Can you hear the difference?

[Spidey]

Can you hear the difference between a high quality compressed audio format and a lossless format? (ripped from a CD)

Played through a high quality digital output sound system.

And I don’t mean theoretically, I mean “you” personally.

[ThugsRook]

heya Spidey,

WAV vs. 128MP3 ~ barely, and only if i screwtinize and listen very carefully in a quiet room.
in-game, no way would i be able to tell a diff.

WAV vs. 128OGG ~ cant tell the diff at all.

[Krom]

Nope, I've never bothered to really strain to hear if there is a perceptible difference. I highly doubt I would be able to tell if I took a double blind test unless they really cut the quality of the lossy format down.

[Top Gun]

heya Spidey,

WAV vs. 128MP3 ~ barely, and only if i screwtinize and listen very carefully in a quiet room.
in-game, no way would i be able to tell a diff.

WAV vs. 128OGG ~ cant tell the diff at all.

Wow...really? 128 kbps MP3s sound like ass to me, and I don't even have great speakers/headphones. Now if we're talking an MP3 pushed up to 320, then no, I can't really tell the difference between that and a WAV/FLAC file, but even at 192, I can hear that something's off.

[Foil]

For an .mp3 at 128 I can sometimes tell the difference, especially if it's a song I frequently listen to, but 192 or better is usually just as good as lossless to my ears.

Honestly, though, it really depends on the sound system. At home with my main system, I can often tell the difference between a CD and a 128 or 192 .mp3, but if I'm out in my car, no way.

[Top Gun]

Yeah, environment definitely makes a difference, and the road noise in a car can drown out a lot of what you'd be able to pick up in a quieter environment. At least for me, the big difference between low and high-bitrate files lies in the treble range: high-bitrate or lossless files have that extra "pop" in the high end that gets muddled or distorted in something like a 128 file. I really noticed this over the past day or two when listening to my Portal 2 soundtrack CDs.

[fliptw]

MP3 quality is dependant on the quality of the encoder.

[vision]

For an .mp3 at 128 I can sometimes tell the difference, especially if it's a song I frequently listen to, but 192 or better is usually just as good as lossless to my ears.

Honestly, though, it really depends on the sound system. At home with my main system, I can often tell the difference between a CD and a 128 or 192 .mp3, but if I'm out in my car, no way.

This, but also the harmonic content of the program material determines how it will sound after compression. I wrote a song years ago and could never get a suitable compressed file. Even a 320 kbps mp3 had very noticeable artifacts in it. I was shocked at this.

[fliptw]

vision, did you have any harmonics that went past 22 khz?

This is a nice primer on digital audio

[vision]

vision, did you have any harmonics that went past 22 khz?

I have no idea, I wouldn't have been able to hear it anyway. I'll look at the track through a spectrum analyzer later, but right now the file is archived in my storage unit. Wrote it back in 1996. Either way, the harmonic content doesn't always lend itself to nice compression.

[Spidey]

Thanks for your responses…here’s the reason I ask.

After going thru hell getting the problem with my audio solved, I kind of caught upgrade fever while thinking about having to replace hardware, software etc.

One of the obvious additional upgrades would have been ripping my entire collection again in a lossless format.

So I did some experimenting to see if I could tell the difference, and of course there were the obvious differences in the upper highs, which was a given from the beginning, because I understood this when I ripped in the first place.

But I also noticed some difference in the clarity and definition of the music as well, and I wanted to confirm, that it wasn’t my imagination.

So please continue the discussion, because I’m still not convinced.

[vision]

So please continue the discussion, because I’m still not convinced.

One thing you can do is get a friend to help you do a double-blind test to see if you really can tell the difference or if it is your imagination.* That's the best way to know for sure. I've done that kind of test with myself and found that most of the time I can't tell the difference between uncompressed files and high bitrate mp3's (192+). Like I mentioned above, it's usually the harmonic content of the program that will give it away the compression, some material sounding terrible no matter how high the bitrate.

[Spidey]

Yea, I understand…

JFTR the majority of my collection is ripped @ 1 mbps. (WMA, not variable, not “pro”)

Some of the shorter tunes ripped at a low of around 400k, but don’t ask me why. (most much higher, probably 600k average)

[fliptw]

If are going to re-rip your CDs, then a lossless format would be ideal, cause now your have your CDs in an archival format, and only need to do it once.

To also put it more sombrely, you might hear a difference now, but you won't later. Hearing does go with age, unless you were babying your ears your entire life.