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I’ve personally ABX tested people who swore up and down that they could spot 128 AAC, even, and they couldn’t. Never found anyone who could. I know they exist,
by pkulak 3y ago
I’ve personally ABX tested people who swore up and down that they could spot 128 AAC, even, and they couldn’t. Never found anyone who could. I know they exist, but they are rare, and probably not the folks who say they can.
- Espressosaurus 3y agoThere's probably an element of the quality of the DACs and speakers you're using too. If it's a subtle difference it's unlikely we're going to notice it being played through some low-end computer speakers.
- c0pium 3y agoI have very good equipment and lots of people in my circle who are audio enthusiasts. None of them have ever been able to demonstrate in a blind test that they can tell the difference.
- jerf 3y agoSome of it is people ask the wrong questions. On a loudness-war-wrecked pop song I may not be able to tell 128Kbps from the original, but on specific content I have been able to tell. I'm not even claiming golden ears or anything; some specific audio content is the audio equivalent of visual confetti [1], and anyone can hear the difference, because the codec isn't even close. And let me underline, I mean, anyone. No special claims being made here. But all in all, that content is relatively rare, and generally transient even in the music they appear in. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI
- TylerE 3y agoThe giveaway for low-mid nitrate MP3 is the high hats. The lower the nitrate, the more you get a sort of temporal ghosting that sounds like an almost “crunchy” swishy sizzle sort of sound, a bit like a jazz player using brushes, but more lo fi.
- tedunangst 3y agoLow nitrate MP3 is a fantastic typo.
- hunter2_ 3y agoI agree, and my hypothesis is that it's exacerbated by the combination of three particular things: 1. It's a high frequency complex waveform with a fast envelope, so it demands bitrate. 2. Drum miking often involves multiple mics spaced apart, so more than one typically picks up any given cymbal with a phase offset, and those mics are panned quite differently, leading to a very "wide" result, i.e., left and right output is fairly uncorrelated as seen on a vectorscope [0]. 3. A perceptual codec at a given total bitrate often sounds better when stored as a mid-side transformation (instead of storing a left channel and a right channel, store a L+R "mid" a.k.a. sum channel and a L-R "side" a.k.a. difference channel), also known as "joint stereo" which is a common flag on MP3 encoders, because it allows for assigning more bits to the mid channel (correlated signals) and fewer bits to the side channel (uncorrelated signals). More bits for mono center-panned stuff like vocals is the goal, which is generally for the best, but fewer bits remain available for wide stuff like those cymbals! Contrast with regular stereo mode where half of the total bitrate is assigned to each channel. MP3 below 256kbps typically needs joint stereo mode enabled in order to sound decent. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope#Audio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope#Audio
- pushedx 3y agoA realistic take on the issues invovled. I never knew what “joint stereo” meant. Great explanation. If anyone has a good cymbal crash sample at 24/96 or better that they can provide, it seems like it would be a great example for intentional differentiation of various compressed versions.
- TylerE 3y agoVinyl actually encodes stereo much the same way.
- 3y ago
- ahofmann 3y agoWell, most classical songs are very well compressible, because not much is going on. Punk Rock or any other music were a lot is happening, at the same time, can suffer very audible from 128 kbit lossy compression. So you can hear lossy compression better in a loud pop song than other music.
- esquivalience 3y agoI don't agree with this from my own experience. To me, classical music at high compression suffers far worse than modern bands.
- colejohnson66 3y agoMy unscientific guess would be that classical music might have wider dynamic range than “normal” music. So the same compression amount affects the one with more range first (classical).
- nuancebydefault 3y agoHigher dynamic range and typically also more 'pure'. The introduced compression artifacts stand out more in simpler waveforms than in wavevorms that are an addition of many more layers of sound.
- thefilmore 3y agoYour guess would be correct [1]. Some samples [2]. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/2624-599X/4/3/42 https://www.mdpi.com/2624-599X/4/3/42 [2] http://www.harmjschoonhoven.com/mp3-quality.html http://www.harmjschoonhoven.com/mp3-quality.html
- munchler 3y agoA typical classical symphony requires 50-80 instruments, several dozen of which might play at the same time, while a typical punk song has maybe four.
- 3y ago
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago128k AAC is quite good, and is roughly akin to 160k MP3. Personally, past 160k on MP3, it gets very hard for me to distinguish bitrates, so I ripped at VBR, averaging at around 200k. 128k MP3s, though, fall apart with more complex instrumentation.
- pimeys 3y agoAnd 128k opus is perfect to my ears. I store all my music in the best possible quality FLAC files, but stream it to my phone in 128k opus. Such a great format, encodes very fast even with my Intel atom and sounds great.
- samtheprogram 3y agoI’m curious as someone with a local library, how do you stream it in a different format than it’s encoded in, from your phone?
- lozf 3y agoLossy to lossy transcodes always cause more degradation, so it's better to keep your lossy files in their original format without any re-encoding. Easy transcodes to various lossy formats are the primary reason for a well maintained and curated library of proper FLACs (or ALACs). The main advantage being that your can fit more great sounding music on your space-limited device. Disk space is cheap, but upgrades on your phone are probably not. Even if your Music collection fits easily, why not have more room for other media / apps?
- doubled112 3y agoI used to use Subsonic and one of the many clients. I don't know if Subsonic is still an option, but there are many server side applications, including a few forks, that fill that role. There are others that work with those same Subsonic clients. It will allow you to choose a codec for streaming that is different than storage.
- pimeys 3y ago