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From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better q

• alfalfasprout 5y ago
  > There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones than a compressed version, even 320kbps MP3. A poorly mastered track will be much harder (if not outright impossible) to tell the difference on.
  • Someone1234 5y ago
    > I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. I, too, run high-end gear and cannot. The problem scope isn't simply reproduction accuracy, it is also one of taste: Different compression can elevate/alter parts of the sound, and your opinion may not lean to the highest bit rate but rather some other coloring of the music. The fact you've run this test "repeatedly" actually hurts your argument, since you may just be learning what to expect in your environment. The crux of the article/discussion is that people cannot blindly pick the highest quality, which they cannot (since the different colorings of the music are subjective anyway).
    • pwagland 5y ago
      This is crux to the argument. If you know what to listen for, you can pick out the "bad bits", since you know that is where the issue lies. Once you know how to identify bad bits, then you'll be able to "hear" compression artefacts because you'll be primed for them. In A/B tests this is true, I _can_ reliably (not 100%, but way better than random) tell you which of A/B is compressed, and I can normally do this on somewhat crappy headphones, since I _know_ where to listen to pick out the compression. And this despite being partly deaf. However, if I am just listening to music I never notice these artefacts, since when listening to music, I'm not trying to determine which A/B stream is wrong. Most of the time, the music is just playing in the background anyway.
      • TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Problem is, sometimes when you learn how to spot a deficiency, you can't unlearn it and stop spotting it. It's like with kerning[0] or image compression artifacts. Everyone has a different level, and I haven't measured mine, but even when casually listening to music - including music from bad speakers in a waiting room somewhere - I can identify too badly compressed music and get immediately annoyed by it. -- [0] - https://xkcd.com/1015/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
        • JohnBooty 5y ago
          It's like with kerning Kerning is a great comparison, I think. Studies have shown that well-compressed lossy audio is nearly indistinguishable from the originals. This is certainly true for me. I can sometimes pick out the compressed version if I know the track well and can look for specific details, but generally I'm absolutely not consciously aware of any compression artifacts. Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues. And yet... I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences. I believe there may be parallels with lossy vs. lossless compression when it comes to music, and with many other experiences as well -- you may not be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with cheap butter and grass-fed butter in an A/B test, but might you enjoy one cookie more than the other anyway?
  • svantana 5y ago
    When you say "score well" on that test, what does that mean? From the marketing around lossless, they make it sound like most folks will get 6 out of 6. I've got good monitors and good hearing (in the audiology sense), and I can mostly rule out the 128kbps, but it's a tossup between 320 and lossless.
    • marcan_42 5y ago
      It really depends on the encoder and song; I think the vast majority of people would have a very hard time getting above-chance on an ABX test vs a properly encoded MP3 at 320kbps, but I would not discount specific instances where things fall over and it still introduces artifacts that you can learn to recognize. Lossy compression is, unfortunately, not predictable in this sense, so there are always corner cases (or even outright bugs in encoders). Here's one result which lines up pretty much with what I'd expect - if you get lucky with very specific songs/styles, you can pick out a 320kbps mp3, just barely, with good playback hardware. https://www.head-fi.org/threads/abx-test-of-320kbps-vs-flac-results.431522/ https://www.head-fi.org/threads/abx-test-of-320kbps-vs-flac-...
  • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    > Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and silent listening environment – is mastered with more dynamic range. The mainstream release of the same music, on the other hand, often features a different mastering with levels pushed up, because they assume that ordinary people will be listening to music in noisy environments, like through earbuds in the metro. This is often a problem for re-releases of 1960s recordings of jazz where the producer and engineer really exploited dynamic range, but that is lost in the most recent of the digital-era re-releases. (Another reason to prefer SACDs and Blu-ray releases of recordings is for the possibility of 5.0 surround sound, because of course CD and mainstream downloads or streaming are limited to mono or stereo only.)
    • StrictDabbler 5y ago
      Absolutely agreed. People spend so much time arguing about whether we're "past the limits of human perception" on sound or video. They want to quote Nyquist and check frequencies. Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over. Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. If your friend is naive and easily fooled, do an A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating with the speakers. There are a thousand compromises between the source of music and your ear. What is worth paying for is a recording where those compromises were made well. The compression level is a very small part of the picture.
      • Retric 5y ago
        I have been surprised in both directions where what I thought was live music was prerecorded and what I thought was prerecorded turned out to be live music. Which shouldn’t be that surprising, audio equipment has gotten really good and audio standards are based around what people notice.
  • marcan_42 5y ago
    This is largely because MP3 is a crappy, old format. Try high-bitrate Opus on most samples and you're a lot less likely to get above-chance results on an ABX test, pretty much ever, at high bitrates. Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all samples. So you will always be able to find corner cases where an encoder or format does worse and results in more audible artifacts; some of these might be encoder bugs, some might not. Therefore, it is fair to say that you might not want to rely on lossy compression for archival. But it is perfectly reasonable to use it to put music on devices to actually listen to. You say good mastering makes it easier to notice encoding artifacts, but actually, bad mastering can do that too. Over-compressed stuff (in dynamic range) with inter-sample peaks above 0dB can clip and distort after getting run through a lossy codec. As for lossless formats, though, anything above 48kHz 16 bits is complete nonsense for final delivery to consumers. All the "high resolution" stuff with higher sample rates and bit depths is just marketing bullshit, and this has been repeatedly demonstrated in trials (the well-designed ones anyway; there are plenty of terrible ones - no, comparing the 96kHz download to the 48kHz download of a song is not how you test this properly). Bit depths above 16 are useful during production (because quantization noise accumulates and is boosted by things like dynamic range compression); in practice you want to record at 24 bits for headroom reasons, and process in 32-bit float because there's no reason not to with modern computers (and many practical advantages, e.g. ~infinite dynamic range). Sample rates above 48kHz are less so; the main reason to use them is to avoid aliasing artifacts, but it is usually much more effective to do that with well-designed DSP algorithms that include internal oversampling, as opposed to just doing everything at a higher sample rate. Unless you're doing extreme pitch shifting; then higher sample rates may make sense. Videos everyone interested in audio production should watch: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M The little tidbit at the end of the second video about how 48kHz is, in some respects, twice as good as 44.1kHz, is quite neat and not something I'd realized before.
    • andybak 5y ago
      MP3 with a good compressor and reasonable bitrate has repeatedly shown to be indistinguishable from uncompressed. The reason to avoid mp3 is to be able to squeeze the bitrate and save on storage bandwidth - but that has mattered less year on year. I'm personally baffled and irritated by this move from Apple. They'll be selling healing crystals next.
  • lukevp 5y ago
    You may be confusing data compression with dynamic range compression, since you mention dynamic range. Dynamic range compression (limiting / brick wall limiting) has nothing to do with data compression, which is just referring to the removal of unnecessary data that is not noticeable from a psychoacoustic perspective (eg humans can’t hear above 24khz so that data isn’t needed, etc.) here is more info on DRC and MP3: http://www.tonestack.net/articles/digital-audio-compression/mp3-aac-dynamic-range.html http://www.tonestack.net/articles/digital-audio-compression/...
  • RIMR 5y ago
    I took the test, and it pretty conclusively proved to me that I cannot detect the difference. And even if I could detect the difference, I am not convinced that the improvement in bitrate would actually result in any increased enjoyment.
  • stephc_int13 5y ago
    I tried it with my decade old entry-level Seinheiser headset plugged into my desktop computer. 4/6 with two errors where I confused 320Kbps and raw wav. But to be honest, I could hardly distinguish between the samples and I mostly guessed.
  • Workaccount2 5y ago
    I highly suggest that people check out/try out "ABX comparator" plugin for Foobar2000 player. You give it two files (say a 128kbps mp3 version and a lossless flac verison) and it runs you through a double blind test of the two versions, quizzing you along the way. It's not just "listen to A" "listen to B", it gives you lots of options to listen to them and compare them in different ways, including obfuscating what track is A and what track is B. If you think you can really hear fine differences in audio, it can be very eye opening (ear opening?).
    • ehsankia 5y ago
      +1 I have nothing against NPR but that has like 5 samples and absolutely nothing about methodology. As far as I know, the goto test is: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ They have a few other tests heres: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
      • threeseed 5y ago
        I wish people would stop posting this useless test. It compares FLAC with 320 Kbps AAC which no streaming service uses (Apple uses 256 Kbps) and is a very high bit rate. And its choice of indie tracks isn't suited for demonstrating codec artefacts. At least have classical, EDM etc as well.
    • rokweom 5y ago
      There's a great tool for creating online ABX tests: https://abxtests.com/ https://abxtests.com/ The guy who made it, jaakkopasanen, is also the author of other great audio tools - AutoEQ and Impulcifer.
  • spawnthink 5y ago
    Not sure how reflective that test is, since my perception is already primed by noticing the loading time per sample
    • marcan_42 5y ago
      If they are delivering a compressed file and an uncompressed file, that already disqualifies the test. The only way to do ABX comparisons is to round-trip one version through the encoder and back to the original format. Anything else introduces uncontrolled dependencies (e.g. on a particular device's decoder implementation) and side channels that unblind the experiment (like loading time). This is a common mistake people make, e.g. comparing 48k vs 96k files. What you need to do is take a 96k original, downsample it to 48k, upsample it again to 96k (both using very high quality algorithms), then compare it to the original 96k file again. Otherwise you're relying on your playback software or hardware's resampling algorithm, and I guarantee that's a compromise between quality and performance, and not valid for a scientific test.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    I've done blind tests and I can tell if I try really hard but I wouldn't even say that the mp3 sounds worse, just different. I focus on hi hats. I do collect lossless audio for archival reasons and the ability to convert from a non lossy source. I believe that high bitrate audio is entirely bullshit though- as Chris Montgomery has shown: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
    • adrianmonk 5y ago
      > high bitrate audio Based on the opening part of that video, I think you must have meant to say high sampling rate.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        Yes. Thanks. It's been awhile since I watched.
    • snvzz 5y ago
      >I wouldn't even say that the mp3 sounds worse, just different. If you're comparing against lossless, sounding different means sounding worse. The goal is transparency: Preserving the qualities of the original audio that you can actually hear, while occupying less space.
  • tarsinge 5y ago
    I'm actually quite skeptical random people with high end gear can hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless. It has more to do with ear training, mp3 compression is not really on the same axis than what high end gear give you (basic equipment can have a large frequency response).
    • leviathant 5y ago
      On the topic of ear training and hearing differences most people don't hear, I had a recording I was mixing down that featured a squeaky kick pedal on the bass drum. I spent more time than I should have trying to scoop that out of the mix, and in the end, I could still hear the squeaky kick pedal, but no one else in the band could. Later that week I put in a CD with songs I'd heard hundreds of times, and to my absolute horror, I could now hear the squeak of that drummer's kick pedal, like an icepick jabbing me in the ear. It had been there the whole time, pressed to millions of CDs, broadcast over countless radio stations, but only became apparent to me after intense focus on that particular sound. I imagine that people who claim to hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless experience something like that. There may be a particular, narrow band of frequencies that sound slightly more modulated in 320 when compared to lossless, but unless you make a concerted, drawn out effort to find that, you'll never know. And if you do make that effort, you can end up ruining your otherwise pleasant experience for absolutely no good reason. Anyway, after the kick pedal squeak incident, I switched to listening to wholly electronic music for the next month or so as a palette cleanser, and I haven't picked up on the squeak anywhere else since.
  • unfamiliar 5y ago
    > I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Every time this comes up someone says this. I've never seen anyone actually doing it. e.g. a video of setting up a double blind test of this and someone actually passing consistently. When I've challenged people IRL who claim the same thing the response is always "Well, obviously I can't do it with any of the audio gear that either of us have access to... but if I did have high end gear I could tell for sure!"
    • jorvi 5y ago
      Not only that, biology is also against them. Somewhere between 25-30 years of age, your hearing already dips <17KHz. Where does lossy do the vast amount of its information discarding? >17KHz.
      • foo_barrio 5y ago
        I am almost 40 and can easily hear pure ones over 17khz but can't differentiate pure noise with or without anything above 13khz. Right around 18.5khz there's a sharp falloff on pure tones no matter how much I pump the volume. I use a loudness meter that shows me the freq spectrum to confirm that my speakers and headphones are producing a pure constant tone. On the tests at: "https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_frequency.php?frq=14 https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_frequency.php?frq=14" I can get 10/10 on the 10khz and 11khz test, 9/10 on the 12khz test and then it's just guessing at 13khz and higher. High hats tend to fall around 16khz and I have been able to differentiate on audio tests just by listening to high hats but that has more to do with how aggressive the codec is and not necessarily my hearing capability. I enjoy piano music and using the Apple afconvert tool I've been able to get piano tracks down to under 100kbps and they sound fine to me which is pretty amazing. I cannot use some of the more popular Berydynamic headphones because they sound too trebly and some pop songs are physically painful for me to listen to (eg the marimbas at the start of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You are like ear daggers on the 880 headphone and unlistenable on the 990's). I wonder if some of that brand's popularity comes from older ladies/gentlement being able to hear treble in the music that they otherwise wouldn't hear at all.
  • Ashanmaril 5y ago
    Being able to discern a difference in a side-by-side test doesn't really mean much. You can tell which of 2 similar shades of blue is lighter next to each other, but if you were to look at one and then another a day apart you probably couldn't say which was lighter
    • xkjkls 5y ago
      It's a good point about optimization of certain things in general. Like, yeah, someone might post a study that in an anechoic chamber you can tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed audio, but how much of a difference is that making for people in the real world? Often when I listen to music, I'm at the gym, or the office, surrounded by all sorts of background noise that is going to impact my experience way more than compression.
  • thrdbndndn 5y ago
    Can people who claimed that they can distinguish 320Kbps MP3 and lossless start posting their ABX log already?
  • kwanbix 5y ago
    There are a very small % of people that can. You can check HydrogenAudio's double blind test for explanation on how to do a proper test. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Blind_test https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Blind_test
  • baldfat 5y ago
    I use to be a sound engineer. Those "test" usually with gear they owned and you can of course tell the difference with gear you are use to. Most gear has anything but clarity. Most people will dislike clear sound. The POINT is blind test 128 MP3 and lossless. Still the vast majority of people don't have the equipment to hear any difference. The Second POINT is most people prefer to have boomy colored sound and again that ruins the need for lossless. This is why people prefer old vinyl records. It compresses the sound and makes it sound better in most people's opinion. If people would listen to 80s tapes I bet they would love that sound also. The Third POINT music is heard with background noise all the time. No way while listening to music people could tell the difference and those that can it would require great concentration. There is a limited return of investment for most people. Personally I own a DAC and a preamp and have my hundreds of dollars headphones and my Genlec speakers that cost thousands of dollars. I hear a SLIGHT difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC and that is 100% concentration and I can hear a difference in only certain types of music. Classical Jazz and Classical music. I can't tell with pop and electronic music which is what most people listen to.
  • lloeki 5y ago
    There is also the theoretical case of double lossy encoding, e.g with Bluetooth headsets. Something not perceivable when listening to AAC decoding directly punched into a wired headset vs reencoding for BT transport which could transform previously unhearable compression artifacts into the perceivable range (think editing a jpeg and resaving as jpeg often produces artifacts) I have not seen any tests for that. (Of course if the device is able to push the AAC stream to the headset this does not happen. This kind of thing is quite opaque and hard to get info about as to which hardware or combination of hardware would support that) > So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones I'm quite convinced that a good part of vinyl being reputably better comes from that, especially with the virtuous loop of audiophiles being the main audience for modern vinyl, which calls for good mastering.
  • sporkland 5y ago
    I could hear the difference on the first question on my pixel 5 phone speakers.
    • ehsankia 5y ago
      Try a proper ABX audio test like: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ http://abx.digitalfeed.net/ It is a bit lengthy, takes 5-10m, but it is a true blind A/B test with enough samples to be significant.
  • raggi 5y ago
    Test using pixel 4 xl built in speakers at 2/3 volume. You don't need high end gear, you can pick artifacts in half the test cases almost more easily on low end speakers. A few of the tracks only become noticeable once theyre busy. https://photos.app.goo.gl/Bx1XZP5DKpMvvmHf8 https://photos.app.goo.gl/Bx1XZP5DKpMvvmHf8
  • robbyking 5y ago
    This is really interesting! I did the test you linked, and for all but one I picked the lowest bitrate version. I'm using WH-1000XM3 headphones and am a lifelong musician with pretty mild tinnitus.
    • bentcorner 5y ago
      Similar thing happened to me. What sounded "best" is subjective and I really had no idea what to listen for. Listened using Beyerdynamic Custom Studios with a cheap-ish DAC on a windows PC.
    • dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Same headphones and tinnitus and picked out WAV 5/6 times. I did spend some time to listen tho, not pick blindly. I did have aptX enabled at some point in Macos, not sure if it's still working.
  • squeaky-clean 5y ago
    These sorts of tests are BS in my opinion. How often are you listening to the same track 3 times across different quality settings in the same listening session? The only "real" test for these sorts of things is > You've got a new device. Your streaming app defaults to low-quality upon installation. How long until you notice this?
    • peeters 5y ago
      There are plenty of things that can poison the user experience that don't rise above the sub-conscious. Just because you don't notice something doesn't mean that if that thing is improved, you won't have a better experience. E.g. an added 15ms latency on a website.
  • not_good_coder 5y ago
    On NPRs site I can tell which track is the wav file by observing the load time of each track.
  • IceWreck 5y ago
    I gave these and I can't distinguish between 320kbps and uncompressed.
  • summerlight 5y ago
    It's technically possible to distinguish between 320kbps and loseless but it's nothing to do with perceived sound quality or not but more of whether you're trained to hear high-freq sound domain which tends to more suffer from compression.
  • 86J8oyZv 5y ago
    I just got 5/6 with just my MacBook Pro speakers (but am a musician). "Bigger and stronger" is kind of an asinine way to describe the difference though. Was "you hear more subtle details" too many words?
  • INTPenis 5y ago
    That test was amazing. You made me really excited and I even guessed the first one correctly by seemingly hearing the difference. So I spent minutes on each of the other questions, listening and listening, but I just couldn't hear it and sure enough I guessed wrong on every other question after that. And I have a mid-range mini amp that fits in between my books, and two mid-range dali speakers hooked up with a regular 3.5mm outlet to my Ryzen MSI PC board, volume up to max on the computer but not on the amp.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • treeman79 5y ago
    Audio is a deep rabbit rabbit hole. There is always a next level of quality. You can hear the difference, so always a reason to spend just a bit more. Then you have a 100k setup and someone is wondering why you just book the band directly.
  • snvzz 5y ago
    >even 320kbps MP3 Not "even" as if that was any good. MP3 320kbps is a very low bar. OPUS vbr averaging 128kbps is much harder than mp3 320kbps to ABX against FLAC. MP3 simply is a really bad codec by current standards.
    • dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Yet if you open Soulseek 99% of tracks are mp3.
  • Seb-C 5y ago
    I run what I consider to be "good high-end gear" and am surprised that I cannot even tell the difference between 128kbps and 320 kbps, let alone lossless...
  • dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Guessed WAV's 5/6 on bluetooth headphons, but took a lot of attention. Also - the samples can steer you in many directions.
• tobyhinloopen 5y ago
  I have plastic shiny disks that are DRM free. They’re actually pretty great, lossless, and no monthly fees. They are called _Compact Discs_ and you can get them pretty cheap these days!
  • crazypython 5y ago
    Where can I buy CDs of popular music?
    • dagmx 5y ago
      CDs of popular music are actually the easiest to find. (Target, Walmart or any big local equivalent will have the top charting artists stocked as CDs) It's the more esoteric artists that have become increasingly difficult to get CDs for. Streaming is really a boon for anything outside the mainstream.
      • LgWoodenBadger 5y ago
        The last time I bought a cd-looking disc, the "CD" "CompactDisc" logo/words/terms were nowhere on it, inside or out. I seem to recall that meant they weren't actually CDs, they just happened to look exactly like them, and usually function in a CD player. Computers often had trouble with them. I don't know if this is true, or just bs, but there you go.
        • antiterra 5y ago
          The logo you want is the CD Digital Audio logo which requires adherence to the red book standard. Music discs with Sony root kit DRM did not have this logo.
          • fomine3 5y ago
            Ironically Sony and Philips wrote the redbook.
  • 5y ago
• yehaaa 5y ago
  The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec. Secondly Apple has been using AAC since forever which is a successor to mp3 and an MPEG standard.
  • moogly 5y ago
    > The format is ALAC, it’s not proprietary but an open spec True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.
    • yehaaa 5y ago
      To increase interoperability with existing libraries for example. The user group that has some kind of Apple device, and thus potentialy ALAC encoded audio is quite large.
    • floatingatoll 5y ago
      I've been storing my FLAC files as ALAC for iTunes compatibility for the past decade. Max.app on macOS, while old and creaky looking, does a fine job of transcoding them and maintaining tags.
      • moogly 5y ago
        Now imagine storing it in FLAC and playing them everywhere, without having to transcode at all.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • floatingatoll 5y ago
          That's someone else's windmill to tilt, sorry.
      • floatingatoll 5y ago
        Oh, if you're using homebrew and you want ffmpeg to support ALAC, you can do that. brew edit ffmpeg; add `depends_on "fdk-aac"` and `--enable-libfdk-aac`, `--enable-nonfree` to the relevant sections, remove the bottle section; then, brew reinstall ffmpeg. There's probably a better way to do this that doesn't trigger a merge conflict each time they update the bottle hashes (resolved easily with brew edit ffmpeg, repeat above), but I'm lazy and ffmpeg doesn't update frequently. I have no idea if ffmpeg can maintain ID3 tags from FLAC->ALAC or not, but if you have need of this knowledge someday, say hi to that future for me! (And if compilation fails with a specific weird error about corefoundation corevideo coreaudio etc, uninstall and reinstall your macOS command line tools, because they're broken; `sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools ; xcode-select --install` will do that.)
• varispeed 5y ago
  People don't know what to listen for. The compression artefacts may seem like artistic choice to people rather than a loss of quality. Once you know what to listen for, you can almost always tell the difference, even on lower quality listening devices.
  • antiterra 5y ago
    This is true, most of 320kbps is indistinguishable, but high hats are often subject to artifacts, including pre-noise that occurs before the sound is supposed to begin. To some it might sound intentional, like a very subtle reverse high hat or other room effect.
    • varispeed 5y ago
      This and also transients - they sound in a specific way through the way the compression works. Once you hear it, it is difficult to stop paying attention to it.
      • antiterra 5y ago
        Right, high hats are a source of transients which get smeared because there’s a minimum block size in mp3 that is somehow too big to encode it temporally.
• Grollicus 5y ago
  I've got two recordings of Machine Head's Through The Ashes Of Empires, one 320kbps mp3 and one flac, which is the one I usually listen to. So some day I'm listening to that album as I'm wont to do and I notice there's some cracks missing. After questioning my sanity a bit it turns out the mp3 ones somehow managed to sneak into my playlist.
• moolcool 5y ago
  Do you think the record labels would be fine with Apple streaming their IP in a lossless and DRM-free format? It's self-evident that DRM-free is objectively more versatile, but it's also self-evident that it can't not have DRM for business reasons.
• Gaelan 5y ago
  > But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM. For what it’s worth, music actually purchased on iTunes (not an Apple Music subscription) has been DRM-free for years. If this means iTunes-purchased songs are lossless now, that might be useful.
  • thetinguy 5y ago
    Apple Music files have DRM but iTunes purchases do not.
    • Gaelan 5y ago
      That's what I said.
• PaulHoule 5y ago
  Converting files to Ogg Vorbis a long time ago was something I regret. There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder or Apple's AAC encoder (maybe the only quality AAC encoder) but you are guaranteed to have to re-encode if you want to play on your sports watch, in your car, play on your smart speakers, etc.)
  • StavrosK 5y ago
    > There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder Really? From tests I did way back in the day, the quality was comparable at around half the size. It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free. Let's hope Opus has a better fate.
    • skrause 5y ago
      MP3 is also royalty-free now and MP3 encoders are much better than they were 20 years ago.
    • 45ure 5y ago
      >It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free. Spotify currently uses Ogg Vorbis on desktop and mobile, and AAC for the web player.
  • CannisterFlux 5y ago
    Even on bog-standard Android, Ogg files tend not to be as well supported by random music programs compared to MP3. I re-ripped a few CDs in MP3 that I'd also foolishly done to ogg just have them play gapless in VLC I think it was (might have been some other app, I forget now), otherwise there was an annoying pause between tracks that had seemless blending between them. And another app I use to slow down or pitch shift tracks to play along to or transcribe didn't work with anything but MP3 for a long time, though that at least got an update.
    • Loughla 5y ago
• simias 5y ago
  It doesn't matter, it's good marketing. It's not rational, but it lets Apple posture as being "high end". The utter majority of people won't be able to tell the difference but then again the utter majority of people won't even try to test it. I know that I personally can't even tell the difference between Spotify's "mid" and "high" quality settings the vast majority of the time even in perfect listening conditions with good earphones and focusing hard on the small details. I've given up on arguing with audiophiles about this. In the end if they enjoy their overpriced setups to listen to 196kHz 32bits-per-sample uncompressed tracks who am I to tell them otherwise? It won't keep me from listening to compressed audio on my cheapo USB DAC with my mid-range earphones and enjoying it just as much.
  • tachyonbeam 5y ago
    People are downvoting you but you're not wrong. One of the biggest factors behind Apple's success is that they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. They're the Prada of the tech world. I switched from an iPhone to an Android recently and found the quality of the device and software to be just as good if not better, but an Android doesn't say "I'm upper middle class" like an iPhone does. Me, I see spatial audio and I'm like... Ah, that's annoying, because it's yet another proprietary gimmick, and it means the format will likely be incompatible with everything else. You could see a proliferation of audio files that are only usable on Apple devices. Stereo seems... Based in physical reality, ubiquitous, and very practical. I hope Google doesn't try to copy them just like they did after Apple decided to remove the headphone jack, because that wasn't an upgrade. Deprecating trusted, reliable technology to try to entice buyers is not an upgrade.
    • iDisagreedEar 5y ago
      I got an IPhone for work and I was extremely excited during unpackaging and giving my personal information to Apple. It took only a few weeks for disappointment over slow transitions, buggy apps, and annoying updates. Today I'm not sure how I could live without a few Android exclusive things, Linux, ad block, macros. They might be available for IPhone, but it's mind numbingly easy to get started. Final complaint, our grandparents got iPhones because it was supposed to be easy. Apple logins and lingo made it difficult to use.
• marcodiego 5y ago
  Personal experience: most people can not differentiate anything above 128kbps mp3. Some can, but don't care. A lot of people listen to music in noisy environments with lower quality blue-tooth devices that decrease audio quality even more and make it way harder to differentiate from anything better than 128kbps mp3. Most current music is heavily dynamic compressed leaving very little space to differentiate better codecs. And the new generation of listeners is getting so used to compression artifacts that a cleaner sound may feel strange and unfamiliar.
  • robbyt 5y ago
    Who are these people who can't hear the difference? And what sort of listen setup have you used to test this? Even my parents can hear the difference!
    • marcodiego 5y ago
      For a quick result: http://systmuwi.de/Pdf/Technical%20Reports/TechnicalReport_MP3.pdf http://systmuwi.de/Pdf/Technical%20Reports/TechnicalReport_M... page 16. And about people getting used to compression artifacts: https://web.archive.org/web/20090315092806/radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090315092806/radar.oreilly.com... and https://gizmodo.com/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-destroyed-music-5166649 https://gizmodo.com/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-dest...
    • em500 5y ago
      The German c't magazin did an extensive test back in 2000 using pricey audiophille equipment (Sennheiser Orpheus, B&W Nautilus 803). 256k MP3 was statistically tied with the Compact Disc source. Translated article: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0
  • kevindong 5y ago
    If I really strain myself, I can tell the difference between 128 and 320. But I never put that much effort into listening/appreciating music.
• teolandon 5y ago
  What's interesting to me is that they put J Balvin's statement about lossless audio in the section about spatial audio.
• viro 5y ago
  > with DRM Umm did I miss something? ...This for a music streaming service.
  • vultour 5y ago
    Yes, his argument is that it’s pointless for a streaming service
• lucideer 5y ago
  TL;DR of a lot of the relevant sibling replies here: DR is a lot better on some (not all) masters of lossless releases. I tbh think "sound(s) bigger and stronger" is actually a pretty decent layman's phrase for "has a higher dynamic range".
• swiley 5y ago
  IME: you get quantitation error with very quiet sounds (or dark things in video) which gets amplified by the lossy encodings. It's not normally apparent but there are cases where it is.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• twobitshifter 5y ago
  I’m not an audiophile, but a couple days ago my wife had the radio in the car on and I thought something was wrong with the stereo, the middle range of the music were missing. It was all snare and a muted bass. I tried adjusting the EQ, but it had no real effect. I was a little worried about my own hearing at this point, but I saw that the station was broadcasting in “HD.” I looked this up and HD apparently means that they broadcast in pretty low bitrates. I agree that there must be a point where the difference is negligible but people have taken the argument that you won’t hear the difference so far that they’re wiping out the heart of music on radio.
  • ddingus 5y ago
    I am not sure whether it has been improved, but back when the Ibiquity HD was being deployed, the codec actually synthesized sound above something like 5 to 8Khz at the receiver, all depending on the bitrate choices and band, AM having a lower overall available bitrate to work with. Someone noted a song by the Bangles, which featured a little finger cymbal. (Two discs worn on a finger and thumb) That sound was missing and or rendered poorly. Turns out it offers very little sound under 5Khz. The codec parameters were increased to address those few cases, but are still below 10Khz, I believe. The other discussion was quality over choice. Fact is a full FM bitstream performed great. More than good enough to really enjoy in a car. Most people would trade the losses for lack of fuzz and noise present on analog RF. "CD Quality" was, and today is not accurate at all in the technical sense, but the overall feel is more like a CD than it is analog media, so... that is what they went with. However, being able to offer several streams meant multiple branding, commercial free streams to promote digital radio, and, and, and. Mostly, that discussion resolved to choice being king over quality. Improving quality at the expense of choice = wasted bits. That is by far the dominant view in broadcast. A little thought experiment explains why: Say you have a radio, and you get two stations. One offers compelling content, but the quality is low. The other is amazing good quality, but is just not compelling. Which do you listen to? Given others find the same material compelling that you do, which do you believe they will listen to? And that is why peak quality on broadcast is no longer a thing. Streaming services can offer compelling and quality choices to a higher degree than broadcast can, which means generally higher quality, even when available bitrates are, or could be. comparable. But, if they are ever pinned, they will favor choice over quality in a pinch, because compelling content wins over quality nearly all the time. I pretty much gave up on radio around this time too. Being able to carry a good music library around meant just using a car system as an output device. For a time, I did enjoy live or daily broadcasts, talk, news, sports. But, those carry such a high commercial load, and when phones and data plans began to favor streaming, I switched completely. ...all of which is why I am not too current on how HD Radio performs today. Next time I rent a car, I will have to scan the dial to see what, if anything, has changed.
• k_sze 5y ago
  Just a FYI in case you didn’t know, but Vorbis is kinda superseded by Opus now, which is a newer, royalty-free lossy codec that has a few nice qualities, such as, if I understand correctly, less decoding latency, higher compression ratio for similar perceptual quality. It has been the high quality audio codec for sites like Youtube for a while now. I just wish digital audio players would pick it up.
• layer8 5y ago
  > There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. Indeed, here is such a test: https://gxip23wuyntw2qbzp2f7yfke6y-ac5fdsxevxq4s5y-www-heise-de.translate.goog/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html https://gxip23wuyntw2qbzp2f7yfke6y-ac5fdsxevxq4s5y-www-heise... Even trained listeners using high-end equipment weren’t able to distinguish between CD and 256 kbps MP3 in double-blind tests.
  • lozf 5y ago
    There's plenty of double blind ABX test results at https://hydrogenaud.io https://hydrogenaud.io that contradict this, and with some material at even higher bitrates. Mostly it's experienced listeners making useful contributions to codec developers.
  • joshspankit 5y ago
    The worst thing we ever did for audio quality was focus on short A/B tests. It seems like a decent idea, and works for big differences, but ears are not great at it. Much better results would be had with 1 month of A, then switching to B.
    • fomine3 5y ago
      Any sources?
      • joshspankit 5y ago
        I can’t find the references I got that from (it was decently respected people in the audiophile world talking about their experience with AB tests over a decade or two), but it’s also true in my own experience. As well, I feel like the same concept is being used when people listen to the same recording of the same track every time they are trying out new headphones or speakers.
• hparadiz 5y ago
  Yup. It's pointless to offer this in a locked down form.
• crossroadsguy 5y ago
  This is Apple and its loyal follower base (their customer base is different) we are talking about. The followers who would have gone week in the knees right after those words. That Scoopertino post never fails to amuse me. https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-what-if-apple-made-water-20130801-story.html https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-what-if-apple-m...
• taylodl 5y ago
  Metallica's Death Magnetic is going to sound like shit whether you play it with lossless or lossy audio. You can't fix a bad mix. The other extreme are things I would love to hear in lossless audio and Dolby Atmos but it would have to be re-mastered and there's limits for what was captured on the original audio tape. Pink Floy'd Dark Side of the Moon is one example.
• meristohm 5y ago
  Just my two kilobits: I also prefer FLAC and Ogg and Opus, and after some testing I settled on 24kbps mono Opus for audiobooks and 96kbps stereo Opus for anything more than spoken. I was limited by storage on my old Android device, and my earbuds were whatever. I now have better headphones (~$60?) and speakers (~$130?) and am sometimes transported back to my teens and the wonder of listening to music in all its breadth and depth.
• tombert 5y ago
  I have a pretty fancy stereo system that I bought when I really didn't have enough money to afford such things, and I do like it, but I feel like any quality difference that I hear when I'm playing lossless audio is largely psychosomatic. An mp3 or AAC with a high bit rate sounds pretty damn good, so it's fine for nearly anything. All that being said, I still use FLAC for nearly everything for two reasons: 1) Since it's lossless, it makes a good "transit medium"; I can have some assurances that it's not going to degrade in quality with subsequent renders if I import the audio into a video editor and export it to 24 Bit FLAC. 2) Hard drive space is pretty cheap nowadays. I have a home streaming server that I set up to stream to my stereo (doesn't do any additional compression from the input source), and even if it is psychosomatic, I do like knowing that I have the highest quality possible. I'll admit it's silly, but the music sounds better psychologically because I know it's lossless, even if I realistically cannot tell a difference in a blind test.
  • andykellr 5y ago
    I agree with you. And besides, even if the difference is psychosomatic, do we need to split hairs between our brain saying it's better because of internal bias or external stimulus?
• TacticalCoder 5y ago
  > There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. Two things... CD quality (16 bit / 44.1 kHz stereo) was "big" in the eighties but it now makes for really tiny files. 1 TB harddisk and much more are common for consumers. Why are we still even arguing about 320 kbps mp3 when we can have provably bitperfect rips of our CDs, which can serve both as archive and for listening? The second thing: from the other side of a big room I cannot tell the difference between a 100 dpi color printing of a painting and a 1200 dpi color printing of that same painting. Well... Even if I cannot tell the difference I do prefer to know I have the 1200 dpi print and not the 100 dpi one. Why would I even take the risk, even I cannot consciously tell the difference, to have something of lesser quality? mp3 was lots of fun in the Napster days when we were running 28.8 k baud modems and had 3.2 GB HDD. But nowadays I've got 1 TB HDDs... To me the mp3 ship has sailed and won't be missed. It's FLAC and only FLAC. CD quality everywhere. I don't own SACD (maybe I should) but got a lot of CDs. And FLACs are my CD in digital version. mp3s simply aren't. And that's in 2021. I cannot imagine, say, in 2026. This "mp3 vs flac" argument is never ever going to go back in favor of mp3: as time passes the room it takes to store your music collection as FLAC keeps getting proportionally tinier and tinier.
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  The liberal use of adjectives when discussion audio quality is what sets my BS alarm off. Bigger. Stronger. Warmer. Not that these cannot meaningfully describe audio. But it tells me they cannot quantify the difference.
  • mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Right, I don't want those sorts of modifications to my audio. Clearer, more accurate, would be my preference. Which I'll modify at my end as I choose.
  • bruce343434 5y ago
    I think _experiencing_ audio is mostly subjective anyway, and that these discussions are all equally worthless because of it.
• twoodfin 5y ago
  I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix. Who's to say that Apple now or in the future might not want to do what amounts to dynamic "re-mixing" on-device? Presumably whatever adaptive tricks they might like to pull to make your music sound better or sync up to AR scenes or ... would benefit from the uncompressed source.
• BatteryMountain 5y ago
  I'm not an audiophile but I can hear the difference. For me, compressed audio sounds like this: low frequencies: dull, humming noise mid range: sounds like the sound is coming from a sock higher frequencies: too squeaky is the best way I can describe it. I have permanent tinnitus though. The better/higher the sound quality, the less noticeable it is. And of coarse listening to a real instrument a few meters away (that doesn't go through a mic & amplifier) is an absolute treat.
• babypuncher 5y ago
  I buy FLAC so that I can easily convert my music to other formats without making 2nd generation lossy copies. Being able to convert my entire library to AAC, pre-apply my ReplayGain data, and shove it on to my iPhone is real handy. This just seems like a waste of bandwidth for streaming though.
• bayindirh 5y ago
  > There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. It's been said many times, but with good equipment and familiarity with the instruments of the genre can (and will) change the outcome of these tests. 320CBR MP3 will sound extremely good, but with a good system and some relaxed listening in a silent environment will highlight the differences for who knows what to listen for. By a "good system" I don't mean $10K+ systems on isolated rooms. A good vintage amplifier with a relatively modern CD player with good quality (Burr Brown / Wolfson) DAC and high quality speakers is enough.
• alternatetwo 5y ago
  And the comparison would be against 256 aac (what iTunes uses currently), which is insanely good and much better than 320 mp3! Nobody can hear that!
• scythe 5y ago
  >There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". Yes, but lossless audio is still useful for transcoding. If you want to play music on your phone, and you have plenty of fixed hard drive space on your desktop (which is very cheap), it's rational to compress with an advanced codec to ~90 kbps since your headphones probably aren't good enough to pass anything more hi-fi and you want space for pictures and videos. However, if your downloads come lossy compressed, you'll introduce transcoding artifacts; you can get around this by transcoding at a significantly higher bitrate, but now the compressed file is wasting space!
• locusm 5y ago
  Apple tosses togethor lossless and high res in this article, it states that its whole catalog will be available in lossless format and also this "For the true audiophile, Apple Music also offers Hi-Resolution Lossless all the way up to 24 bit at 192 kHz". It doesnt say if the high res tracks are included in a subscription which is interesting as competing services usually have a higher price tier for this. Services like Tidal & Qobuz differentiate themselves on high res but it is such a tiny percentage of their catalog thats its often a waste of effort. And then there is the whole hardware support question, Android down samples everything and Apples codec over bluetooth isnt going to support anything high res anyway. This all sounds like features for the average user (bigger numbers are better) where in reality it probably holds value for less than 1% of users.
  • joshspankit 5y ago
    Apple’s own high-end headphones can’t even handle the lossless files. I suspect like many things, that this is Apple’s attempt at providing a service that’s just valid enough that they can dry up the competitors then relax their quality and get back to selling the products they want to sell people.
• bstar77 5y ago
  I might not be able to hear those frequencies, but I can sure as hell hear the artifacts. All I need to do is use my $300 B&O headphones.