3 ms·

The industry also prefers to use people with "golden ears", so they can be pretty confident that the target audience cannot tell the difference.

• holy_city 7y ago
  There's a weird bar for confidence, to be frank. Most often I've found that people disregard studies with people who have "golden ears" because they're not average ears, or that studies find that only those with "golden ears" can find a difference, and the audience tends to feel they're in that range. For example, there was a study a few years ago at McGill with trained listeners on the effects of bitrate with mp3 and m4a audio encoding that found that only a slim number of mastering engineers preferred lossless over lossy encoded audio (interestingly enough, some professional mixers and musicians found lossy encodings preferable to lossless even for jazz and classical music). But trying to convince audiophiles that those codecs are comparable to lossless is a losing battle.
  • zaarn 7y ago
    As someone with minor audiophilia, there is still some difference; when you have a lossless version, you can reencode to any lossy version without loosing quality over time. I can transcode FLAC to Mp3 fast enough to stream it on my phone without issue, if I decide to use OGG or Opus or anything else, I don't have eventual reencoding issues.
    • hvidgaard 7y ago
      For archival purposes, it makes no sense to store anything less than lossless.