20 ms·

I once spent ~2 hours explaining all of this (well maybe not all of it) to a friend of mine who was studying sound design at the time. He didn't believe me. I

I once spent ~2 hours explaining all of this (well maybe not all of it) to a friend of mine who was studying sound design at the time. He didn't believe me. I even transcoded some 24/192 FLAC Pink Floyd I had lying around and made him do a double blind test to show him that he'd prefer the slightly louder song every time, even if the louder song was 192kbps vs the FLAC. He did. He still doesn't believe me. He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now. I don't think any amount of reasoning will make some people change their minds. Some people buy $500 wooden knobs to make their volume pots sound better. (or was that a hoax? i can't tell anymore)

masklinn 12y ago
> Some people buy $500 wooden knobs to make their volume pots sound better. (or was that a hoax? i can't tell anymore) Some people buy small pyramids to elevate their cables off the floor, some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player (http://dagogo.com/millenniums-m-cd-mat-carbon-cd-damper-review http://dagogo.com/millenniums-m-cd-mat-carbon-cd-damper-revi...), some people buy $1000+/meter digital interconnect cables (http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/transparent-reference-xl-digital-link/ http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/transparent-referen...), some people buy $7200 power cords (http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/crystal-cable-absolute-dream-speaker-cable-interconnect-and-power-cords/?page=5 http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/crystal-cable-absol...) and $350/m HDMI cables (http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-first-american-made-high-speed-hdmi-cable/ http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-fi...). Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. Developer bullshit has nothing on them.
- nnnnni 12y ago
  $350/m HDMI cables... so, Monster?
  - masklinn 12y ago
    Far from me the idea to defend them, but $350/m is about 3 times higher than Monster's most bullshitty bullshit cable. Even their "2000HD HyperSpeed HDMI cable" only had a $115/m MSRP in 5ft, falling to $32/m in 35ft: http://www.monsterproducts.com/Monster_Video_ISF_2000HD_Hyper_Speed_HDMI_Cable http://www.monsterproducts.com/Monster_Video_ISF_2000HD_Hype...
    - ansible 12y ago
      My great business idea was to produce a line of "organic" cables. Our company would go to the remote places of the earth to hunt down copper dragons (as in DnD) and harvest their veins to make audio cables. The "natural", "organic" copper has a warmth to the audio signals flowing through it that artificially produces cables just can't provide (they have harsher undertones). Then we'd also have silver and gold cables, harvested from, you guessed it, silver and gold dragons. These would truly be "monster" cables.
      - leoc 12y ago
        PETA's going to bust your ass.
      - sitkack 12y ago
        dragoncopper, have the website default to some non-existent northern european language/font with a translation button (british flag). Burled wood with reds and yellows. will buy.
      - gumby 12y ago
        I plan to disrupt the audiophile business (and crush you in passing) with my homeopathic cables. As we melt the gold we mix in a few atoms of "rare earth" elements (rare == expensive == so good "they" don't want you to have access) which is then diluted by adding more melted gold until only the imprint of the rare earth atom remains. The gold will the be hand drawn by virgins (in truth these will be strong, hairy, 50-yo virgins with dreadful hygiene and B.O. though strong enough to pull, but we need not add all that confusing stuff, we'll just say "virgins"). The wire will be lovingly laid into hand-made insulation made from organic pinniped leather. I see a variety of future applications both in the home (connect your cable modem to your WiFi access point) and business (data centers). To quote Rony Abovitz, we'll soon be "the size of Apple". Invest now, while you still can!
- yclept 12y ago
  If there's psychological phenomena that make them enjoy it more, what's the issue?
  - btown 12y ago
    And there are jobs created for engineers who design that equipment - simultaneously recycling more money in the economy and contributing to the statistics of STEM job prospects! Everybody wins!
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      And I get cheap hight definition AD and DA conversors to use in my projects! I'm certainly not complaining.
    - Confusion 12y ago
      Broken window fallacy.
      - btown 12y ago
        Sure, you need to take externalities into account. One can imagine an audiophile who would rather spend $100K on a sound system that sustains 3 jobs at a niche sound-system-design business, instead of angel-investing that money in a growth company that would eventually create 300 jobs. But what if the audiophile's daughter is then inspired to build another growth company when she grows up, because she was intrigued by how much her dad would geek out about the electronics in her sound system? Nothing is clear, it's incredibly hard to quantify probabilities about any of these things. As long as the audiophile isn't neglecting responsibilities or breaking windows to obtain his sound system... that is, as long as negative externalities are not a foregone conclusion... we should let him enjoy his passion.
        Confusion 12y ago
        Certainly, there are valid moral arguments to allow, even encourage, this state of affairs. I was just pointing out that the economical argument that was offered is a broken window fallacy. Refuting an argument in favor of X is not an argument against X.
- TylerE 12y ago
  That's rather a wide-ranging bit of character assisination. Some of us just enjoy listing to music on decent equipment (If you can buy it at your local big box store, it's probably not sufficiently "decent") properly setup (which doesn't mean expensively - just basic proper speaker placement and the like).
  - bch 12y ago
    > Some of us just enjoy list[en]ing to music on decent equipment The best definition of audiophile I've heard is somebody who listens to equipment, rather than music. Of course your favourite Pink Floyd sounds better on a decent stereo rather than a clock-radio, but if somebody is forever chasing the proper "colour" for their speakers, or swapping amps for the perfect tone... they might be an audiophile. edit: s/you might be/they might be/
    - TylerE 12y ago
      You're using "audiophile" as if it only represents say , the 5% most wacky partipants in the hobby.
    - cthalupa 12y ago
      >The best definition of audiophile I've heard is somebody who listens to equipment, rather than music. Audiophiles are an easy target. There are a lot that do stupid shit like buy $5000 power cables, expensive risers to lift cables off the ground, etc. A lot are pretentious, even if they're not insane or dumb. But that's a rather inflammatory, and in my opinion, unfair position to take. I would probably be considered an audiophile - I have put quite a bit of money into audio equipment. But I love music. I listen to it basically constantly. It's one of my primary sources of entertainment - and I don't just mean 'I have music on when I do other shit.' Each week I spend probably 20 hours doing nothing but relaxing with a bit to drink and some music on. Not reading, not surfing the net, not doing anything but closing my eyes and enjoying the sound. I'm listening to the music. At times, yes, when I have been testing out new equipment before deciding if I want to buy it I go through and I do blind ABX tests with level matching. In this case, yes, I am listening to equipment. But this is a very minor portion of my total listening time. I know you're probably not being totally serious with the post, but I do think it's a bit unfair towards those of us that love music, but also have invested time and money into getting a setup that sounds better for increased enjoyment.
- threeseed 12y ago
  > Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant. God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.
  - largote 12y ago
    Well, Bose / Beats are clearly overpriced for what they deliver.
  - thisjepisje 12y ago
    >God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product. This has little to do with the article. If you've got 100 bucks to spend on a pair of headphones, it's only fair to point out that with certain products you're not getting the best sound out of your money.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Those are low-budget audiophile products, ie they are still marketed mainly to boost the ego of purchasers. There are three brands of headphones that pros use: Beyerdynamic (typically DT-100 or DT-770), Sennheiser (typically HD-5/650) and Sony (typically MDR-7506/9). Beyerdynamics have somewhat better isolation so they're more popular in music studios, Sonys are more comfortable when you have to wear them all day so they're more popular on film sets; I favor the 7506 and am on my 4th or 5th pair. Some people love Sennheisers but I personally don't care for the ergonomics. They're not beautiful, lightweight, or fashionable, but they're a lot nicer to listen to - which is why one or other of them was almost certainly used at the recording stage. If it was good enough for the people who made the recording, it's good enough for you. Also, you'll save money compared to the 'quality' consumer brands.
    - aidenn0 12y ago
      What's different between the $80 7506 and $200 7509?
      - anigbrowl 12y ago
- agumonkey 12y ago
  On the other side of their spectrum, I went "near" an audiophile shop test booth and I was sucked by clarity and density of the sound in the air (this was a drum solo track). Some audiophileness is good. I'll head back to my 40$ crappy mp3 player now.
  - stinkytaco 12y ago
    I actually think you'll find many "audiophiles" enamored of the Sansa Clip Plus and Zip, which fall into that price range. Probably the most highly thought of MP3 players after the iPod classic 5.5.
    - DiabloD3 12y ago
      Now that Android supports USB DACs, you can just get portable DAC+Amp combos that you can stick in your pocket with your phone. No need for a dedicated device anymore.
- Wicher 12y ago
  > some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player An 80-minute, 700 MB CD-R fits 80 * 60 * 44100 * 2 * 2 / 2^20 ~= 807 MB of audio. Why is that? The 100MB difference is not just due to the audio TOC being of smaller size than the ISO9660 or UDF file system metadata. It's also because of differences in error correction. I don't have the spec on hand but I recall from when I was investigating this that CD-ROMs use more bits for error correction than audio CDs. That's why you can fit more audio data than "filesystem data" on a CD-R. Reading (ripping, digitally) an audio CD will likely result in different digital audio files every time, since the error correction is not that good, but good enough, for audio. I read into this when I was wondering why my CD-DA extracted .wavs came out with a different checksum every time. Vibration is one of the factors that would make the same audio CD, read with the same CD player, produce different digital signals some of the time or even every time. CD-ROMs however, which store digital data, need better correction - you definately don't want a bitflip in your .exe, while a minor amplitude diff — an uncorrected bitflip in the upper bits of a 16-bit PCM signal — is no biggie. So… I'm not saying that the people using CD mats are informed (or have tested whether the mat makes a difference, or would even know how to go on about testing this, scientifically), but there's more to it than what I originally thought — which was "it's digital so it's never degraded". I wouldn't have known without checking the md5sum of my .wav, though.
  - aidenn0 12y ago
    On a decent drive, cdparanoia should successfully rip with no errors on a clean disc. I have done the md5sum test before.
    - Wicher 12y ago
      Background here: http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#play http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#play
      - X-Istence 12y ago
        "Oh, and virtually no PC on earth has that kind of I/O throughput; a Sun Enterprise server might, but a PC does not. Most don't come within a factor of five, assuming perfect realtime behavior." Some statements just don't age well ...
- storrgie 12y ago
  When someone spends money on something in a silly way, do you consider them to be an idiot? Would you make the same statement about someone who spends 200$ on a bottle of scotch versus buying a 35$ bottle? Let the 'idiots' spend their money driving an industry that is combining the creation of electronics with functional art. I'm not sad to see a $40,000 DAC. I don't have to buy it, and it's cool to know someone built something of silly 'value'. For example, look at this thing: https://www.naimaudio.com/statement https://www.naimaudio.com/statement It's absolutely silly, and the cost is outrageous. I'm happy that they built it though. It was actually built as part of the acquisition that Focal made of Naim. It seems that they allowed the engineers at Naim to go nuts once the company was acquired. I like seeing silly things that people build. It doesn't make me sad that someone spends thousands on ridiculous items that from an engineering perspective don't make a difference.
  - dcohenp 12y ago
    It's one thing when you plop down a ton of cash for something where you embrace the "silliness" or whatever makes it special (e.g. buying exotic cars with monstruous engines to drive them into traffic). It's another, however, believing something is objectively "better" because it cost more; e.g. spending money on Monster Cables thinking you can hear a difference. In audio, you have people who love vinyl because they enjoy the distortion it makes, and that's perfectly fine; but you have others who somehow believe it sounds closer to the original, which is demonstrably ridiculous.
    - storrgie 12y ago
      I completely get that as I personally prefer to collect Old Stock vacuum tubes for my listening purposes (http://imgur.com/a/INXVX http://imgur.com/a/INXVX). I just think folks should be left to their own devices to enjoy an avocation as they please. Trying to defend something through completely subjective argument is silly, I've a hard time discussing 'objectively better' technology with audiophole folks, but if someone said 'I like this more' I really can't hope to debunk that through any sort of mathematical characterization of performance.
- tsotha 12y ago
  >Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. I agree on the "plagued by magical thinking" part, but not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent, in fact. I think they just want to be "in the know", and are able to suspend their normal skepticism in order to belong. One of the smartest and most productive programmers I ever met was taken in by this nonsense. He replaced all the metal bolts in his power supply with teflon because the metal bolts disrupt the magnetic field around the transformer and you can hear that, maaaan! He did have a nice sounding system, for which he spent about $10k more than one that would have sounded the same.
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    I have to laugh at this, really But I suspect the metal ones are better. More magnetic shielding So, IF your audio system uses a linear power supply (and it should) AND it is badly filtered (it should have good filtering) you can hear the 60Hz/50Hz from the power network (assuming it's not creeping in your system through other means as well - most likely they are)
  - danohuiginn 12y ago
    The most generous approach to audiophiles is to allow for a placebo effect. i.e. they get greater enjoyment from listening to what they believe is a perfect sound system, regardless of whether the gold-plated cables actually do anything.
    - tsotha 12y ago
      I think that's exactly right.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    James Randi has a speech (you can probably find it on Youtube) about how it is easier to fool smart people than average people. Smart people think they can't be fooled.
  - mhurron 12y ago
    > not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent You can be very intelligent in one domain and be a complete idiot in every other domain. The result ends up being unless we're talking about that one domain, they're an idiot.
- ClashTheBunny 12y ago
  Wouldn't most of the digital cable costs be due to analog interference in the machines they are connecting and them acting like antennas and not that the signal is corrupted on the way? Unless it's an insulator (like fiber optic cables), you are hooking both a 50 foot antenna and a digital transmission line to your box; if you want just the digital transmission line, you have to insulate the hell out of the antenna part of it.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  $130 USB cable, with 8 non-ironic/satirical reviews: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Carbon-75m-2-5-Cable/product-reviews/B0041EH0WW/ http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Carbon-75m-2-5-Cable/produc... (Also, the reviews on this $15,000 speaker cable are amazing: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Terminated-Speaker-Cable-Discontinued/product-reviews/B000J36XR2/ http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Terminated-Speaker-Cable-Di... )
- balladeer 12y ago
  Well, you might be surprised on Apple's Store page - esp. the accessories section. Or you like that?
- lectrick 12y ago
  The first paragraph in the power cord "review" sounds like it is rapidly approaching Poe's Law
- x4m 12y ago
  Had anyone metioned DVD Rewinder? http://www.dvdrewinder.com/index.html http://www.dvdrewinder.com/index.html Also demagnetizer is a cool device http://www.acoustic-revive.com/english/rd3/rd3_01.html http://www.acoustic-revive.com/english/rd3/rd3_01.html
chubot 12y ago
It is baffling to me that people even talk about 24/192. There are such vast differences in audio quality related to speakers, loudness, amplifier, mastering, and EQ, before you even get to the source format. For some reason people seem to latch on to the format thing, before being able to make judgements about the more important factors.
- xorcist 12y ago
  It doesn't end there. For most people, I strongly suspect moving around your furniture would affect your sound reproduction more than changing your equipment.
  - copperx 12y ago
    Most people listen to music using headphones nowadays.
    - Demiurge 12y ago
      I'm interested to know the source of this assertion?
      - rconti 12y ago
        I have no source either, but I'd bet a very small sum of somebody else's dollars that "most people" in the US, at least, listen to most of their music in the car.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- davidgerard 12y ago
  I mind the Alan Parsons interview - a sound engineer whose own music is favoured by many audiophiles - who says, guess what: fix the room first. http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles... "I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics. The pro audio guy will prioritize room acoustics and do the necessary treatments to make the room sound right. The hi-fi world attaches less importance to room acoustics, and prioritizes equipment; they are looking more at brand names and reputation."
pierrec 12y ago
Wait until he gets some of'em Shakti Stones! [1] One reviewer [2] notes: "The effect of the first few Shakti products was not as apparent as when the effect became compounded. Each built on the others' ability to eliminate EMI in the component on or under which it was placed. Music became more relaxed, with greater clarity. Space and ambience increased. The soundfield became considerably more open and defined. At a certain point, the effect became quite startling as another Stone or On-Line was added. Shazaam!" [1]: http://www.shakti-innovations.com/audiovideo.htm http://www.shakti-innovations.com/audiovideo.htm [2]: http://www.audaud.com/audaud/DEC01/EQUIP/equip3DEC01.html http://www.audaud.com/audaud/DEC01/EQUIP/equip3DEC01.html PS: Sorry for bringing these up. They're quite the recurring joke in audiophile discussion.
- radley 12y ago
  Curious - what's the difference between Shakti and Ferrite beads? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead I used ferrite beads to remove EMI in a pair of self-powered speakers. I was hearing the local college station broadcast at a very low level when nothing was playing. I added them to the speaker wires, along with a basic EMI power strip, and the interference was gone.
- Anthony-G 12y ago
  A perfect example of Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
  - markild 12y ago
    Indeed.. I actually had to do some research to convince of me otherwise [1]. It could still be parody though, even though they actually sell this stuff... :P [1]: http://www.thecableco.com/Manufacturer/Shakti-Innovations http://www.thecableco.com/Manufacturer/Shakti-Innovations
elwell 12y ago
If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is no better doesn't benefit from it. If it is better, then the person who thinks it is no better doesn't benefit from it. If the objective is subjective benefit, then placebo is a benefit; assuming your bank account is large enough and you don't care to give your money to someone who really needs it. Edit: An answer to this is the Carl Sagan quote at the end of the article: "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Of course, it isn't really possible to not 'persist in delusion'. One can try, but he won't know if by trying he is perpetuating a grander delusion.
- onion2k 12y ago
  If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. Only if everything else is equal. It's rare that's no downside to the benefit - for example, something costing more because it's "better".
- Nursie 12y ago
  Did you read the article? He explores (and technically explains) how higher sampling rates can actually be much worse due to equipment.
  - elwell 12y ago
    I should add the combination: If it is worse, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is worse, then the person who thinks it is worse loses value with it.
cthalupa 12y ago
>He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now. It's really not fair to compare FLAC vs MP3 to "hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC There's legitimately some instruments that do not compress well. The harpsichord is a particular example that you should be able to hear the difference on on any sort of decent equipment. Bur hi-rez vs regular flac is something that I don't think can be really detected by humans. I've gone through and done the Philips golden ears challenge to completion, and have very high end equipment, blind ABX FLAC vs MP3 on a lot of songs I am familiar with, but have never once been able to successfully ABX between a 24/192 flac and a regular one.
- AdmiralAsshat 12y ago
  What the heck is "hi-rez" FLAC? My understanding is that FLAC is lossless. How would you have varying degrees of lossless?
  - TylerE 12y ago
    Greater than 44.1khz sampling rate and/or 16bit depth.
  - induscreep 12y ago
    24/192 flac as opposed to 16 bit flac. flac/mp3 is about compression, bits and khz are about sampling/representation.
  - squeaky-clean 12y ago
    By '"hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC"' the parent post means something like 24/192 vs 16/44.1, not the amount of compression. It has a higher resolution than the other example.
- protomyth 12y ago
  Wasn't a cello (I keep remembering hearing "cello attack") supposed to be problematic on mp3?
  - 12y ago
ollysb 12y ago
> He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 If we're to take Tidal and Spotify(at highest quality) as representative of those two (please correct me if I'm wrong, no expert) then the difference is night and day. Perhaps Spotify could use a higher quality mp3 encoding?
induscreep 12y ago
Maybe it depends on the song as well? Classical music is supposed to have a much greater frequency spectrum - meaning, the effects of MP3 encoding becomes apparent when played on high fidelity equipment.
- mxfh 12y ago
  It has greater dynamic range (think volume, this is the domain of the bit rate properly called bit depth) than most compressed studio-produced music but the frequency range or spectrum (think pitch, which is limited on the high end by the sampling rate/2 via the Nyquist-Shannon theorem) is not different if not also clipped off by mixing.
anigbrowl 12y ago
If it's any consolation, I'm a pro sound engineer and I entirely agree with you. I do like 24 bits (although I'd be satisfied with 20 bits) but I can't be bothered recording at anything higher than 96khz and even that is mainly wiggle room in case I want to do extreme pitch-shifting or suchlike. Most of the time I use 24 bits/48Khz. Sometimes I think I'd like to buy some expensive measurement microphones and record at 192Khz for Science, eg to find out if there are tunes in cricket stridulations or whatnot. But then I get over it.
janussi 12y ago
You can't hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC? I'm sorry but either you're deaf or your equipment is very poor. Bad example.
- kstenerud 12y ago
  I keep FLAC copies just so that I have lossless versions that I can convert into the lossy format du jour, but for actually listening, I mass-convert to lossy. I've listened to FLAC and properly encoded MP3 files (@192 and 160) on $50,000 audio equipment, and I can't tell the difference.
  - bryans 12y ago
    To put it simply and honestly, you are not paying enough attention. There is no human-discernible difference between FLAC and V0/320kbps. But implying that 192kbps and 160kbps are sufficiently perfect is somewhat ludicrous. You can still hear noticeable artifacts on cymbals at 192kbps. They will sound like an absolute mess of warbling, and all of the audio will be imbued with a slight tinge of white noise. There is a reason the mp3 scene moved away from 192kbps, and it doesn't have anything to do with bandwidth availability. It's because 192kbps sounds terrible.
    - cthalupa 12y ago
      >There is no human-discernible difference between FLAC and V0/320kbps I can't on almost any modern music (which is the majority of what I listen to), but when I was going through the philips golden ears course, I did a fair amount of blind ABX on harpsichords, cymbals, and a few other instruments at v0/320kbps and didn't have much trouble identifying them. Granted, at that point I had been going through something specifically intended to help train you for discerning differences in audio, but they were distinct enough I don't think I would have had any trouble beforehand, either. On some stuff I couldn't immediately tell that some sounded better - just different. Though on some of the samples the FLAC was easily better to my ears. (My criteria for a 'successful' ABX was accuracy of at least 8 out of 10 using the foobar ABX comparator plugin)
  - 12y ago
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
The DECT phone standard had to be marketed as "6.0" for the US market because non-technical people were trained to believe that 5.8GHz was better than 2.4GHz and a phone that ran at 1.9GHz would never sell in the US. This is the same thought process driving the audiophools' desire for bigger numbers regardless of reason. It doesn't help that the fundamentals of sampling theory aren't particularly intuitive.
aswanson 12y ago
mp3 sucks for bass and sub bass physical response. It's incredibly easy for a non audiophile (like my girlfriend back in the day) to tell the wooly, muffled bass of a quantized in my car vs the actual cd on the same system. Perceptual coding is not perfect.
calinet6 12y ago
Preface: I consider myself an audiophile, but keep reading before you judge. I completely, wholeheartedly agree with the original article and the science behind it. There's no question that our hearing just isn't good enough to discern the minute differences between sound of sufficient quality (which is well defined in the Xiph article). However, all I'll say is, it's very different to hear or feel a difference, than to prove it 100% without any doubt in the exacting conditions of an ABX test. You behave differently and aim your listening at different things in the special case of critical testing, than when normally listening. You have to know and respect this to make good arguments against hardcore audiophiles. Only once you give credence to the possibility can you bring on the real science: that the true bandwidth of the ear and the nyquist theorem truly does mean that any signal within our range of hearing can be encoded perfectly in double the sampling frequency and some 65 thousand steps—assuming an ideal decoding, of course, which means, yes, you should respect the idea of DAC design. The world is full of idiots who are easily parted with their money. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Pursue good quality audio equipment, to a point, because damn, it is enjoyable.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  >However, all I'll say is, it's very different to hear or feel a difference, than to prove it 100% without any doubt in the exacting conditions of an ABX test. You behave differently and aim your listening at different things in the special case of critical testing, than when normally listening. so what you are saying is you know what sounds better if you read the label BEFORE listening to it? :) There is almost always a difference, no one is claiming otherwise. Pointing which one is closer to the original (not "better", because "better" might mean louder/overdriven bass) is the real test, and EVERY SINGLE audiophool to date fails at this point - Randi foundation did run a $1M pot for someone to spot a difference between 'audiophile grade' power/speaker cables versus coat hangar at one point. http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/wishful_thinking.htm http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/wishful_thinki...
esaym 12y ago
I don't know about comparing digital to digital, but I know I can tell the difference between a 320kbs mp3 and a good quality LP record. Its in the treble. I guess any kind of digital just ruins that.
- aaronem 12y ago
  Yeah, that's an easy difference to spot -- LP playback is just so lossy, with so much artifacting, that it's just not worth the bother.
- kalleboo 12y ago
  MP3 in particular has issues above 16KHz. This is solved in modern formats such as AAC and Ogg Vorbis. It has nothing to do with "any kind of digital".
tomlu 12y ago
The article is correct, but it's not true that nobody can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC. I've personally done blind A/B testing in my (then) studio to discover the point at which I can't distinguish between MP3 and uncompressed audio. These days the encoders are really good, so it gets real hard at around 256kbps. I'm confident I could reliably pick out 192kbps though.
- radley 12y ago
  Why expect audio clarity to be uniform among everyone. Not everyone has 20/20 vision. Some have 20/100, others 20/10.
- the_why_of_y 12y ago
  MP3 is a really old format with some known flaws even at the highest bitrates - try using something newer like Vorbis or Opus.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
thirdsun 12y ago
While I think that there are people who actually can tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio (with a decent bitrate), I'm not counting me among them. Yet, I only buy lossless music since I plan to keep my music library around for ages and this allows me to change to a different format in the future if needed. This is an aspect of lossless audio, which is often overlooked.
retrogradeorbit 12y ago
You've completely misunderstood the article. It's discussing differences in the the PCM sampling rate, not the MP3 encoding bitrate. Or in otherwords, all these samples they compare are FLAC. 192 KHz has nothing to do with 192 kbps. I'm one of those audio engineers who mistakenly thinks I can tell between an MP3 and a FLAC. Yet somehow I understand the difference between sample rate and encoding bitrate, and you do not. All of this is besides the point. I'd much prefer a 24/44 sample than a 16/96 or 16/192. Bit depth has a much larger impact on the sound than sample rate.
- ChrisGranger 12y ago
  Bit depth affects dynamic range, and that's it. The only thing a 24-bit sample can do better than a 16-bit sample is accurately reproduce the difference between very loud sounds and very quiet ones. That's all. For the vast, vast majority of music listeners, the difference will be insignificant, as they don't listen in an environment where a dynamic range of 144 dB can be used to anywhere near its full effect.
  - retrogradeorbit 12y ago
    Yes. And 16 bit cannot by itself represent without distortion the full dynamic range of a lot of music. Most samples, most of the time, do not use a full 16 bits. This is why during CD mastering dithering is used. Take it from me, when you master 24 bit stereo tracks, and you don't dither, huge amounts of low level detail disappear. The detail in the quiets is there in 24 bit, and lost when its truncated to 16 bits. Add the dithering, and you get increased noise, but the detail comes back. One could suggest that with dithering 16 bits can represent it. But that's with a whole bunch of noise added to the signal. You can argue that noise is not audible, but it is _just_, and when mastering you can audition the different dither spectrums to find which dither least impacts the music. http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/16-dither.html http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/16-di...
    - ChrisGranger 12y ago
      I certainly won't argue that 16-bit is just as good as 24-bit from an objective standpoint, as 24-bit is obviously superior, full stop. I'm just saying that for most listeners (everyone except those who listen at high levels in dedicated, treated listening rooms in very quiet environments) the difference will be inaudible almost all the time. Extremely low level detail doesn't really matter if it's lost in the >20 dB of natural noise in your room. At that point the issue may become moot as other problems like standing waves, harmonic distortion, inaccurate speaker frequency response and so on creep in and affect music playback to a subjectively larger degree than '16-bit versus 24-bit does', IMO. All that said, 24-bit is definitely the way to go since we might as well do it right even if only x percent of listeners will notice. As an aside, thank you for being one of the conscientious 'good guys' in the studio. I collect music and wish I had a nickel for every sloppy recording I've heard.
liotier 12y ago
> He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day I don't know if I would tell the difference in your test, but where I have noticed it the cause might be bad MP3 encoding - MP3 encoding quality varies widely... The difference between good and bad encoding may be far greater than between good MP3 and FLAC.
RexRollman 12y ago
In my personal testing a few years ago, I couldn't tell the difference between source and 192kbps MP3s either. I still rip CDs to FLAC but only to transcode them to lossy formats for later listening. I do this in case I decide to switch lossy formats in the future (note: due to differences in psychoacoustical models, you should never transcode from one lossy format to another).
tammer 12y ago
The article specifically mentions that lossless formats offer advantages over compressed formats. The argument is 24/192 encodes lossless files vs 16/48, which I feel the author soundly confirms.

masklinn 12y ago

> Some people buy $500 wooden knobs to make their volume pots sound better. (or was that a hoax? i can't tell anymore) Some people buy small pyramids to elevate their cables off the floor, some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player (http://dagogo.com/millenniums-m-cd-mat-carbon-cd-damper-review http://dagogo.com/millenniums-m-cd-mat-carbon-cd-damper-revi...), some people buy $1000+/meter digital interconnect cables (http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/transparent-reference-xl-digital-link/ http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/transparent-referen...), some people buy $7200 power cords (http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/crystal-cable-absolute-dream-speaker-cable-interconnect-and-power-cords/?page=5 http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/crystal-cable-absol...) and $350/m HDMI cables (http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-first-american-made-high-speed-hdmi-cable/ http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/nordost-releases-fi...). Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. Developer bullshit has nothing on them.

nnnnni 12y ago
$350/m HDMI cables... so, Monster?
- masklinn 12y ago
  Far from me the idea to defend them, but $350/m is about 3 times higher than Monster's most bullshitty bullshit cable. Even their "2000HD HyperSpeed HDMI cable" only had a $115/m MSRP in 5ft, falling to $32/m in 35ft: http://www.monsterproducts.com/Monster_Video_ISF_2000HD_Hyper_Speed_HDMI_Cable http://www.monsterproducts.com/Monster_Video_ISF_2000HD_Hype...
  - ansible 12y ago
    My great business idea was to produce a line of "organic" cables. Our company would go to the remote places of the earth to hunt down copper dragons (as in DnD) and harvest their veins to make audio cables. The "natural", "organic" copper has a warmth to the audio signals flowing through it that artificially produces cables just can't provide (they have harsher undertones). Then we'd also have silver and gold cables, harvested from, you guessed it, silver and gold dragons. These would truly be "monster" cables.
    - leoc 12y ago
      PETA's going to bust your ass.
    - sitkack 12y ago
      dragoncopper, have the website default to some non-existent northern european language/font with a translation button (british flag). Burled wood with reds and yellows. will buy.
    - gumby 12y ago
      I plan to disrupt the audiophile business (and crush you in passing) with my homeopathic cables. As we melt the gold we mix in a few atoms of "rare earth" elements (rare == expensive == so good "they" don't want you to have access) which is then diluted by adding more melted gold until only the imprint of the rare earth atom remains. The gold will the be hand drawn by virgins (in truth these will be strong, hairy, 50-yo virgins with dreadful hygiene and B.O. though strong enough to pull, but we need not add all that confusing stuff, we'll just say "virgins"). The wire will be lovingly laid into hand-made insulation made from organic pinniped leather. I see a variety of future applications both in the home (connect your cable modem to your WiFi access point) and business (data centers). To quote Rony Abovitz, we'll soon be "the size of Apple". Invest now, while you still can!
yclept 12y ago
If there's psychological phenomena that make them enjoy it more, what's the issue?
- btown 12y ago
  And there are jobs created for engineers who design that equipment - simultaneously recycling more money in the economy and contributing to the statistics of STEM job prospects! Everybody wins!
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    And I get cheap hight definition AD and DA conversors to use in my projects! I'm certainly not complaining.
  - Confusion 12y ago
    Broken window fallacy.
    - btown 12y ago
      Sure, you need to take externalities into account. One can imagine an audiophile who would rather spend $100K on a sound system that sustains 3 jobs at a niche sound-system-design business, instead of angel-investing that money in a growth company that would eventually create 300 jobs. But what if the audiophile's daughter is then inspired to build another growth company when she grows up, because she was intrigued by how much her dad would geek out about the electronics in her sound system? Nothing is clear, it's incredibly hard to quantify probabilities about any of these things. As long as the audiophile isn't neglecting responsibilities or breaking windows to obtain his sound system... that is, as long as negative externalities are not a foregone conclusion... we should let him enjoy his passion.
      - Confusion 12y ago
        Certainly, there are valid moral arguments to allow, even encourage, this state of affairs. I was just pointing out that the economical argument that was offered is a broken window fallacy. Refuting an argument in favor of X is not an argument against X.
TylerE 12y ago
That's rather a wide-ranging bit of character assisination. Some of us just enjoy listing to music on decent equipment (If you can buy it at your local big box store, it's probably not sufficiently "decent") properly setup (which doesn't mean expensively - just basic proper speaker placement and the like).
- bch 12y ago
  > Some of us just enjoy list[en]ing to music on decent equipment The best definition of audiophile I've heard is somebody who listens to equipment, rather than music. Of course your favourite Pink Floyd sounds better on a decent stereo rather than a clock-radio, but if somebody is forever chasing the proper "colour" for their speakers, or swapping amps for the perfect tone... they might be an audiophile. edit: s/you might be/they might be/
  - TylerE 12y ago
    You're using "audiophile" as if it only represents say , the 5% most wacky partipants in the hobby.
  - cthalupa 12y ago
    >The best definition of audiophile I've heard is somebody who listens to equipment, rather than music. Audiophiles are an easy target. There are a lot that do stupid shit like buy $5000 power cables, expensive risers to lift cables off the ground, etc. A lot are pretentious, even if they're not insane or dumb. But that's a rather inflammatory, and in my opinion, unfair position to take. I would probably be considered an audiophile - I have put quite a bit of money into audio equipment. But I love music. I listen to it basically constantly. It's one of my primary sources of entertainment - and I don't just mean 'I have music on when I do other shit.' Each week I spend probably 20 hours doing nothing but relaxing with a bit to drink and some music on. Not reading, not surfing the net, not doing anything but closing my eyes and enjoying the sound. I'm listening to the music. At times, yes, when I have been testing out new equipment before deciding if I want to buy it I go through and I do blind ABX tests with level matching. In this case, yes, I am listening to equipment. But this is a very minor portion of my total listening time. I know you're probably not being totally serious with the post, but I do think it's a bit unfair towards those of us that love music, but also have invested time and money into getting a setup that sounds better for increased enjoyment.
threeseed 12y ago
> Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant. God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.
- largote 12y ago
  Well, Bose / Beats are clearly overpriced for what they deliver.
- thisjepisje 12y ago
  >God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product. This has little to do with the article. If you've got 100 bucks to spend on a pair of headphones, it's only fair to point out that with certain products you're not getting the best sound out of your money.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Those are low-budget audiophile products, ie they are still marketed mainly to boost the ego of purchasers. There are three brands of headphones that pros use: Beyerdynamic (typically DT-100 or DT-770), Sennheiser (typically HD-5/650) and Sony (typically MDR-7506/9). Beyerdynamics have somewhat better isolation so they're more popular in music studios, Sonys are more comfortable when you have to wear them all day so they're more popular on film sets; I favor the 7506 and am on my 4th or 5th pair. Some people love Sennheisers but I personally don't care for the ergonomics. They're not beautiful, lightweight, or fashionable, but they're a lot nicer to listen to - which is why one or other of them was almost certainly used at the recording stage. If it was good enough for the people who made the recording, it's good enough for you. Also, you'll save money compared to the 'quality' consumer brands.
  - aidenn0 12y ago
    What's different between the $80 7506 and $200 7509?
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
agumonkey 12y ago
On the other side of their spectrum, I went "near" an audiophile shop test booth and I was sucked by clarity and density of the sound in the air (this was a drum solo track). Some audiophileness is good. I'll head back to my 40$ crappy mp3 player now.
- stinkytaco 12y ago
  I actually think you'll find many "audiophiles" enamored of the Sansa Clip Plus and Zip, which fall into that price range. Probably the most highly thought of MP3 players after the iPod classic 5.5.
  - DiabloD3 12y ago
    Now that Android supports USB DACs, you can just get portable DAC+Amp combos that you can stick in your pocket with your phone. No need for a dedicated device anymore.
Wicher 12y ago
> some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player An 80-minute, 700 MB CD-R fits 80 * 60 * 44100 * 2 * 2 / 2^20 ~= 807 MB of audio. Why is that? The 100MB difference is not just due to the audio TOC being of smaller size than the ISO9660 or UDF file system metadata. It's also because of differences in error correction. I don't have the spec on hand but I recall from when I was investigating this that CD-ROMs use more bits for error correction than audio CDs. That's why you can fit more audio data than "filesystem data" on a CD-R. Reading (ripping, digitally) an audio CD will likely result in different digital audio files every time, since the error correction is not that good, but good enough, for audio. I read into this when I was wondering why my CD-DA extracted .wavs came out with a different checksum every time. Vibration is one of the factors that would make the same audio CD, read with the same CD player, produce different digital signals some of the time or even every time. CD-ROMs however, which store digital data, need better correction - you definately don't want a bitflip in your .exe, while a minor amplitude diff — an uncorrected bitflip in the upper bits of a 16-bit PCM signal — is no biggie. So… I'm not saying that the people using CD mats are informed (or have tested whether the mat makes a difference, or would even know how to go on about testing this, scientifically), but there's more to it than what I originally thought — which was "it's digital so it's never degraded". I wouldn't have known without checking the md5sum of my .wav, though.
- aidenn0 12y ago
  On a decent drive, cdparanoia should successfully rip with no errors on a clean disc. I have done the md5sum test before.
  - Wicher 12y ago
    Background here: http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#play http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#play
    - X-Istence 12y ago
      "Oh, and virtually no PC on earth has that kind of I/O throughput; a Sun Enterprise server might, but a PC does not. Most don't come within a factor of five, assuming perfect realtime behavior." Some statements just don't age well ...
storrgie 12y ago
When someone spends money on something in a silly way, do you consider them to be an idiot? Would you make the same statement about someone who spends 200$ on a bottle of scotch versus buying a 35$ bottle? Let the 'idiots' spend their money driving an industry that is combining the creation of electronics with functional art. I'm not sad to see a $40,000 DAC. I don't have to buy it, and it's cool to know someone built something of silly 'value'. For example, look at this thing: https://www.naimaudio.com/statement https://www.naimaudio.com/statement It's absolutely silly, and the cost is outrageous. I'm happy that they built it though. It was actually built as part of the acquisition that Focal made of Naim. It seems that they allowed the engineers at Naim to go nuts once the company was acquired. I like seeing silly things that people build. It doesn't make me sad that someone spends thousands on ridiculous items that from an engineering perspective don't make a difference.
- dcohenp 12y ago
  It's one thing when you plop down a ton of cash for something where you embrace the "silliness" or whatever makes it special (e.g. buying exotic cars with monstruous engines to drive them into traffic). It's another, however, believing something is objectively "better" because it cost more; e.g. spending money on Monster Cables thinking you can hear a difference. In audio, you have people who love vinyl because they enjoy the distortion it makes, and that's perfectly fine; but you have others who somehow believe it sounds closer to the original, which is demonstrably ridiculous.
  - storrgie 12y ago
    I completely get that as I personally prefer to collect Old Stock vacuum tubes for my listening purposes (http://imgur.com/a/INXVX http://imgur.com/a/INXVX). I just think folks should be left to their own devices to enjoy an avocation as they please. Trying to defend something through completely subjective argument is silly, I've a hard time discussing 'objectively better' technology with audiophole folks, but if someone said 'I like this more' I really can't hope to debunk that through any sort of mathematical characterization of performance.
tsotha 12y ago
>Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. I agree on the "plagued by magical thinking" part, but not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent, in fact. I think they just want to be "in the know", and are able to suspend their normal skepticism in order to belong. One of the smartest and most productive programmers I ever met was taken in by this nonsense. He replaced all the metal bolts in his power supply with teflon because the metal bolts disrupt the magnetic field around the transformer and you can hear that, maaaan! He did have a nice sounding system, for which he spent about $10k more than one that would have sounded the same.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  I have to laugh at this, really But I suspect the metal ones are better. More magnetic shielding So, IF your audio system uses a linear power supply (and it should) AND it is badly filtered (it should have good filtering) you can hear the 60Hz/50Hz from the power network (assuming it's not creeping in your system through other means as well - most likely they are)
- danohuiginn 12y ago
  The most generous approach to audiophiles is to allow for a placebo effect. i.e. they get greater enjoyment from listening to what they believe is a perfect sound system, regardless of whether the gold-plated cables actually do anything.
  - tsotha 12y ago
    I think that's exactly right.
- danielweber 12y ago
  James Randi has a speech (you can probably find it on Youtube) about how it is easier to fool smart people than average people. Smart people think they can't be fooled.
- mhurron 12y ago
  > not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent You can be very intelligent in one domain and be a complete idiot in every other domain. The result ends up being unless we're talking about that one domain, they're an idiot.
ClashTheBunny 12y ago
Wouldn't most of the digital cable costs be due to analog interference in the machines they are connecting and them acting like antennas and not that the signal is corrupted on the way? Unless it's an insulator (like fiber optic cables), you are hooking both a 50 foot antenna and a digital transmission line to your box; if you want just the digital transmission line, you have to insulate the hell out of the antenna part of it.
tlrobinson 12y ago
$130 USB cable, with 8 non-ironic/satirical reviews: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Carbon-75m-2-5-Cable/product-reviews/B0041EH0WW/ http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Carbon-75m-2-5-Cable/produc... (Also, the reviews on this $15,000 speaker cable are amazing: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Terminated-Speaker-Cable-Discontinued/product-reviews/B000J36XR2/ http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Terminated-Speaker-Cable-Di... )
balladeer 12y ago
Well, you might be surprised on Apple's Store page - esp. the accessories section. Or you like that?
lectrick 12y ago
The first paragraph in the power cord "review" sounds like it is rapidly approaching Poe's Law
x4m 12y ago
Had anyone metioned DVD Rewinder? http://www.dvdrewinder.com/index.html http://www.dvdrewinder.com/index.html Also demagnetizer is a cool device http://www.acoustic-revive.com/english/rd3/rd3_01.html http://www.acoustic-revive.com/english/rd3/rd3_01.html

chubot 12y ago

It is baffling to me that people even talk about 24/192. There are such vast differences in audio quality related to speakers, loudness, amplifier, mastering, and EQ, before you even get to the source format. For some reason people seem to latch on to the format thing, before being able to make judgements about the more important factors.

xorcist 12y ago
It doesn't end there. For most people, I strongly suspect moving around your furniture would affect your sound reproduction more than changing your equipment.
- copperx 12y ago
  Most people listen to music using headphones nowadays.
  - Demiurge 12y ago
    I'm interested to know the source of this assertion?
    - rconti 12y ago
      I have no source either, but I'd bet a very small sum of somebody else's dollars that "most people" in the US, at least, listen to most of their music in the car.
deleted 12y ago
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davidgerard 12y ago
I mind the Alan Parsons interview - a sound engineer whose own music is favoured by many audiophiles - who says, guess what: fix the room first. http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles... "I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics. The pro audio guy will prioritize room acoustics and do the necessary treatments to make the room sound right. The hi-fi world attaches less importance to room acoustics, and prioritizes equipment; they are looking more at brand names and reputation."

pierrec 12y ago

Wait until he gets some of'em Shakti Stones! [1] One reviewer [2] notes: "The effect of the first few Shakti products was not as apparent as when the effect became compounded. Each built on the others' ability to eliminate EMI in the component on or under which it was placed. Music became more relaxed, with greater clarity. Space and ambience increased. The soundfield became considerably more open and defined. At a certain point, the effect became quite startling as another Stone or On-Line was added. Shazaam!" [1]: http://www.shakti-innovations.com/audiovideo.htm http://www.shakti-innovations.com/audiovideo.htm [2]: http://www.audaud.com/audaud/DEC01/EQUIP/equip3DEC01.html http://www.audaud.com/audaud/DEC01/EQUIP/equip3DEC01.html PS: Sorry for bringing these up. They're quite the recurring joke in audiophile discussion.

radley 12y ago
Curious - what's the difference between Shakti and Ferrite beads? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrite_bead I used ferrite beads to remove EMI in a pair of self-powered speakers. I was hearing the local college station broadcast at a very low level when nothing was playing. I added them to the speaker wires, along with a basic EMI power strip, and the interference was gone.
Anthony-G 12y ago
A perfect example of Poe's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- markild 12y ago
  Indeed.. I actually had to do some research to convince of me otherwise [1]. It could still be parody though, even though they actually sell this stuff... :P [1]: http://www.thecableco.com/Manufacturer/Shakti-Innovations http://www.thecableco.com/Manufacturer/Shakti-Innovations

elwell 12y ago

If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is no better doesn't benefit from it. If it is better, then the person who thinks it is no better doesn't benefit from it. If the objective is subjective benefit, then placebo is a benefit; assuming your bank account is large enough and you don't care to give your money to someone who really needs it. Edit: An answer to this is the Carl Sagan quote at the end of the article: "For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." Of course, it isn't really possible to not 'persist in delusion'. One can try, but he won't know if by trying he is perpetuating a grander delusion.

onion2k 12y ago
If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. Only if everything else is equal. It's rare that's no downside to the benefit - for example, something costing more because it's "better".
Nursie 12y ago
Did you read the article? He explores (and technically explains) how higher sampling rates can actually be much worse due to equipment.
- elwell 12y ago
  I should add the combination: If it is worse, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is worse, then the person who thinks it is worse loses value with it.

cthalupa 12y ago

>He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now. It's really not fair to compare FLAC vs MP3 to "hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC There's legitimately some instruments that do not compress well. The harpsichord is a particular example that you should be able to hear the difference on on any sort of decent equipment. Bur hi-rez vs regular flac is something that I don't think can be really detected by humans. I've gone through and done the Philips golden ears challenge to completion, and have very high end equipment, blind ABX FLAC vs MP3 on a lot of songs I am familiar with, but have never once been able to successfully ABX between a 24/192 flac and a regular one.

AdmiralAsshat 12y ago
What the heck is "hi-rez" FLAC? My understanding is that FLAC is lossless. How would you have varying degrees of lossless?
- TylerE 12y ago
  Greater than 44.1khz sampling rate and/or 16bit depth.
- induscreep 12y ago
  24/192 flac as opposed to 16 bit flac. flac/mp3 is about compression, bits and khz are about sampling/representation.
- squeaky-clean 12y ago
  By '"hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC"' the parent post means something like 24/192 vs 16/44.1, not the amount of compression. It has a higher resolution than the other example.
protomyth 12y ago
Wasn't a cello (I keep remembering hearing "cello attack") supposed to be problematic on mp3?
- 12y ago

ollysb 12y ago

> He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 If we're to take Tidal and Spotify(at highest quality) as representative of those two (please correct me if I'm wrong, no expert) then the difference is night and day. Perhaps Spotify could use a higher quality mp3 encoding?

induscreep 12y ago

Maybe it depends on the song as well? Classical music is supposed to have a much greater frequency spectrum - meaning, the effects of MP3 encoding becomes apparent when played on high fidelity equipment.

mxfh 12y ago
It has greater dynamic range (think volume, this is the domain of the bit rate properly called bit depth) than most compressed studio-produced music but the frequency range or spectrum (think pitch, which is limited on the high end by the sampling rate/2 via the Nyquist-Shannon theorem) is not different if not also clipped off by mixing.

anigbrowl 12y ago

If it's any consolation, I'm a pro sound engineer and I entirely agree with you. I do like 24 bits (although I'd be satisfied with 20 bits) but I can't be bothered recording at anything higher than 96khz and even that is mainly wiggle room in case I want to do extreme pitch-shifting or suchlike. Most of the time I use 24 bits/48Khz. Sometimes I think I'd like to buy some expensive measurement microphones and record at 192Khz for Science, eg to find out if there are tunes in cricket stridulations or whatnot. But then I get over it.

janussi 12y ago

You can't hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC? I'm sorry but either you're deaf or your equipment is very poor. Bad example.

kstenerud 12y ago
I keep FLAC copies just so that I have lossless versions that I can convert into the lossy format du jour, but for actually listening, I mass-convert to lossy. I've listened to FLAC and properly encoded MP3 files (@192 and 160) on $50,000 audio equipment, and I can't tell the difference.
- bryans 12y ago
  To put it simply and honestly, you are not paying enough attention. There is no human-discernible difference between FLAC and V0/320kbps. But implying that 192kbps and 160kbps are sufficiently perfect is somewhat ludicrous. You can still hear noticeable artifacts on cymbals at 192kbps. They will sound like an absolute mess of warbling, and all of the audio will be imbued with a slight tinge of white noise. There is a reason the mp3 scene moved away from 192kbps, and it doesn't have anything to do with bandwidth availability. It's because 192kbps sounds terrible.
  - cthalupa 12y ago
    >There is no human-discernible difference between FLAC and V0/320kbps I can't on almost any modern music (which is the majority of what I listen to), but when I was going through the philips golden ears course, I did a fair amount of blind ABX on harpsichords, cymbals, and a few other instruments at v0/320kbps and didn't have much trouble identifying them. Granted, at that point I had been going through something specifically intended to help train you for discerning differences in audio, but they were distinct enough I don't think I would have had any trouble beforehand, either. On some stuff I couldn't immediately tell that some sounded better - just different. Though on some of the samples the FLAC was easily better to my ears. (My criteria for a 'successful' ABX was accuracy of at least 8 out of 10 using the foobar ABX comparator plugin)
- 12y ago

kevin_thibedeau 12y ago

The DECT phone standard had to be marketed as "6.0" for the US market because non-technical people were trained to believe that 5.8GHz was better than 2.4GHz and a phone that ran at 1.9GHz would never sell in the US. This is the same thought process driving the audiophools' desire for bigger numbers regardless of reason. It doesn't help that the fundamentals of sampling theory aren't particularly intuitive.

aswanson 12y ago

mp3 sucks for bass and sub bass physical response. It's incredibly easy for a non audiophile (like my girlfriend back in the day) to tell the wooly, muffled bass of a quantized in my car vs the actual cd on the same system. Perceptual coding is not perfect.

calinet6 12y ago

Preface: I consider myself an audiophile, but keep reading before you judge. I completely, wholeheartedly agree with the original article and the science behind it. There's no question that our hearing just isn't good enough to discern the minute differences between sound of sufficient quality (which is well defined in the Xiph article). However, all I'll say is, it's very different to hear or feel a difference, than to prove it 100% without any doubt in the exacting conditions of an ABX test. You behave differently and aim your listening at different things in the special case of critical testing, than when normally listening. You have to know and respect this to make good arguments against hardcore audiophiles. Only once you give credence to the possibility can you bring on the real science: that the true bandwidth of the ear and the nyquist theorem truly does mean that any signal within our range of hearing can be encoded perfectly in double the sampling frequency and some 65 thousand steps—assuming an ideal decoding, of course, which means, yes, you should respect the idea of DAC design. The world is full of idiots who are easily parted with their money. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Pursue good quality audio equipment, to a point, because damn, it is enjoyable.

rasz_pl 12y ago
>However, all I'll say is, it's very different to hear or feel a difference, than to prove it 100% without any doubt in the exacting conditions of an ABX test. You behave differently and aim your listening at different things in the special case of critical testing, than when normally listening. so what you are saying is you know what sounds better if you read the label BEFORE listening to it? :) There is almost always a difference, no one is claiming otherwise. Pointing which one is closer to the original (not "better", because "better" might mean louder/overdriven bass) is the real test, and EVERY SINGLE audiophool to date fails at this point - Randi foundation did run a $1M pot for someone to spot a difference between 'audiophile grade' power/speaker cables versus coat hangar at one point. http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/wishful_thinking.htm http://www.bostonaudiosociety.org/bas_speaker/wishful_thinki...

esaym 12y ago

I don't know about comparing digital to digital, but I know I can tell the difference between a 320kbs mp3 and a good quality LP record. Its in the treble. I guess any kind of digital just ruins that.

aaronem 12y ago
Yeah, that's an easy difference to spot -- LP playback is just so lossy, with so much artifacting, that it's just not worth the bother.
kalleboo 12y ago
MP3 in particular has issues above 16KHz. This is solved in modern formats such as AAC and Ogg Vorbis. It has nothing to do with "any kind of digital".

tomlu 12y ago

The article is correct, but it's not true that nobody can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC. I've personally done blind A/B testing in my (then) studio to discover the point at which I can't distinguish between MP3 and uncompressed audio. These days the encoders are really good, so it gets real hard at around 256kbps. I'm confident I could reliably pick out 192kbps though.

radley 12y ago
Why expect audio clarity to be uniform among everyone. Not everyone has 20/20 vision. Some have 20/100, others 20/10.
the_why_of_y 12y ago
MP3 is a really old format with some known flaws even at the highest bitrates - try using something newer like Vorbis or Opus.

deleted 12y ago

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thirdsun 12y ago

While I think that there are people who actually can tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio (with a decent bitrate), I'm not counting me among them. Yet, I only buy lossless music since I plan to keep my music library around for ages and this allows me to change to a different format in the future if needed. This is an aspect of lossless audio, which is often overlooked.

retrogradeorbit 12y ago

You've completely misunderstood the article. It's discussing differences in the the PCM sampling rate, not the MP3 encoding bitrate. Or in otherwords, all these samples they compare are FLAC. 192 KHz has nothing to do with 192 kbps. I'm one of those audio engineers who mistakenly thinks I can tell between an MP3 and a FLAC. Yet somehow I understand the difference between sample rate and encoding bitrate, and you do not. All of this is besides the point. I'd much prefer a 24/44 sample than a 16/96 or 16/192. Bit depth has a much larger impact on the sound than sample rate.

ChrisGranger 12y ago
Bit depth affects dynamic range, and that's it. The only thing a 24-bit sample can do better than a 16-bit sample is accurately reproduce the difference between very loud sounds and very quiet ones. That's all. For the vast, vast majority of music listeners, the difference will be insignificant, as they don't listen in an environment where a dynamic range of 144 dB can be used to anywhere near its full effect.
- retrogradeorbit 12y ago
  Yes. And 16 bit cannot by itself represent without distortion the full dynamic range of a lot of music. Most samples, most of the time, do not use a full 16 bits. This is why during CD mastering dithering is used. Take it from me, when you master 24 bit stereo tracks, and you don't dither, huge amounts of low level detail disappear. The detail in the quiets is there in 24 bit, and lost when its truncated to 16 bits. Add the dithering, and you get increased noise, but the detail comes back. One could suggest that with dithering 16 bits can represent it. But that's with a whole bunch of noise added to the signal. You can argue that noise is not audible, but it is _just_, and when mastering you can audition the different dither spectrums to find which dither least impacts the music. http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/16-dither.html http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/16-di...
  - ChrisGranger 12y ago
    I certainly won't argue that 16-bit is just as good as 24-bit from an objective standpoint, as 24-bit is obviously superior, full stop. I'm just saying that for most listeners (everyone except those who listen at high levels in dedicated, treated listening rooms in very quiet environments) the difference will be inaudible almost all the time. Extremely low level detail doesn't really matter if it's lost in the >20 dB of natural noise in your room. At that point the issue may become moot as other problems like standing waves, harmonic distortion, inaccurate speaker frequency response and so on creep in and affect music playback to a subjectively larger degree than '16-bit versus 24-bit does', IMO. All that said, 24-bit is definitely the way to go since we might as well do it right even if only x percent of listeners will notice. As an aside, thank you for being one of the conscientious 'good guys' in the studio. I collect music and wish I had a nickel for every sloppy recording I've heard.

liotier 12y ago

> He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day I don't know if I would tell the difference in your test, but where I have noticed it the cause might be bad MP3 encoding - MP3 encoding quality varies widely... The difference between good and bad encoding may be far greater than between good MP3 and FLAC.

RexRollman 12y ago

In my personal testing a few years ago, I couldn't tell the difference between source and 192kbps MP3s either. I still rip CDs to FLAC but only to transcode them to lossy formats for later listening. I do this in case I decide to switch lossy formats in the future (note: due to differences in psychoacoustical models, you should never transcode from one lossy format to another).

tammer 12y ago

The article specifically mentions that lossless formats offer advantages over compressed formats. The argument is 24/192 encodes lossless files vs 16/48, which I feel the author soundly confirms.