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There is a trick there. A sound can mask another sound. You will not be able to tell the difference with both sounds playing at the same time, but if you subtra

There is a trick there. A sound can mask another sound. You will not be able to tell the difference with both sounds playing at the same time, but if you subtract them you can hear it because there is no masking. I always loved to test the ears of my "Audiophile" friends. They will tell you how different MP3s are. You make a bet they can not differentiate them in 20 trials better than chance. I won with most people but some professional musicians that can identify little differences.

mrob 2y ago
>A sound can mask another sound. Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking Bernhard Seeber of the Audio Information Processing Group at the Technical University of Munich has some good demonstration videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
maep 2y ago
I spent half my professional career doing listening tests (MUSHRA and P.800), specifically on test items like Tom's diner. 128 kbps mp3 ist fairly easy to pick out, especially if you can compare it to the original. Double the bitrate and it's a real challenge. Modern codes like opus are much more efficient. At high bitrates they are fully transparent and anybody who claims to be able to hear a difference is full of shit. Put them in a controlled setting and they fail every time.
- anotherhue 2y ago
  LAME @192kb/s VBR was transparent 20 years ago, that said FLAC is still a good choice because storage is cheap now and you don't want to have to deal with a copy-of-a-copy situation. Some Young folk think that 24bit/192kHz is the one-true-form who would think a 16/44 FLAC is a lossy encode, and then there's the vinyl folks. (I like vinyl, but not for the fidelity). Required reading: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
- pimeys 2y ago
  I've found 128 kbps opus to be the best quality to stream my music when I'm not home. It is very fast to encode on the fly, and outside the house I mostly listen to music with either Bluetooth headphones or sometimes in a car, so playing something like flac would be a waste of bandwidth. Maybe I'm old, but I do not hear a difference between 128 kbps opus and flac. I mainly use flac because it is an excellent archival format and you can encode it to different formats easily.
  - maep 2y ago
    Yea same with me. Unless you have a perfect setup this is good enough. Though if you want to do a little experiment, try Fatboy Slim's Kalifornia, the beginning is notorious for destroying transform based codecs.
- kiririn 2y ago
  I think these kind of blind listening tests are fundamentally flawed. For example in the graphics realm (games, video encoding, colour science, etc) all it takes is a momentary black screen between two comparison images to make it vastly more difficult to detect differences. Likewise side by side is also more difficult than swapping between two images instantly. Audio makes it impossible to do an instant swap, at best you’re getting the equivalent of a side-by-side comparison
  - maep 2y ago
    If anything those tests make it easier to find subtle differences, which is good if transparency is the goal. I don't think that makes them fundamentally flawed. They are used throughout the industry, making results comparable. Of course there are other ITU tests that work without hidden references, looping or even A/B comparison. They require a much bigger listener pool, are more expensive and take longer, thus used less often during development.
    - kiririn 2y ago
      Maybe not fundamentally flawed but audio ABX testing is focused towards short term memory and opinion (especially in unskilled subjects) than I would like. I don't think there is any right answer to audio blind tests. I'll trust actual validated limits of human perception such as 16/48 audio, 1~3dE colour, etc. And techniques used in video encoding like psnr, ssim, etc are also pretty well grounded in science. Also SINAD But anything involving a human blindly comparing audio is into audiophile pseudoscience territory, no matter how large a cohort of people or how it is executed
      - maep 2y ago
        I can assure you that audio codec testing is a through science. Tools such as PSNR, PEAQ or POLQA all have limitations and cannot fully replace a human listener. Those familiar with the topic are often vocal critics of audiophile bullshit. No, this is nowhere near pseudoscience, psychoacoustics is an established field of science.
  - 2y ago
- Sonic656 2y ago
  I laughed when Reddit suddenly spent months claiming Spotify is garbage despite It using 320kbps Vorbis and that the other 3 streaming platforms would dethrone It. Despite the fact I doubt any of them would tell AAC or Vorbis at 160 ~ 192kbps from FLAC, Hell I doubt they even tell 192kbit/s VBR LAME from FLAC let alone the modern lossy codecs. lol
JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
What bitrates are you using? I see practically no difference between v0 and anything above that on most things but sub 192kbps it can be very evident. I feel like a lot of the FLAC people have a hardcoded bias from the Limewire days that's hard to shake off once you've got it, you're basically listening to FLAC for the assurance that you're not missing something (which is a fair reason to a point imo).
Beijinger 2y ago
" I won with most people but some professional musicians that can identify little differences." Even this seems unlikely. I remember a test from the C't Computer magazine that has a very good reputation. And there were many professionals and as far as I remember, they were not able to tell the difference. Fun fact: The only person that scored significantly was a person that loved punk music and had an ear damage. [EDIT] https://www-parkrocker-net.translate.goog/threads/komprimierte-musik.71815/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-parkrocker-net.translate.goog/threads/komprimier...
archi42 2y ago
Regarding little differences: Sometimes(!) hits on the crash cymbals sound "wrong". Since compression is pretty good, most of the time it sounds fine though. Plus, in other instances that's just how it was recorded/sampled. So it's not a good indicator for your test (and I wouldn't dare claim what your audiophile friends claimed). But in a few cases a "wrong" sound cymbal can actually caused by compression. But I sit down to listen to music as a hobby (and used to play drums, so I listen closely to them). And while I don't have audiophile-grade snake oil, I have both decent headphones and speakers; including the electronics.
smolder 2y ago
There's a particular song I have in 96/24 .flac that I can easily tell apart from a 192kbps mp3. Much harder with v0. It's specific to the content though, having some really soft background sounds layered on top of an already rich sound. It helps having fancy headphones, I'm sure. With many other recordings or just worse headphones I doubt I could tell.

mrob 2y ago

>A sound can mask another sound. Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking Bernhard Seeber of the Audio Information Processing Group at the Technical University of Munich has some good demonstration videos on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9UZnMsm9o8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU0_Kaj7cPk

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

maep 2y ago

I spent half my professional career doing listening tests (MUSHRA and P.800), specifically on test items like Tom's diner. 128 kbps mp3 ist fairly easy to pick out, especially if you can compare it to the original. Double the bitrate and it's a real challenge. Modern codes like opus are much more efficient. At high bitrates they are fully transparent and anybody who claims to be able to hear a difference is full of shit. Put them in a controlled setting and they fail every time.

anotherhue 2y ago
LAME @192kb/s VBR was transparent 20 years ago, that said FLAC is still a good choice because storage is cheap now and you don't want to have to deal with a copy-of-a-copy situation. Some Young folk think that 24bit/192kHz is the one-true-form who would think a 16/44 FLAC is a lossy encode, and then there's the vinyl folks. (I like vinyl, but not for the fidelity). Required reading: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
pimeys 2y ago
I've found 128 kbps opus to be the best quality to stream my music when I'm not home. It is very fast to encode on the fly, and outside the house I mostly listen to music with either Bluetooth headphones or sometimes in a car, so playing something like flac would be a waste of bandwidth. Maybe I'm old, but I do not hear a difference between 128 kbps opus and flac. I mainly use flac because it is an excellent archival format and you can encode it to different formats easily.
- maep 2y ago
  Yea same with me. Unless you have a perfect setup this is good enough. Though if you want to do a little experiment, try Fatboy Slim's Kalifornia, the beginning is notorious for destroying transform based codecs.
kiririn 2y ago
I think these kind of blind listening tests are fundamentally flawed. For example in the graphics realm (games, video encoding, colour science, etc) all it takes is a momentary black screen between two comparison images to make it vastly more difficult to detect differences. Likewise side by side is also more difficult than swapping between two images instantly. Audio makes it impossible to do an instant swap, at best you’re getting the equivalent of a side-by-side comparison
- maep 2y ago
  If anything those tests make it easier to find subtle differences, which is good if transparency is the goal. I don't think that makes them fundamentally flawed. They are used throughout the industry, making results comparable. Of course there are other ITU tests that work without hidden references, looping or even A/B comparison. They require a much bigger listener pool, are more expensive and take longer, thus used less often during development.
  - kiririn 2y ago
    Maybe not fundamentally flawed but audio ABX testing is focused towards short term memory and opinion (especially in unskilled subjects) than I would like. I don't think there is any right answer to audio blind tests. I'll trust actual validated limits of human perception such as 16/48 audio, 1~3dE colour, etc. And techniques used in video encoding like psnr, ssim, etc are also pretty well grounded in science. Also SINAD But anything involving a human blindly comparing audio is into audiophile pseudoscience territory, no matter how large a cohort of people or how it is executed
    - maep 2y ago
      I can assure you that audio codec testing is a through science. Tools such as PSNR, PEAQ or POLQA all have limitations and cannot fully replace a human listener. Those familiar with the topic are often vocal critics of audiophile bullshit. No, this is nowhere near pseudoscience, psychoacoustics is an established field of science.
- 2y ago
Sonic656 2y ago
I laughed when Reddit suddenly spent months claiming Spotify is garbage despite It using 320kbps Vorbis and that the other 3 streaming platforms would dethrone It. Despite the fact I doubt any of them would tell AAC or Vorbis at 160 ~ 192kbps from FLAC, Hell I doubt they even tell 192kbit/s VBR LAME from FLAC let alone the modern lossy codecs. lol

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago

What bitrates are you using? I see practically no difference between v0 and anything above that on most things but sub 192kbps it can be very evident. I feel like a lot of the FLAC people have a hardcoded bias from the Limewire days that's hard to shake off once you've got it, you're basically listening to FLAC for the assurance that you're not missing something (which is a fair reason to a point imo).

Beijinger 2y ago

" I won with most people but some professional musicians that can identify little differences." Even this seems unlikely. I remember a test from the C't Computer magazine that has a very good reputation. And there were many professionals and as far as I remember, they were not able to tell the difference. Fun fact: The only person that scored significantly was a person that loved punk music and had an ear damage. [EDIT] https://www-parkrocker-net.translate.goog/threads/komprimierte-musik.71815/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=de&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-parkrocker-net.translate.goog/threads/komprimier...

archi42 2y ago

Regarding little differences: Sometimes(!) hits on the crash cymbals sound "wrong". Since compression is pretty good, most of the time it sounds fine though. Plus, in other instances that's just how it was recorded/sampled. So it's not a good indicator for your test (and I wouldn't dare claim what your audiophile friends claimed). But in a few cases a "wrong" sound cymbal can actually caused by compression. But I sit down to listen to music as a hobby (and used to play drums, so I listen closely to them). And while I don't have audiophile-grade snake oil, I have both decent headphones and speakers; including the electronics.

smolder 2y ago

There's a particular song I have in 96/24 .flac that I can easily tell apart from a 192kbps mp3. Much harder with v0. It's specific to the content though, having some really soft background sounds layered on top of an already rich sound. It helps having fancy headphones, I'm sure. With many other recordings or just worse headphones I doubt I could tell.