated).
2) Amp-PreAmp (noticeable differences between Parasound, McIntosh, Mark Levinson, Yamaha, Marantz). This is not hype about cost. I like the sound of Parasound more than McIntosh even though McIntosh cost much much more. I like the sound of Parasound PreAmp more than Oppo HA-1 (when used as a PreAmp).
3) DAC (noticeable difference between Chord Hugo2 with it's chip-free algorithms, built-in DAC on the Parasound P5 with its Burr-Brown PCM1798 DAC chip, and Oppo UDP 205 with its Sabre32 DAC chip)
4) Quality of source recording and sound engineering
5) HiRes versus compressed files
6) Digital media player (Audirvana > iTunes; I have not tried HQ player yet)
7) interconnects (anyone who believes digital music is the same regardless of interconnects can come listen to the difference on my system as I have evolved over the years with various interconnects, although there is a rapid law of diminishing returns and I am not advocating interconnects >$200-$300)
In conclusion, tests that aim to assess if compressed (128k, 320 mp3 or AAC files) versus lossless (FLAC, ALAC, AIFF) 44k, / 16 bit, versus HiRes (e.g. 48/24 and higher usually 96/24, DSD64 and higher, etc) can be differentiated by the listener need to be properly designed to reveal what differences are actually theorized. Until a test is optimally designed, it neither proves nor disproves any putative differences. One day I will have the time, energy, motivation, and commitment to design such a study myself. Until then, I just enjoy my music.
Disclosure: My setup includes Parasound Halo A21/ P5 Amp-Preamp, B&W 802 D3 speakers, Chord Hugo2 DAC with RCA analog interconnect into P5, Oppo UDP 205 DAC with balanced XLR interconnect into preAmp, Audioquest interconnects, and listen to 44/16 CD rips, 96/24 HDTrack downloads, and SACD discs. Digital music is played on my MB pro with Audioquest USB cable into the Chord Hugo2 when I want maximum sound quality and Tidal Lossless streaming (44/16) via Apple TV into the Oppo UDP 205 via HDMI for less intense (or more convenient) listening. I listen to B&W Zeppelin Wireless speakers in the bedroom when relaxing, B&W P7 headphone when traveling, and B7W MM1 computer speakers when working at my desk for prolonged periods. I offer this disclosure knowing full well at least some people will dismiss my analysis above and suggest I am retroactively justifying my equipment because I apparently drank the Kool Aid. So be it. I am a former engineer and current interventional cardiologist with many years of training in assessing scientific study design (is it designed to assess what it aims to evaluate and minimize preventable confounding factors) and understanding human physiology / psychology.
You know paying more for your cables doesn't matter right? Especially on digital cables.
@@Koffiato Have you tried some different cables? There is a price point above which there seems to be little difference. But I can hear the difference.
@@gandalfthewhite4097 yup, I tried very varying qualities (not extremely high end ones tho). Difference is mostly placebo sadly. Can't hear a difference at all. Also, no real data other than manufacturers marketing that suggest cable quality is indeed matter.
With classical music, you have a pretty good idea of how a string quartet or symphony orchestra is supposed to sound. Much the same applies with other traditional musics played on acoustic instruments. With rock, and other studio-generated music, unless you were in the control room during the final mix, you have no idea of how it's supposed to sound anyway.
I worked in high level hearing research for many years, totally like and agree with your points, despite being a vinyl only guy. Sharp and accurate