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> 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 act

> 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.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Beyerdynamic headphones have a lot of fake detail (actually sibilence) that comes from echoes at high frequencies as well as their treble tuning. It makes songs mastered for radio sound more detailed in the same way a sharpness filter would work on images.
  - jorvi 5y ago
    I can't tell you anything except that you have exceptional frequency reach for your age. ISO has actually standardized age-related hearing loss (yes, really), and they point to the same 17KHz point for even young adults. It actually makes me quite envious of you. I have sensitive ears - I can pick up very faint electrical circuitry sounds in screens or the delivery driver scootering into the beginning of our street despite our windows being closed, but I'd happily trade that away for higher frequency range.
    - foo_barrio 5y ago
      Ha! I literally just sat at my PC and saw your response at 3m old. Yea I've noticed I tend to test pretty well on all the official charts but really can't hear a difference in a lot of "audiophile" stuff people claim night/day differences. I had a beat up, 10+ year old pair of sennheizer hd600's that I never got tired of listening to. I finally had them refurbished and they don't sound as "easy" to listen to. One thing is I suffer from tinnitus or something because at night I am always aware of a constant noise or "roar" in my hearing as well as my visual noise in my eyesight. I have pretty terrible eyesight so my hearing circuitry may have just amped the volume a bit to compensate (like upping iso on a camera). In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people. I think my brain has just had a lot of practice. I've always loved music, practiced classical piano hours a day when I was younger, and cut my teeth programming learning DSP algos for audio processing. I recently did a hobby project involving reproducing NES music from ROMs and that involved just listening to raw square/triangle waves and literally just following intuition to get everything to sound right. I'm willing to bet my case is one more of training than raw ability.
jolux 5y ago
My buddy can do it. I didn’t believe him at first but he scored better than me, consistently. We’re both musicians but he’s more into lossless audiophile stuff. We tested it out in our college dorm freshman year. Speakers were the built in ones on my MacBook Pro. I will say that the difference is extremely minor and he has said he only cares about lossless for the sake of having original media in high quality, so he can make compressed versions in whatever format he wants without losing quality. He rarely actually listens to lossless audio. What he recognized was minor clipping on some high-hat hits, and after he pointed it out I could notice it too if I really tried.
- rapjr9 5y ago
  I think this is what confuses many people when they do their own tests, they don't know what to listen for and expect a more general sound quality difference over all parts of the recordings. The differences are actually in particular kinds of sounds, like high hats or piano, and only at specific moments, and only in specific music. For music that is all distortion all the time likely no one can tell the difference. Some people are irked at the slight changes in sound at specific moments compared to listening to CD's or vinyl, some don't even notice it because it is brief or those instruments/moments are not present in a particular recording.
  - jolux 5y ago
    Yeah, it's not a general loss of quality. He actually showed me a really cool YouTube video that explained what is lost with compression, where the person making the video played the same passage of a song compressed and uncompressed, and then showed visually the parts of the waveform that were clipped, and then played the clipped parts isolated. It was a lot of high-pitched, tinny noise, presumably from the upper end of the high hat cymbals and stuff. Wish I still had it handy.
throwaway34241 5y ago
So many of these posts aren't specifying the exact compression format / bitrate they used for the test though. It's obviously possible to pass at some level of compression, but what I really want to know is if anyone can pass a double blind test at a high bitrate on a modern codec vs uncompressed. The codecs obviously represent human-audible information much more efficiently than raw PCM samples. I'm not sure why the quality couldn't scale up (by increasing the bitrate) until it surpasses 100% of human hearing limits (since there's a lot of headroom to increase the bitrate and still be smaller than uncompressed). Maybe some formats have hard-coded frequency cutoffs (that don't change with the bitrate) that are too low for 1% of the population, but there's enough format choice that it would be surprising if they all had that problem.
picardythird 5y ago
Factors: - Quality of audio equipment - The experience of the listener - The nature of the audio It’s quite obvious that the average listener listening to a 128kbps podcast stream is not the issue here. Nor is the average listener listening to a 320kbps stream of a loud, noisy pop/rock album. But there are certain types of music where it’s much more apparent. I have a trained ear and so I can’t speak for everyone. There are certain types of music where I can’t tell the difference. But some classical piano albums on Spotify sound terrible to me. The artifacts of the conpression are more obvious on sensitive, detailed music. All this to say that a random seection of people failing an online test to some random audio isn’t a comprehensive answer to this question.
lozf 5y ago
If you're interested, check out the listening tests section at https://hydrogenaud.io https://hydrogenaud.io where experienced testers contribute results to devs trying to improve various lossy codecs. It often depends on the source material -- some sounds are harder for some algorithms to encode, leading to increased bitrate if the codec supports VBR, or perhaps artifacts of not, or if there's insufficient bitstream available. Unsurprisingly the newer codecs usually manage to sound better than MP3 at significantly lower bitrates. Remember the only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth -- it's literaly why MP3 et al were invented.

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.
- astrange 5y ago
  Beyerdynamic headphones have a lot of fake detail (actually sibilence) that comes from echoes at high frequencies as well as their treble tuning. It makes songs mastered for radio sound more detailed in the same way a sharpness filter would work on images.
- jorvi 5y ago
  I can't tell you anything except that you have exceptional frequency reach for your age. ISO has actually standardized age-related hearing loss (yes, really), and they point to the same 17KHz point for even young adults. It actually makes me quite envious of you. I have sensitive ears - I can pick up very faint electrical circuitry sounds in screens or the delivery driver scootering into the beginning of our street despite our windows being closed, but I'd happily trade that away for higher frequency range.
  - foo_barrio 5y ago
    Ha! I literally just sat at my PC and saw your response at 3m old. Yea I've noticed I tend to test pretty well on all the official charts but really can't hear a difference in a lot of "audiophile" stuff people claim night/day differences. I had a beat up, 10+ year old pair of sennheizer hd600's that I never got tired of listening to. I finally had them refurbished and they don't sound as "easy" to listen to. One thing is I suffer from tinnitus or something because at night I am always aware of a constant noise or "roar" in my hearing as well as my visual noise in my eyesight. I have pretty terrible eyesight so my hearing circuitry may have just amped the volume a bit to compensate (like upping iso on a camera). In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people. I think my brain has just had a lot of practice. I've always loved music, practiced classical piano hours a day when I was younger, and cut my teeth programming learning DSP algos for audio processing. I recently did a hobby project involving reproducing NES music from ROMs and that involved just listening to raw square/triangle waves and literally just following intuition to get everything to sound right. I'm willing to bet my case is one more of training than raw ability.

jolux 5y ago

My buddy can do it. I didn’t believe him at first but he scored better than me, consistently. We’re both musicians but he’s more into lossless audiophile stuff. We tested it out in our college dorm freshman year. Speakers were the built in ones on my MacBook Pro. I will say that the difference is extremely minor and he has said he only cares about lossless for the sake of having original media in high quality, so he can make compressed versions in whatever format he wants without losing quality. He rarely actually listens to lossless audio. What he recognized was minor clipping on some high-hat hits, and after he pointed it out I could notice it too if I really tried.

rapjr9 5y ago
I think this is what confuses many people when they do their own tests, they don't know what to listen for and expect a more general sound quality difference over all parts of the recordings. The differences are actually in particular kinds of sounds, like high hats or piano, and only at specific moments, and only in specific music. For music that is all distortion all the time likely no one can tell the difference. Some people are irked at the slight changes in sound at specific moments compared to listening to CD's or vinyl, some don't even notice it because it is brief or those instruments/moments are not present in a particular recording.
- jolux 5y ago
  Yeah, it's not a general loss of quality. He actually showed me a really cool YouTube video that explained what is lost with compression, where the person making the video played the same passage of a song compressed and uncompressed, and then showed visually the parts of the waveform that were clipped, and then played the clipped parts isolated. It was a lot of high-pitched, tinny noise, presumably from the upper end of the high hat cymbals and stuff. Wish I still had it handy.

throwaway34241 5y ago

So many of these posts aren't specifying the exact compression format / bitrate they used for the test though. It's obviously possible to pass at some level of compression, but what I really want to know is if anyone can pass a double blind test at a high bitrate on a modern codec vs uncompressed. The codecs obviously represent human-audible information much more efficiently than raw PCM samples. I'm not sure why the quality couldn't scale up (by increasing the bitrate) until it surpasses 100% of human hearing limits (since there's a lot of headroom to increase the bitrate and still be smaller than uncompressed). Maybe some formats have hard-coded frequency cutoffs (that don't change with the bitrate) that are too low for 1% of the population, but there's enough format choice that it would be surprising if they all had that problem.

picardythird 5y ago

Factors: - Quality of audio equipment - The experience of the listener - The nature of the audio It’s quite obvious that the average listener listening to a 128kbps podcast stream is not the issue here. Nor is the average listener listening to a 320kbps stream of a loud, noisy pop/rock album. But there are certain types of music where it’s much more apparent. I have a trained ear and so I can’t speak for everyone. There are certain types of music where I can’t tell the difference. But some classical piano albums on Spotify sound terrible to me. The artifacts of the conpression are more obvious on sensitive, detailed music. All this to say that a random seection of people failing an online test to some random audio isn’t a comprehensive answer to this question.

lozf 5y ago

If you're interested, check out the listening tests section at https://hydrogenaud.io https://hydrogenaud.io where experienced testers contribute results to devs trying to improve various lossy codecs. It often depends on the source material -- some sounds are harder for some algorithms to encode, leading to increased bitrate if the codec supports VBR, or perhaps artifacts of not, or if there's insufficient bitstream available. Unsurprisingly the newer codecs usually manage to sound better than MP3 at significantly lower bitrates. Remember the only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth -- it's literaly why MP3 et al were invented.