8 ms·
How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?
- 72deluxe 11y agoVery interesting! I was relieved that I managed to pick out the uncompressed WAV in most of them even on MacBook speakers - I failed with Jay Z and Coldplay as the telltale snare and cymbal artefacts are hidden under layers of compression already (and the "snare" on Jay Z's song is a sample anyway). The real tell-tale song was Suzanne Vega's a cappella song, where the MP3 versions sound like she's got a terrible snotty cold. Modern songs have much compression and hard limiting which makes everything distorted (you can hear distortion on the Coldplay sample I think towards the beginning, unless I am mistaken?). Other offenders for brick wall limiting are most Chili Peppers albums, Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full, and California Breed's (sadly) one and only album. Jason Bonham's snare gets lost for 75% of the album.
- thesumofall 11y agoInteresting that you were able to distinguish the 320 MP3s from the uncompressed files. Couldn't make out any differences at all on decent headphones. Even the 128s were pretty good esp. for the more modern mainstream music where the quality is questionable from the beginning :)
- noobie 11y agoI personally think the samples are not ill-suited for the purpose of distinction between the various bitrates.
- 72deluxe 11y agoThe 128kbps MP3s are easy to distinguish - they sound like audio in a washing machine, going round and round. Listen to cymbals that instead of going CRASH go CBBRASPHHHHHH with the ending being the giveaway. Snares are also affected as they won't have such high frequency peaks so lose their SNAP sound. Bass drums are also easy to pick out - if there isn't much bottom end then you know it has been compressed. The a cappella version sounds like she's got a throaty cold on the MP3s. The SSSSSes sound different on MP3s too - it ssssoundsss like they've got a lissssppppp with MP3s. You may find it easier to listen quietly because then your ears only pick up the highlights instead of getting fatigued with too much volume (where they will shut down after a while).
- lgunsch 11y agoHaha, yeah. Multi-band compressed till the waveform is a bar-code.
- Zigurd 11y agoSame here. Missed the Coldplay one because I couldn't find artifacts in that "solid wall of sound" style production. The rest were pretty obvious. This with middle-of-the-line Sennheisers, a cheap headphone amp, and whatever sound chip is in my laptop.
- 72deluxe 11y agoNot a HP laptop with Beats is it? :-) You'd hear nothing but BASS
- jreed91 11y agoWant to quickly win? Have a slow connection and pick the one that loads the slowest.
- stephengillie 11y agoFound the hacker. :)
- noobie 11y agoI knew my Third World citizenship would be of some use one day! haha
- darkstar999 11y agoSo.. slowly win?
- marianov 11y agoExactly what happened to me. Use a crappy 1Mbit WISP connection and raw audio takes ages to load
- virmundi 11y agoApparently I prefer 128. My definition of better was crispness. I found the uncompressed to be muddied, at least coming through a Bose Color Soundlink. 128 was bright and clear.
- JTon 11y agoI remember reading somewhere that people who grew up with 128kbps audio (Generation Napster) prefer the sound of it.
- JohnBooty 11y agoI'm not one of those people who automatically trashes Bose equipment, but Bose does a lot of processing/EQ/"coloration" to music to make it sound more pleasing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with preferring that! Nearly all consumer-oriented speakers/headphones do this, because there are other models specifically intended for monitoring use. However, it does make Bose equipment poorly suited to engineering-type applications such as recording work, comparing mp3 compression algorithms, etc.
- virmundi 11y agoGood point. I do wonder if Bose washes out the middle.
- codeulike 11y agoI feel sorry for people who can tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav because they then have to spend extra on headphones and pono players and amps and whatnot just to elimate the perceived difference that the rest of us are happily oblivious of.
- Shivatron 11y agoWhile I can tell the difference (6/6 in this test), in practice, it doesn't actually matter to me personally. I'm usually listening to music while there are a cacophony of other noises going on (talking/cooking/driving), so the slight difference in the way cymbals are rendered or the loss of nuance in a large bass hit are far from the primary degradations to my listening experience...
- hzhou321 11y agoIt is not really about people IMHO but about their headphone and amplifier. Better equipment require more expensive up-keeping, that is usual.
- scosman 11y agoExactly. Most people could hear it with pro equipment. It's a dangerous cycle. Buy better gear, hear more, repeat.
- 72deluxe 11y agoIt's all about ear training! I couldn't tune a guitar by ear at one point but now know how out of tune a guitar is by ear, and know if their string is sharp or flat (it helps to remember a song in that key and replay that note in your head compared to what you're hearing). The same is true of audio quality. I thought 128kbps MP3s were fine for years (I even had some MP2s somewhere) but now they sound like sludge.
- Jack000 11y agoyes, but this is like saying you'd prefer poorer eyesight just so you can wear glasses as a fashion statement. I have the same problem with beer - people seem to love it, but all I ever taste is sour and bitter. Sure I save money on beer, but it's an experience I miss out on.
- bd 11y agoThis was surprising. With all that poking fun of audiophiles, I expected there would not be much of a difference. I got 5 out of 6 correct, and the one I missed was pretty near miss (I picked at random between 320 kbps and uncompressed sample). And these were quite clear choices, many times I just needed few seconds: 128 kbps sounded worse every single time, 320 kbps vs uncompressed was a bit harder, but still pretty noticeable if I paid attention. It wouldn't probably make a big practical difference for a typical "background noise" listening, but it may have impact if you just want to sit back, relax and focus on music (lower bitrates for me sounded "muddled", losing details in high frequencies). BTW I'm no audiophile, no special audio gear, just cheap (but decent) 9 EUR in-ear headphones plugged into a notebook.
- vinbreau 11y agoMy results were similar. I got 4 out of 6 and the 2 I missed I picked the 320 kbps. It was more difficult to tell the difference between uncompressed and 320 kbps when the composition was busier, as with the Coldplay track. The piano track at the end was clear as day, the uncompressed version was warmer, fuller, had clearer reverb. Same with the Vega track.
- Joeboy 11y ago> With all that poking fun of audiophiles, I expected > there would not be much of a difference. The fun poking is mostly about things like 192kHz sample rates and thousand dollar power cables. It's uncontroversial that people can hear mp3 artifacts.
- 72deluxe 11y ago192kHz sample rate are unnecessary. In truth, 96kHz is common for live too (as it is half the latency of a 48kHz system). 48kHz and 24bits is what most audio is recorded at nowadays, then downsampled with aliasing for CD quality audio.
- Joeboy 11y ago> 96kHz is common for live too (as it is half the latency of a 48kHz system). I don't really understand this, but I guess what it means is that the first sample of a digital signal gets from some place to some other place a ninety-six thousandth of a second more quickly. I'm not sure why that would matter. It's the time it takes sound to travel 4mm, which seems inconsequential, and the overall shape will be the same phase. In many cases (like, if there's a computer involved anywhere), a high sample rate means you need higher latency to avoid the risk of underruns.
- arh68 11y agoI did this yesterday; I picked 320 / WAV / WAV / 320 / 320 / 128. I cannot distinguish 320 from WAV, so I was mostly just trying to spot the 128 and pick one of the other two. I found it a bit fatiguing to listen to so much new music. Also, it's hard to know if I'm listening to a WAV of some 808 drum loop or an actual recording of a snare/cymbal encoded. The classical piano seemed easiest to spot the 128. I listened through IEMs plugged into a Macbook Air in a quiet room and I wouldn't say it was easy.
- uulbiy 11y agoSimilarly, I got 3 wavs and 3 320s. I could distinguish the 128s but not between the other two. Please note that I did this wearing studio headphones (shure srh840).
- eludwig 11y agoSame here 3 of 6. I always spotted the 128, but the others were a coin toss. This was on an iPad (chrome browser) with Bose over-ear phones.
- Zigurd 11y agoI'm old enough to be losing auditory acuity, and I really despise golden-ears equipment reviews, especially of speaker cable, but I find the qualitative tests for compression technologies unsatisfying. Taking a gang of schlubs out of a shopping mall and playing audio, video, or still images to them and asking for an opinion could be OK in some contexts, like "Can you tolerate us putting this low-bit-rate codec in your mobile phone?" If the answer is "Huh, can't tell" then go ahead. But is a JPG of an Ansel Adams print still a work of art if 90% of those same schulbs can't tell the difference?
- coldtea 11y agoFor most people it's like: In self-assured comments in forums? Very well. In actual, properly conducted, A/B tests? Not so much.
- pingec 11y agoSimilar test: http://test.tidalhifi.com http://test.tidalhifi.com
- petercooper 11y agoThe digital audio system here in the UK is terrible. They divide up the available bandwidth so much to cram in more channels the stations sound worse than FM (and they use MPEG2 audio too, which makes it worse). Last week, they crammed in a special Eurovision channel and reduced several other channels from 128kbps to 112kbps to cope. 1xtra (the station I listen to) suddenly sounded so "dull" and slushy.. even just with a 16kbps drop! I had no idea what was going on so asked on DigitalSpy and learnt the above. Long story short, my takeaway is that perhaps it's not just about absolute levels of quality, but also what effect minor effects in bitrate can have on the underlying codec.
- 72deluxe 11y agoIs this with a satellite feed or Freeview? I have Sky (basically Freesat because I won't want to pay Sky any money thanks) and the quality is abysmal, even for video. The audio is compressed massively and LOUD all the time, and the video is blocky as can be, with snowy or rainy scenes being unintelligible. You can notice on some adverts that the small text at the bottom is completely unreadable.
- petercooper 11y agoNo, DAB (for people overseas, DAB is a terrestrially transmitted digital audio service - imagine FM radio but digital). If I'm not in the car, I'll listen online instead (notably, BBC stations sound better streamed over 3G but this has big UX implications when driving). The quality on Sky used to be substantially better than DAB when I used it 10 years ago, but I don't know about it now. That said, I have Sky TV and the picture quality is variable. Most of the channels I watch are fine and all HD channels are very clear.
- 72deluxe 11y agoInformative, thank you. I am glad to know that Sky is decent quality on the HD channels. Strangely they believe that you spend your entire life watching TV and can't comprehend you doing anything else (like typing comments on HN at 9 in the evening.....) A chap at work listens to DAB over some big Questeds and the glitching and artefacting from Radio 2 (ugh I hate hearing that all day) is irritating (down to poor reception). Those Questeds sound great if proper audio is put through them though! It seems a waste to shove DAB Radio 2 and Jeremy Vine and his argument "show" through them.
- ta92929 11y agoMy ears suck :-( and I tell myself I'm an amateur musician too.
- scosman 11y agoWith a dac and decent, but not pro, headphones I could pick out the WAV, but I was always unsure.
- istvan__ 11y agoI can hear the difference between mp3(320) and flac/alac easily on my stereo both in the car and in my room. The funny part is that you can easily recognize mp3 compression based on high it trims the high frequencies and the high hats are affected by it quite a bit. You can try different lossy formats but i guess it is just damage control. The only reason I use alac and not flac is because iPods only work with alac (and it is limited to 16bit, 44100Hz) and my car only supports iPods :(
- imaginenore 11y agoOr you think you hear the difference because you actually know which files you play. Do a double blind test and you will fail. Professional musicians fail at 320 vs original tests.
- istvan__ 11y agoNope. I can pass the double blind test easily.
- coldwaraaron 11y agoI can attest to this.
- istvan__ 11y agoNot to mention that I am more of a sound engineer who has a lot to do with sound quality while musicians care less about that, I know several musicians who could not setup even basic sound system. It is also pretty common that DJs (and other types of musicians) require the roads to help them to achieve the best sound of their music. The musician is in charge of the music, while the sound engineers are in charge of the sound. Quiet different subjects.
- JohnBooty 11y agoThis test reinforced what I've found in the past: 1. I can reliably tell the difference between 128kbps mp3s and higher-quality files 2. I can not tell the difference between 320kbps CBR mp3s and uncompressed originals. (Or between ~256kbps VBR mp3s, 256kbps iTunes Plus mp4s, and uncompressed originals... though those weren't a part of this test)
- stordoff 11y agoAbout the same as what I've AXB'd in the past as well. Most tracks at ~256kbps AAC are the same to me as the uncompressed version (some doesn't compress that well so still arifact, but are rare). Around 128kbps is fine, but I can pick out which is which. Lower than ~100kbps is awful - the arfiacts are instantly obnoxious and I hate listening to it. It doesn't really apply to streaming, but I keep my music as lossless files despite that. It removes any questions of "Could this sound better?" and I can transcode to a device-appropiate format without compounding the quality loss (desktop has lossless files, laptop has a 256kbps copy, mobile devices have a 128kbps copy)
- kazinator 11y agoThis requires a proper, double-blind "A X B" test. Sample X is guaranteed to be the same article as either A or B, which are different. You, the subject are asked whether sample X is identical to A, or B. Double-blind means that the person administering the test doesn't know whether A is the compressed file and B the uncompressed or vice versa, and whether X is a copy of A or B. Without a properly conducted test, users who want there to exist a difference between 320 kbps that they are able to hear will convince themselves that they can hear it. But likewise, those who believe they shouldn't be able to hear any difference will convince themselves that they don't. The A X B test eliminates this, because though you know that X is exactly the same article as A or B, you don't know which, and you don't know which of A and B is the higher fidelity one. If you believe that there is no audible difference, you can at best randomly guess at the identity of X. If a large number of subjects are tested and they all believe that A and B sound the same, the distribution of their identifications of X will be consistent with a random binary choice. If there are some subjects who can in fact tell the difference, that will show up in the data as bias toward the correct identification of X. Those who think they have "golden ears" and convince themselves they can hear something they in fact cannot are called out by this test procedure, by their failure to actually identify X better than a random guess.
- rectang 11y agoNPR botched the protocol in other ways. The samples have to be sync'd, and the tester to be able to switch between them at will -- with a small crossfade to prevent the glitch from throwing you off. An old buddy of mine, Dan Dugan, hung two pink sheets at an Audio Engineering Society conference on opposite walls to illustrate this point, asking people, "Are they the same color?" It would be trivial to distinguish them side by side, but accuracy is greatly reduced when they are distant in time or space. Human perception is all about edges, not about absolute measurements.
- Udik 11y agoI don't agree. What you propose would be the test "are you able to tell the difference between the compressed and the uncompressed sound when you compare them directly"? While this test is "are you able to appreciate the difference between a compressed and an uncompressed piece of music"? If the two seconds it takes you to switch from one version to the other are enough to prevent you from spotting the difference, I'd say that whatever difference there is is likely to be irrelevant to the listening experience.
- squeaky-clean 11y ago4/6. I could definitely tell which was the 128/320/WAV for the 4 I got right, but on the Katy Perry and Neil Young, all 3 were indistinguishable to me. But still, this is when comparing small sections of songs directly to one another, and being explicitly told there are quality differences. The 128 didn't sound bad, there's just some difference in transients and high frequency content (the hi-hats on the Jay Z track were an immediate giveaway for me). Maybe a better test would be only having one audio track per song (instead of 3) and having to choose if it is 128/320/WAV. I wonder if anyone could distinguish the difference there reliably. I've gotten a new phone 3 times in the past year (I'm clumsy...), and each time, I go a month or two with Spotify set to the default quality instead of "Extreme Quality", and I never notice until I listen to an album I know extremely well. WAV is great, but mp3 is still pretty good, even at 128kbps.
- adamc 11y agoI consistently picked 320 over WAV, fwiw. I could definitely hear the difference but always preferred the 320.
- hansjorg 11y agoMonty from Xiph/Mozilla wrote a great article about why 24-bit/192kHz format (which is what Neil Young's Pono delivers) makes no sense: http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
- KeytarHero 11y agoGood article, but irrelevant. This is about lossless vs 320kbps mp3, not 24/192k vs 16/44.1k
- hansjorg 11y agoWell, it's the next frontier in digital audio for those who claim to have golden ears.
- KeytarHero 11y agoTidal has a similar test[1] (though only between 320 and lossless - no 128 track). Now, it's trying to sell you their high-quality streaming option, so I would take the results with a bit of a grain of salt as there are a number of ways their bias could have affected the results (for example, they could have cherry-picked tracks that didn't encode to mp3 as nicely). However, the format is much better than this one: the two play in sync, and you can seamlessly switch between A&B as it plays. I found it much easier to find subtle differences between the tracks that way over having to restart the track each time. But more importantly, that test format preloads the tracks. In this one, some of the lossless tracks took several seconds to load for me, which completely killed its double-blindness. [1] http://test.tidalhifi.com/ http://test.tidalhifi.com/
- gtrubetskoy 11y agoI think this experiment is slightly flawed, because what compression will do depends on the original recording. For me, the difference was most apparent in Susanne Vega and Katy Perry. Mozart and Neil Young were a complete shot in the dark, I could hear a slight difference with Coldplay. I suspect this very much depends on how the analog recording was digitzed in the first place, if there was an analog recording to begin with. A sample from a CD is not the same as one made from a vinyl or a master tape. Bottom line - there definitely is a difference, but in some cases it's hard to tell.
- uslic001 11y agoFirst time around only got 1 out of 6 but all the others I chose were the 320 wav using cheap over the ear headphones straight out of my desktop. The second time I got 3 out of 6 correct using the same headphones but using a cheap DAC and chose the 320 wav files for the other 3. I would love to do the test with my higher quality DAC and my higher quality over the ear headphones but I do not have access to them at this time. I rip all my CD's to FLAC at home and then convert to 192kH MP3 to load on to my phone. The only time I listen to the FLAC is when I use my higher quality DAC and higher quality headphones. I have bought 3 albums from high definition websites and on only one (Van Morrison Astral Weeks) can I tell the difference between the high definition version and the CD version in blind testing. Given this I have not purchased more high definition CD's.