On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself (https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests.
Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones than a compressed version, even 320kbps MP3. A poorly mastered track will be much harder (if not outright impossible) to tell the difference on.
HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and silent listening environment – is mastered with more dynamic range. The mainstream release of the same music, on the other hand, often features a different mastering with levels pushed up, because they assume that ordinary people will be listening to music in noisy environments, like through earbuds in the metro. This is often a problem for re-releases of 1960s recordings of jazz where the producer and engineer really exploited dynamic range, but that is lost in the most recent of the digital-era re-releases.
(Another reason to prefer SACDs and Blu-ray releases of recordings is for the possibility of 5.0 surround sound, because of course CD and mainstream downloads or streaming are limited to mono or stereo only.)
Spend a million dollars on audio equipment. Turn on your speakers, play some chamber music in insane multi-channel high-res audio, and invite a friend over.
Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers.
If your friend is naive and easily fooled, do an A/B test by actually hiring a quartet and alternating with the speakers.
There are a thousand compromises between the source of music and your ear. What is worth paying for is a recording where those compromises were made well. The compression level is a very small part of the picture.
It's quite impressive when they demo it. There is a moment around 1:20 that plays flies circling around and my cat next to me didnt care about the normal recording but he stood up with his ears out when the 3d version played.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQmQD27uCt0&t=3s
I know it's probably old hat by now (the video is ~10yrs old, yes 2010 was over a decade ago) but it still blows my mind.
Someone with something to sell is a very unreliable source btw.
When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD.
The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible.
That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps.
After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them.
Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps.
Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway.
That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.
That's easy. The one with room echos, washed out highs, and missing bass is the live.
That's why I always tend to bail out of audiophile discussion but I'll bite: why?
What's so special about the soundwaves going into your ears when you sit close to an orchestra that couldn't be reproduced with good audio equipment?
If you're talking about the experience itself of siting next to performers then I wholeheartedly agree, but that's the problem, it's no longer something that can be measured and objectivized.
And that's entirely fine, but I think there's a trend among some people (and especially the type of people who frequent this forum) that deem that if a feeling or emotion can't be objectivized then it's effectively worthless or irrational or something like that, so you see people grasping at straws to justify their emotions with a pseudo-scientific explanation. I find that frankly sad and quite toxic in a way.
Music is art, the enjoyment we derive from it can't be measured in kilobits per second. That doesn't mean that we need to make up pseudo-facts about acoustics to justify our preferences.
During an interval I was sitting in a shitty corner up on some balcony, pretty far; but I could hear the voice and discern the words of a girl chatting down in the platea next to an entrance.
A single mouth, chatting, among hundreds other voices.
During the concert you could hear the individual performers’ instruments, the strings rubbing, the valves clicking. I was blown away
While most of us can't live in such a purpose-optimized room I think OP's point was that a bunch of high quality speakers in that very same auditorium might have yielded very similar results to your experience.
Disclaimer: I am definitely not an audiophile.
The low frequencies that we feel with/through our bodies feel entirely different at a non-electric live concert as compared to what we feel through speakers. No headphones can reproduce such effects. For sure, there are speakers that can reproduce such sounds faithfully, but how often do the audio production guys use such speakers, and how often do they try to control for the feeling in their bodies? Not often, I imagine.
Yes, but we're talking about 5 digit and up audio equipment and listening to the top operas of the world, which definitely do have guys that know how to record. Your 10$ (or 250$) headphones combined with a CD from a smaller producer will not get you all the way there, I agree, but once you're in the insane high-price audiophile world, this becomes possible.
But even this is simplifying things, because each instrument has a different body shape, different sound projection, which would need to be replicated by specialized speakers. Also, the room has an important effect on how the sound waves travel and hit you from different directions. At the end it is probably cheaper and easier to pay a ticket to have this live experience.
Admittedly in order to do this you need to have post-processing specific for every person since we don't process sound exactly the same depending on our physiology. I know that Sony attempted something like that with its "3D audio". I think it's a bit of a gimmick myself, but it's technically doable.
I agree that it is probably possible in theory, but aren't we talking about actual equipment and recordings that people can buy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function
An orchestra is a large number of instruments spread across a wide stage. Each of those instruments is its own sound source. The audio cortex in the brain is highly tuned to understand things like the 3D location of sounds from cues generated by factors like the individual shape of our ears and how sounds bounce around and down into the ear canal.
Now I'm sure you'd agree that sitting in front of two speakers X metres apart, or with headphones on, no matter how good those speakers / headphones are is a different set of sound waves.
Some people are absolutely able to determine the difference between those sound sources. They're likely to have listened to a lot of music. I think these discussions get derailed by the blanket "people can" or "people can't" statements rather than thinking about who might be able to make those distinctions. It might be that the majority of people can't make that distinction. But that doesn't mean that no-one can.
tongue in cheek answer: nothing. It's your ears that are special.
Less tongue in cheek, while we have got pretty good at making microphones, they don't behave anything like human audio system; this makes it really difficult to reproduce what we experience when generated a different way (e.g. multichannel playback).
There is nothing "special" about classical music here either, it's just got a lot of complexity (from multiple instruments, and room dynamics) and dynamic range.
I see your point: if we could a) design microphones that capture everything going by them in a neutral way and b) design speakers that precisely reproduce everything they are sent in a neutral way, and c) set up a room to reproduce things in a neutral way for your particular position ... then this would work. We can't actually do any of those things.
By the time It was over I completely "got" it though. I was internally complaining that an actual fishing port at 5AM don't look like a Monet copy, not watered down, skewed, or idealized.
To be fair to the audio system, a significant reason why they'd sound different is because of room acoustics—and we rarely listen to string quartets playing in residential living rooms.
Apple already have all the lossless files on their server. Just that before they converted them to lossy format before sending to the user, and now they serve the original.
There is no new master / new re-release involved in all these.
Do you happen to have a citation for when this changed? According to the "Apple Digital Masters" Technology Brief[1], the masters delivered to Apple have historically been AAC files.
[1] https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf
Can't source anything except our own deliveries to Apple, but we've been delivering PCM since ~2018. Likely earlier, that's just when the code got moved into source control. That actually predates the copyright on that PDF.
In general, of the maybe 150-odd DSPs we deliver to, as far as I know all but a handful have us deliver PCM. The remainder have us delivering flac.
Cool, I take your word for it. Thanks!
The referenced document only talks about AAC masters, and the tools at https://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/ only create AAC masters. The simplest explanation is that the public materials and tools are just sadly out of date.
Apple Digital Masters Droplet
You can use the Apple Digital Masters Droplet to automate the creation of 256 kbps There isn't actually anything about what you're supposed to send them, only the recommendation to use their tooling which seems geared to produce 256k AAC files.
I, too, run high-end gear and cannot.
The problem scope isn't simply reproduction accuracy, it is also one of taste: Different compression can elevate/alter parts of the sound, and your opinion may not lean to the highest bit rate but rather some other coloring of the music.
The fact you've run this test "repeatedly" actually hurts your argument, since you may just be learning what to expect in your environment. The crux of the article/discussion is that people cannot blindly pick the highest quality, which they cannot (since the different colorings of the music are subjective anyway).
In A/B tests this is true, I _can_ reliably (not 100%, but way better than random) tell you which of A/B is compressed, and I can normally do this on somewhat crappy headphones, since I _know_ where to listen to pick out the compression. And this despite being partly deaf.
However, if I am just listening to music I never notice these artefacts, since when listening to music, I'm not trying to determine which A/B stream is wrong. Most of the time, the music is just playing in the background anyway.
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/1015/
It's like with kerning
Studies have shown that well-compressed lossy audio is nearly indistinguishable from the originals. This is certainly true for me. I can sometimes pick out the compressed version if I know the track well and can look for specific details, but generally I'm absolutely not consciously aware of any compression artifacts.
Similarly, I doubt most people could pick out small problems with kerning and other typographic issues.
And yet...
I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences. I believe there may be parallels with lossy vs. lossless compression when it comes to music, and with many other experiences as well -- you may not be able to tell the difference between cookies baked with cheap butter and grass-fed butter in an A/B test, but might you enjoy one cookie more than the other anyway?
In the Battle of Naboo in the Phantom Menace (2001, 115m budget,) you see a CGI battle between a million zillion CGI robots and CGI aliens with CGI force fields, etc. It's a proud display of state-of-the-art CGI capability, circa 2001.
To this day, when you watch Jurassic Park (1993, 65m budget,) you're looking at a fucking dinosaur.
Great typography is like great special effects in a movie (most of the time,)— the viewer shouldn't realize it's there. "Good typography is invisible" is the most commonly repeated maxim for typographers. Typography is good if it's readable, legible, all elements on the page serve their purpose without needing to be labelled or puzzled over, and the most noticeable thing on the page is the information being conveyed. (Postmodernism challenged this in some interesting ways but for most practical purposes, this still holds true.) A designer might notice the typeface choice, paper choice, tracking, leading, margins, kerning, paragraph 'rag,' line length/column width element hierarchy and placement. The user probably won't notice the greater reading speed, lessened eye fatigue, fewer incidents of losing their place, easier scanning for pertinent bits, and things like that. But it will certainly be there.
I remember the first time I listened to a perfect-condition vinyl of something that I had always only streamed— I was immediately struck by how much more spatially-open it was. I imagine that was pretty deliberately done by the producer and with the necessary high-end loss in lossily compressed music, it just doesn't make it through. Not sure if I would still be able to tell as much of a difference in my 40s as I did in my early 30s, but I think most people would be subtly more engrossed in the music, even if not consciously. That was also sitting at home directly in front of my modest but competent stereo. The real question is context. Will the listening devices convey those subtleties? I know a lot of people are using streaming services as sources for home audio these days, so maybe it would to them? Certainly wouldn't to me as I was listening to music while riding the subway. I might enjoy having it available for a nice sit-down critical listening session.
Though, I'm certain it would be less "perceiving excellence" like a connoisseur, and more like reaping the practical benefits of solid typography.
While there's certainly a lot of showy typography in the world, the sort found in the body copy of books is generally focused on readability, in other words, letting the eye/brain more easily recognize letters and words. Do we enjoy a book more when our eyes and brains aren't overtaxed? It's hard to imagine otherwise -- who enjoys eye strain?
I'm less sure of it but I suspect this is true for lossy vs. lossless music as well. For example, one telltale sign of badly compressed music is when the percussion sounds more like blasts of white noise than the actual instruments -- these sharp transients are hard to losslessly compress efficiently. (It's somewhat similar to how the sharp edges of text and line art are not handled well by some lossy image formats like JPEG)
Is a drum that actually sounds like a drum going to be more pleasing to the ear than something garbled and white-noisy, even if nobody tells you anything? Generally yes, I am fairly sure.
The XKCD comic I linked makes an important point though: someone else pointing out the issues to you can make all the difference. At least with my experience, it literally took that comic for my brain to suddenly start recognizing kerning as a concept, and subsequently see issues with it everywhere.
> I strongly suspect folks would enjoy a book with excellent typography more than they would have if it had slightly less-good typography, despite not being consciously and acutely aware of the differences.
That I agree with, and I think in those cases, giving someone even the most basic framework to understand what is "good" and what is "bad" is enough to make them much more aware of the issues in the works they're enjoying.
You can run the tests as much as you want, if the hypothesis is that "people can't tell the difference between lossless and 320 kbit MP3", even one person demonstrating that they can, disproves the entire hypothesis.
Yups. Me too. Even with cheap professional equipment I cannot hear the difference of lossless vs >= 192kbps MP3.
> anything above that is wasted space.
Unless you want to mix/remix/etc. Changing the pitch brings out the artifacts.
Most of the compression in 320 mp3s is also in areas humans can't hear. I once created a 320 mp3 with a 16kHz cutoff instead of the 20kHz lame uses by default, and to me there was no audible difference - even inverting one and listening to the difference didn't produce anything audible (to me).
Of course nobody uses mp3 anymore, not even iTunes, they encode as 256 aac, which is a far superior codec and near lossless. I doubt anybody can hear the difference between the lossless file and the iTunes file.
Certainly, you probably need lossless if you're going to do any sort of editing.
I also managed to resample my entire portable playlist (yeah, making mp3s out of mp3s, I know in some circles I could be killed just for thinking about that:*) to overcome that dreadful loudness craze that makes pretty much every track produced in the last 20-25 years destroy your ears if you happen to listen to it just after something 10 years older. Unfortunately all methods to level the tracks (mp3gain, replaygain etc.) don't work properly because they should analyze all tracks dynamic content, not just the average/maximum level, then first adjust their dynamics and later normalize their level. In other words, level compression should be applied more to softer tracks and not the other way around. So I faked a solution to the problem by reconverting my playlist after applying compression to an extremely low threshold, making clear to myself that none of those tracks would ever leave my player. Some sound really horrible, but I spared my ears.
This Wikipedia article about loudness wars explains the problem in details. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
You can't 'uncompress' an MP3 back to having the dynamic range it had before.
True. In fact I would rather compress old music to bring it to the same dynamics of the new one, then and only then normalize everything. I know it's almost a crime; I did it just on my player and would never give these tracks to anyone.
Because I don't think we can.
Having lossless copies is still useful for storage and later transcoding. Even if you can't hear a difference between a 192kbit/s MP3 and a higher bitrate lossless file, you might be able to hear one after reencoding the MP3 using another lossy format.
If you could, then yes there is a quality differential, rather you got it right or wrong may be subject to taste. But at least we established there are differences.
But when we say 128Kbps are sort of CD Quality or CD being no-difference to 320Kbps mp3, they generally refers to vast majority of consumers, not audio experts. I think most consumers could tell the difference between 256kbps AAC and 128Kbps MP3. But beyond that it sort of goes into consumer dont give a damn territory. Although most Pros would want the highest quality possible and there are no reason why we cant deliver lossless with today's infrastructure.
I am wondering if there is a market for an even cheaper Music Streaming Services that target lower quality, 128Kbps music.
If you control the client and are able to update it, I think you're better off switching to opus or similar.
96kbps opus is actually quite good for music already: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Opus#Music_encod...
I guess the question then is whether there's a market for 48kbps opus music. But that'd be assuming that a big part of the costs are bandwidth. I'd bet that's not the case.
Also imagine how little traction you'd get once people associate your brand with poor music quality. I don't think you can compete by being 2€/month cheaper.
I can't see any reason for 128kbs service unless you're absolutely starved for data. There is no other advantage.
A lower price tier? Or even a Freemium model. Considering most of them are already available on Youtube. As strange as this may sound I dont think Streaming is the business model that will save Music industry. And despite the headlines ( whatever MSM likes to print these days ) most artist's real income are from somewhere else.
You're only making that problem even worse by offering a low quality, even lower price model.
Frankly I can't imagine there would be many artists particularly happy with having huge swathes of people introduced to their music at 128kbs.
The POINT is blind test 128 MP3 and lossless. Still the vast majority of people don't have the equipment to hear any difference.
The Second POINT is most people prefer to have boomy colored sound and again that ruins the need for lossless. This is why people prefer old vinyl records. It compresses the sound and makes it sound better in most people's opinion. If people would listen to 80s tapes I bet they would love that sound also.
The Third POINT music is heard with background noise all the time. No way while listening to music people could tell the difference and those that can it would require great concentration. There is a limited return of investment for most people.
Personally I own a DAC and a preamp and have my hundreds of dollars headphones and my Genlec speakers that cost thousands of dollars. I hear a SLIGHT difference between 320 MP3 and FLAC and that is 100% concentration and I can hear a difference in only certain types of music. Classical Jazz and Classical music. I can't tell with pop and electronic music which is what most people listen to.
Every time this comes up someone says this. I've never seen anyone actually doing it. e.g. a video of setting up a double blind test of this and someone actually passing consistently.
When I've challenged people IRL who claim the same thing the response is always "Well, obviously I can't do it with any of the audio gear that either of us have access to... but if I did have high end gear I could tell for sure!"
We tested it out in our college dorm freshman year. Speakers were the built in ones on my MacBook Pro. I will say that the difference is extremely minor and he has said he only cares about lossless for the sake of having original media in high quality, so he can make compressed versions in whatever format he wants without losing quality. He rarely actually listens to lossless audio. What he recognized was minor clipping on some high-hat hits, and after he pointed it out I could notice it too if I really tried.
The codecs obviously represent human-audible information much more efficiently than raw PCM samples. I'm not sure why the quality couldn't scale up (by increasing the bitrate) until it surpasses 100% of human hearing limits (since there's a lot of headroom to increase the bitrate and still be smaller than uncompressed). Maybe some formats have hard-coded frequency cutoffs (that don't change with the bitrate) that are too low for 1% of the population, but there's enough format choice that it would be surprising if they all had that problem.
It’s quite obvious that the average listener listening to a 128kbps podcast stream is not the issue here. Nor is the average listener listening to a 320kbps stream of a loud, noisy pop/rock album.
But there are certain types of music where it’s much more apparent. I have a trained ear and so I can’t speak for everyone. There are certain types of music where I can’t tell the difference. But some classical piano albums on Spotify sound terrible to me. The artifacts of the conpression are more obvious on sensitive, detailed music.
All this to say that a random seection of people failing an online test to some random audio isn’t a comprehensive answer to this question.
It often depends on the source material -- some sounds are harder for some algorithms to encode, leading to increased bitrate if the codec supports VBR, or perhaps artifacts of not, or if there's insufficient bitstream available.
Unsurprisingly the newer codecs usually manage to sound better than MP3 at significantly lower bitrates. Remember the only point in lossy encoding is to save space / bandwidth -- it's literaly why MP3 et al were invented.
Right around 18.5khz there's a sharp falloff on pure tones no matter how much I pump the volume. I use a loudness meter that shows me the freq spectrum to confirm that my speakers and headphones are producing a pure constant tone.
On the tests at: "https://www.audiocheck.net/blindtests_frequency.php?frq=14" I can get 10/10 on the 10khz and 11khz test, 9/10 on the 12khz test and then it's just guessing at 13khz and higher.
High hats tend to fall around 16khz and I have been able to differentiate on audio tests just by listening to high hats but that has more to do with how aggressive the codec is and not necessarily my hearing capability. I enjoy piano music and using the Apple afconvert tool I've been able to get piano tracks down to under 100kbps and they sound fine to me which is pretty amazing.
I cannot use some of the more popular Berydynamic headphones because they sound too trebly and some pop songs are physically painful for me to listen to (eg the marimbas at the start of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You are like ear daggers on the 880 headphone and unlistenable on the 990's). I wonder if some of that brand's popularity comes from older ladies/gentlement being able to hear treble in the music that they otherwise wouldn't hear at all.
One thing is I suffer from tinnitus or something because at night I am always aware of a constant noise or "roar" in my hearing as well as my visual noise in my eyesight. I have pretty terrible eyesight so my hearing circuitry may have just amped the volume a bit to compensate (like upping iso on a camera).
In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people. I think my brain has just had a lot of practice. I've always loved music, practiced classical piano hours a day when I was younger, and cut my teeth programming learning DSP algos for audio processing. I recently did a hobby project involving reproducing NES music from ROMs and that involved just listening to raw square/triangle waves and literally just following intuition to get everything to sound right. I'm willing to bet my case is one more of training than raw ability.
Part of that is also your brain. Master sommeliers can tell you which vineyard the grapes in a wine came from, sometimes even which side of the vineyard. Yet give those sommeliers a white wine with red coloring mixed in, and they won't immediately notice.
I've actually met one other person that said what you say, if they really try they can hear a minute difference with cymbals and hi-hats in regards to lossless vs high bitrate lossy, but they also said they had to strainingly focus on the listening and they would never listen nor enjoy music that way.
> In both our cases I wonder how much of this is just our brains have learned to pick things out of the signals are ears give vs our ears actually being more/less capable than other people
A little bit of both, I think. Your ears are naturally more sensitive, so you put the volume on your speakers a lot lower, which teaches your brain to pick up low volume stuff better. I'm always worried the downstairs appartement can hear my 'loud' TV at night, but they've told me they can't hear a thing.
If you think you can really hear fine differences in audio, it can be very eye opening (ear opening?).
As far as I know, the goto test is: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
They have a few other tests heres: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html
It compares FLAC with 320 Kbps AAC which no streaming service uses (Apple uses 256 Kbps) and is a very high bit rate.
And its choice of indie tracks isn't suited for demonstrating codec artefacts. At least have classical, EDM etc as well.
The guy who made it, jaakkopasanen, is also the author of other great audio tools - AutoEQ and Impulcifer.
Something not perceivable when listening to AAC decoding directly punched into a wired headset vs reencoding for BT transport which could transform previously unhearable compression artifacts into the perceivable range (think editing a jpeg and resaving as jpeg often produces artifacts)
I have not seen any tests for that.
(Of course if the device is able to push the AAC stream to the headset this does not happen. This kind of thing is quite opaque and hard to get info about as to which hardware or combination of hardware would support that)
> So a very well mastered track with plenty of dynamic range will still sound noticeably better on high performing speakers or headphones
I'm quite convinced that a good part of vinyl being reputably better comes from that, especially with the virtuous loop of audiophiles being the main audience for modern vinyl, which calls for good mastering.
I do collect lossless audio for archival reasons and the ability to convert from a non lossy source.
I believe that high bitrate audio is entirely bullshit though- as Chris Montgomery has shown:
Based on the opening part of that video, I think you must have meant to say high sampling rate.
If you're comparing against lossless, sounding different means sounding worse.
The goal is transparency: Preserving the qualities of the original audio that you can actually hear, while occupying less space.
Ultimately though, lossy compression is always program-dependent ("program" here means the song, not the app). The encoders use psychoacoustic algorithms, and there is no way to prove they will perform well on all samples. So you will always be able to find corner cases where an encoder or format does worse and results in more audible artifacts; some of these might be encoder bugs, some might not. Therefore, it is fair to say that you might not want to rely on lossy compression for archival. But it is perfectly reasonable to use it to put music on devices to actually listen to.
You say good mastering makes it easier to notice encoding artifacts, but actually, bad mastering can do that too. Over-compressed stuff (in dynamic range) with inter-sample peaks above 0dB can clip and distort after getting run through a lossy codec.
As for lossless formats, though, anything above 48kHz 16 bits is complete nonsense for final delivery to consumers. All the "high resolution" stuff with higher sample rates and bit depths is just marketing bullshit, and this has been repeatedly demonstrated in trials (the well-designed ones anyway; there are plenty of terrible ones - no, comparing the 96kHz download to the 48kHz download of a song is not how you test this properly).
Bit depths above 16 are useful during production (because quantization noise accumulates and is boosted by things like dynamic range compression); in practice you want to record at 24 bits for headroom reasons, and process in 32-bit float because there's no reason not to with modern computers (and many practical advantages, e.g. ~infinite dynamic range). Sample rates above 48kHz are less so; the main reason to use them is to avoid aliasing artifacts, but it is usually much more effective to do that with well-designed DSP algorithms that include internal oversampling, as opposed to just doing everything at a higher sample rate. Unless you're doing extreme pitch shifting; then higher sample rates may make sense.
Videos everyone interested in audio production should watch:
https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jCwIsT0X8M
The little tidbit at the end of the second video about how 48kHz is, in some respects, twice as good as 44.1kHz, is quite neat and not something I'd realized before.
I'll add to this that "high bitrate" for Opus can reasonably be considered as 128kbps or above, generally 160 or 192kbps are comfortably beyond what is needed to achieve audible transparency.
For anyone who's used to MP3 and just doing everything at -V0 or 320kbps, it's extremely impressive to hear how good Opus is, and how low bit rates you can get away with. Even at 24kbps it's serviceable for music, it sounds no worse than a slightly worn cassette tape.
It's a seriously impressive codec, both for speech and musical content.
24kpbs is perfectly adequate for voice/podcasts/audiobooks
This is such a key point: MP3 has known weaknesses with certain common sound profiles (e.g. sharp transitions such as a cymbal or snare drum) which aren't really fixable. For me the threshold was AAC 256kpbs where I stopped noticing artifacting.
On the whole your comment is great, but I think this point might be revealing of either your age or the last time your looked at mp3 encoders. LAME has been great for at least a decade now. Other than (possibly) extremely rare killer samples, you're unlikely to be able to ABX a LAME encoded track at 256 Kbps. I certainly can't, and I have pretty decent gear and have been listening to (and working on) music for a very long time.
Back in the 90s, all mp3 encoders were shit. Xiph's Monty, in the post you link, mentions being able to distinguish between them using only their results as a party trick. Even in the early 2000s you needed 256-320 Kbps to have a shot at transparency. But now, most music is transparent at `lame -V2` settings, which gives approximately 192 Kbps results. I can still ABX a very small number of songs (last I tested), but even these go away by `lame -V0`, which is the highest quality VBR mode. HydrogenAudio, a trustworthy source as far as "audiophile" claims go, says that anything from `-V0 to -V3` should be transparent under most conditions. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php/LAME
AAC and Vorbis are certainly better codecs, achieving transparency most of the time at closer to 160 Kbps. Opus is even better. I've never been able to ABX a 128 Kbps track, and music sounds great even at 96 Kbps (for stereo!). There are supposed to be killer samples for all four, forcing them to require a higher bitrate to achieve transparency, but interest in finding these seems to have dropped.
But storing music over 48kHz and 16bit for comsumption is really just waste of storage space and pure snake oil. 16 bit give a dynamic range of 96dB and I'm not aware of any recording outside of experiments that take advantage of it. Even the most expensive speaker / headphones will distort terribly if you play them on the loudness level where this dynamic range would matter...
And most "high quality" recordings with a high frequency range (96kHz+) only really add ultrasonic sound and mostly noise artefacts that don't correlate to the music recorded (and that no speaker / headphones can even reasonably, without high distortions, reproduce, if they even pass the LPF of the reproduction chain).
So yeah, I also think that 48/16 is all we need for optimal consumption. If the format is lossless, it's also nice for archival reasons.
http://www.lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-white-paper-the_o...
I'm personally baffled and irritated by this move from Apple. They'll be selling healing crystals next.
With most samples, yes. The issue, as I said, is that psychoacoustic codecs are basically heuristic by definition, and so you can pretty much always find counterexamples. It's possible to say 320kbps MP3 is indistinguishable from uncompressed for most samples; it is not possible to say it is indistinguishable for all samples, present and future.
It's also the case that lossy encoding is a bad idea if you're going to be further processing the audio in any way; repeated transcodes definitely start bringing out the artifacts more. So lossless music is always something worth having as an option.
Now, when you start talking about "high-resolution" 96/192k 24b stuff... yeah, that's just as good as healing crystals.
Are there likely to be real-world cases where this happens - and the effect is detrimental enough to actually matter to anyone?
Surely we're debating "when is it good enough for anyone sane and reasonable?" not "when could a hypothetical oracle be fooled 100%"?
And as I said, really, the main reason to avoid lossy compression at this point is due to generational loss and post processing. Lossy compression should be considered a final processing step - what you do to store music that is then going to be delivered directly to a listener, unaltered. If you're going to do anything else, you'd do much better with a lossless version.
That is not to say, of course, that if all you have is a lossy version, it is a major problem :-)
For the record, my lossy format of choice for e.g. putting stuff on my phone is 96kbps Opus. Even that much is excellent for casual listening. But I much prefer to keep lossless FLACs as my primary archival storage - not just because that way I can take advantage of better compression formats as they come (e.g. how I moved from ~130k Vorbis to ~96k Opus), but also because compression makes a massive difference with certain kinds of processing and editing which I sometimes enjoy doing. All the psychoacoustics go out the window if you start doing things like subtracting instrumental mixes from full mixes to get vocal tracks out.
The only "real" test for these sorts of things is
> You've got a new device. Your streaming app defaults to low-quality upon installation. How long until you notice this?
Later that week I put in a CD with songs I'd heard hundreds of times, and to my absolute horror, I could now hear the squeak of that drummer's kick pedal, like an icepick jabbing me in the ear. It had been there the whole time, pressed to millions of CDs, broadcast over countless radio stations, but only became apparent to me after intense focus on that particular sound.
I imagine that people who claim to hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless experience something like that. There may be a particular, narrow band of frequencies that sound slightly more modulated in 320 when compared to lossless, but unless you make a concerted, drawn out effort to find that, you'll never know. And if you do make that effort, you can end up ruining your otherwise pleasant experience for absolutely no good reason.
Anyway, after the kick pedal squeak incident, I switched to listening to wholly electronic music for the next month or so as a palette cleanser, and I haven't picked up on the squeak anywhere else since.
I'm using WH-1000XM3 headphones and am a lifelong musician with pretty mild tinnitus.
I did have aptX enabled at some point in Macos, not sure if it's still working.
Listened using Beyerdynamic Custom Studios with a cheap-ish DAC on a windows PC.
Here's one result which lines up pretty much with what I'd expect - if you get lucky with very specific songs/styles, you can pick out a 320kbps mp3, just barely, with good playback hardware.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/abx-test-of-320kbps-vs-flac-...
You can tell which of 2 similar shades of blue is lighter next to each other, but if you were to look at one and then another a day apart you probably couldn't say which was lighter
And even if I could detect the difference, I am not convinced that the improvement in bitrate would actually result in any increased enjoyment.
4/6 with two errors where I confused 320Kbps and raw wav.
But to be honest, I could hardly distinguish between the samples and I mostly guessed.
And I have a mid-range mini amp that fits in between my books, and two mid-range dali speakers hooked up with a regular 3.5mm outlet to my Ryzen MSI PC board, volume up to max on the computer but not on the amp.
Not "even" as if that was any good. MP3 320kbps is a very low bar.
OPUS vbr averaging 128kbps is much harder than mp3 320kbps to ABX against FLAC.
MP3 simply is a really bad codec by current standards.
This is a common mistake people make, e.g. comparing 48k vs 96k files. What you need to do is take a 96k original, downsample it to 48k, upsample it again to 96k (both using very high quality algorithms), then compare it to the original 96k file again. Otherwise you're relying on your playback software or hardware's resampling algorithm, and I guarantee that's a compromise between quality and performance, and not valid for a scientific test.
It is a bit lengthy, takes 5-10m, but it is a true blind A/B test with enough samples to be significant.
All that being said, I still use FLAC for nearly everything for two reasons: 1) Since it's lossless, it makes a good "transit medium"; I can have some assurances that it's not going to degrade in quality with subsequent renders if I import the audio into a video editor and export it to 24 Bit FLAC.
2) Hard drive space is pretty cheap nowadays. I have a home streaming server that I set up to stream to my stereo (doesn't do any additional compression from the input source), and even if it is psychosomatic, I do like knowing that I have the highest quality possible. I'll admit it's silly, but the music sounds better psychologically because I know it's lossless, even if I realistically cannot tell a difference in a blind test.
True. No one else bothers with it though, because why should they when FLAC exists? That makes ALAC, in practice, largely an Apple-only format.
(And if compilation fails with a specific weird error about corefoundation corevideo coreaudio etc, uninstall and reinstall your macOS command line tools, because they're broken; `sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools ; xcode-select --install` will do that.)
Well if you want to try Nix, https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9dba669e8a53f00114b53d... right out of the box :D
Sure, if you don't have any use for iTunes or iOS FLAC is the obvious choice, but if you do use iTunes there's really no need to keep two formats around. Just use ALAC.
Technically, it's still not as good. For instance, FLAC includes a checksum of the audio data, whereas ALAC doesn't. FLAC also compresses a bit better (=smaller file sizes) and decodes a bit faster (=lower CPU/battery usage).
Except adoption. FLAC is much more widely supported, so why opt for ALAC?
I can't information theoretically argue for this. But I can algebraically argue lossless conversion rather than storage is great, and this seems great for the war against bad IP legal regimes.
Too bad they are probably only doing this because they feel that with streaming's dominance, the IP regime is not at risk.
I've given up on arguing with audiophiles about this. In the end if they enjoy their overpriced setups to listen to 196kHz 32bits-per-sample uncompressed tracks who am I to tell them otherwise? It won't keep me from listening to compressed audio on my cheapo USB DAC with my mid-range earphones and enjoying it just as much.
Me, I see spatial audio and I'm like... Ah, that's annoying, because it's yet another proprietary gimmick, and it means the format will likely be incompatible with everything else. You could see a proliferation of audio files that are only usable on Apple devices. Stereo seems... Based in physical reality, ubiquitous, and very practical. I hope Google doesn't try to copy them just like they did after Apple decided to remove the headphone jack, because that wasn't an upgrade. Deprecating trusted, reliable technology to try to entice buyers is not an upgrade.
This was referring to brand perceptions, not the Android or iOS software platforms.
It took only a few weeks for disappointment over slow transitions, buggy apps, and annoying updates.
Today I'm not sure how I could live without a few Android exclusive things, Linux, ad block, macros. They might be available for IPhone, but it's mind numbingly easy to get started.
Final complaint, our grandparents got iPhones because it was supposed to be easy. Apple logins and lingo made it difficult to use.
That's one way to look at it. Personally I'd say that it stops companies like Tidal (et al) from posturing as being "more high end" based on these dubious and mostly bullshit claims around lossless and high-res audio formats.
Hopefully the outcome will be that we'll be hearing fewer bullshit arguments about how "Tidal sounds better than Apple Music". The people who like their placebos can enjoy their placebos; the rest of us can get on with our lives.
The vast majority of Apple Music lossless audio will be CD-quality ALAC which has a variable bitrate generally between 2x and 4x that of 256kbps AAC. A small subset of music available to stream will also be "high res" with bitrates in the realm of 5x to 10x.
It also won't be "everyone" using this but rather only a small percentage of people—and within that subset, many will only choose it for a limited subset of music and in a limited subset of listening contexts. It wouldn't surprise me if lossless was chosen by fewer than 1% of consumers.
Therefore in aggregate, the increase is going to be somewhere closer to 1.1x, not 10x.
Indeed, here is such a test: https://gxip23wuyntw2qbzp2f7yfke6y-ac5fdsxevxq4s5y-www-heise...
Even trained listeners using high-end equipment weren’t able to distinguish between CD and 256 kbps MP3 in double-blind tests.
Much better results would be had with 1 month of A, then switching to B.
As well, I feel like the same concept is being used when people listen to the same recording of the same track every time they are trying out new headphones or speakers.
There is nothing special about the compression/quality as compared to a quality MP3 encoder or Apple's AAC encoder (maybe the only quality AAC encoder) but you are guaranteed to have to re-encode if you want to play on your sports watch, in your car, play on your smart speakers, etc.)
Really? From tests I did way back in the day, the quality was comparable at around half the size. It's a shame Vorbis support isn't widespread though, given that it's royalty-free. Let's hope Opus has a better fate.
Spotify currently uses Ogg Vorbis on desktop and mobile, and AAC for the web player.
Oh christ, this is my least favorite thing about newer audio formats. Some of the old albums were meant to be heard in one stretch; there are no gaps between tracks, because you're hearing a story. Then comes mp3 and digital audio, with a second pause between them. It just kills me.
I get accused of being a hipster by my family. I just want to hear the story!
It's entirely a player thing to start decoding the next track slightly before the current track ends and continuously feed the audio buffer with no gap. This has nothing to do with mp3 and digital audio, but everything with players that don't conceptually split between reading a file and pushing audio to the output but are just glorified shell for loops over mpg321.
More modern formats solved this issue by precisely defining the start/end points so decoding can produce an output with precisely the same alignment and number of samples as the input.
There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support into it, but the core format cannot do it.
I agree, although arguably the MP3 "core format" has had a number of extensions around so many things that ultimately became de facto standards (vendor extensions if you will). I remember how you could not have precise seeking or current time display with VBR, which now seems to be now largely a solved problem.
> There are certainly nonstandard metadata hacks for MP3 to retrofit gapless support
One of these is LAME adding gapless stuff at least as far back as 2003, so yes it's a workaround to a format limitation, but it's quite an old one, and fairly stable and known well enough that it's been a while since encoders default to encode with gapless metadata.
There's an interesting historical explanation here:
https://sourceforge.net/p/lame/bugs/453/#1bd2
I do agree though that the easy path out of it is to just stop using MP3, for this reason and a zillion others ;)
"Good enough" can be the enemy of "correct".
Bigger. Stronger. Warmer. Not that these cannot meaningfully describe audio. But it tells me they cannot quantify the difference.
For what it’s worth, music actually purchased on iTunes (not an Apple Music subscription) has been DRM-free for years. If this means iTunes-purchased songs are lossless now, that might be useful.
I just wish digital audio players would pick it up.
They are called _Compact Discs_ and you can get them pretty cheap these days!
Also, I believe you had to install junk software from the CD to a Windows or Mac Computer, before those OSs were hardened somewhat. Avoiding all things Sony seems a better strategy than otherwise benign CDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Source: I totally still do that with my CD collection.
I hear what you're saying, but the convenience of a vast and portable library is compelling.
I can format it to MP3, or ALAC, of FLAC, or whatever I like, and I can play them on devices that are made today, or 40 years ago.
But secretly I just use Spotify for it’s discover features, and then buy CDs of the albums I like.
Spotify isn't going anywhere.
Also, all the people holding onto their 8-tracks are definitely thinking they showed all of us. /s
It is still, for me, a cheaper and more flexible option despite licensing squabbles. It also gives me the opportunity to find new artists and give albums a few listens before deciding on whether or not they do it for me.
My views are USA-centric, perhaps licensing issues are more prevalent in other countries.
I don't want the plastic, the physical storage requirements, etc, of a CD. With digital I don't "own" the music, sure, but I've definitely lost more music in my life from scratched discs, people not returning CDs than I ever will through Spotify.
I guess there are many reasons for this, but mainly I guess they are simply victims of copyright.
It's the more esoteric artists that have become increasingly difficult to get CDs for. Streaming is really a boon for anything outside the mainstream.
I seem to recall that meant they weren't actually CDs, they just happened to look exactly like them, and usually function in a CD player. Computers often had trouble with them.
I don't know if this is true, or just bs, but there you go.
CDs aren't lossless unless the material was recorded at or below 16 bit/44.1kHz.
You can argue whether the difference is perceptible - some blind studies suggest not - but this fact is what led to a variety of semi-obscure audiophile disc formats that offered higher sampling rates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD).
The definition of lossless is that either no compression algorithm was used or the compression algorithm is capable of precisely recreating the original bits in as bits out. If you feed a lossless mechanism an 8 bit 3.5KHz mono bitstream, it must reproduce the same 8 bit 3.5Khz mono bitstream at the other end. Quality out equals quality in.
In your definition, no sound is ever lossless because no microphones can ever capture the complete audio experience available from a live performance - if you move your head a quarter of a wavelength, the sound will change.
That's why we don't use that definition.
Also, I’m aware SACDs exists. I actually have an amp that can decode DSD encoded audio but I failed to hear a difference.
Yes, if you blast humans with enough energy in any form they will eventually notice. This is not a relevant result for music.
110 dBSPL represents thousands of times more energy (in watts) than you could plausibly expect in any musically derived ultrasonic content played at a volume level which doesn't pose a significant risk of permanent hearing loss. At such insane power levels, obviously nobody will be hearing the actual frequency but rather sub-harmonics and/or other physical sensations derived from that moronic level of sound pressure.
Because from all accounts it is a myth.
Sensitivity to audio falls off a cliff as you approach 20KHz.
Especially if your hearing has been damaged by repeat exposure to 19 kHz at 138dB SPL.
From all accounts? Don't you mean from one account?
Two things... CD quality (16 bit / 44.1 kHz stereo) was "big" in the eighties but it now makes for really tiny files. 1 TB harddisk and much more are common for consumers. Why are we still even arguing about 320 kbps mp3 when we can have provably bitperfect rips of our CDs, which can serve both as archive and for listening?
The second thing: from the other side of a big room I cannot tell the difference between a 100 dpi color printing of a painting and a 1200 dpi color printing of that same painting. Well... Even if I cannot tell the difference I do prefer to know I have the 1200 dpi print and not the 100 dpi one.
Why would I even take the risk, even I cannot consciously tell the difference, to have something of lesser quality?
mp3 was lots of fun in the Napster days when we were running 28.8 k baud modems and had 3.2 GB HDD. But nowadays I've got 1 TB HDDs... To me the mp3 ship has sailed and won't be missed. It's FLAC and only FLAC. CD quality everywhere. I don't own SACD (maybe I should) but got a lot of CDs. And FLACs are my CD in digital version. mp3s simply aren't.
And that's in 2021. I cannot imagine, say, in 2026. This "mp3 vs flac" argument is never ever going to go back in favor of mp3: as time passes the room it takes to store your music collection as FLAC keeps getting proportionally tinier and tinier.
It doesnt say if the high res tracks are included in a subscription which is interesting as competing services usually have a higher price tier for this. Services like Tidal & Qobuz differentiate themselves on high res but it is such a tiny percentage of their catalog thats its often a waste of effort.
And then there is the whole hardware support question, Android down samples everything and Apples codec over bluetooth isnt going to support anything high res anyway.
This all sounds like features for the average user (bigger numbers are better) where in reality it probably holds value for less than 1% of users.
I suspect like many things, that this is Apple’s attempt at providing a service that’s just valid enough that they can dry up the competitors then relax their quality and get back to selling the products they want to sell people.
This just seems like a waste of bandwidth for streaming though.
It's been said many times, but with good equipment and familiarity with the instruments of the genre can (and will) change the outcome of these tests.
320CBR MP3 will sound extremely good, but with a good system and some relaxed listening in a silent environment will highlight the differences for who knows what to listen for.
By a "good system" I don't mean $10K+ systems on isolated rooms. A good vintage amplifier with a relatively modern CD player with good quality (Burr Brown / Wolfson) DAC and high quality speakers is enough.
low frequencies: dull, humming noise
mid range: sounds like the sound is coming from a sock
higher frequencies: too squeaky is the best way I can describe it.
I have permanent tinnitus though. The better/higher the sound quality, the less noticeable it is. And of coarse listening to a real instrument a few meters away (that doesn't go through a mic & amplifier) is an absolute treat.
Yes, but lossless audio is still useful for transcoding. If you want to play music on your phone, and you have plenty of fixed hard drive space on your desktop (which is very cheap), it's rational to compress with an advanced codec to ~90 kbps since your headphones probably aren't good enough to pass anything more hi-fi and you want space for pictures and videos. However, if your downloads come lossy compressed, you'll introduce transcoding artifacts; you can get around this by transcoding at a significantly higher bitrate, but now the compressed file is wasting space!
Someone noted a song by the Bangles, which featured a little finger cymbal. (Two discs worn on a finger and thumb)
That sound was missing and or rendered poorly. Turns out it offers very little sound under 5Khz. The codec parameters were increased to address those few cases, but are still below 10Khz, I believe.
The other discussion was quality over choice. Fact is a full FM bitstream performed great. More than good enough to really enjoy in a car. Most people would trade the losses for lack of fuzz and noise present on analog RF.
"CD Quality" was, and today is not accurate at all in the technical sense, but the overall feel is more like a CD than it is analog media, so... that is what they went with.
However, being able to offer several streams meant multiple branding, commercial free streams to promote digital radio, and, and, and.
Mostly, that discussion resolved to choice being king over quality. Improving quality at the expense of choice = wasted bits. That is by far the dominant view in broadcast.
A little thought experiment explains why:
Say you have a radio, and you get two stations. One offers compelling content, but the quality is low. The other is amazing good quality, but is just not compelling.
Which do you listen to?
Given others find the same material compelling that you do, which do you believe they will listen to?
And that is why peak quality on broadcast is no longer a thing.
Streaming services can offer compelling and quality choices to a higher degree than broadcast can, which means generally higher quality, even when available bitrates are, or could be. comparable. But, if they are ever pinned, they will favor choice over quality in a pinch, because compelling content wins over quality nearly all the time.
I pretty much gave up on radio around this time too. Being able to carry a good music library around meant just using a car system as an output device.
For a time, I did enjoy live or daily broadcasts, talk, news, sports. But, those carry such a high commercial load, and when phones and data plans began to favor streaming, I switched completely.
...all of which is why I am not too current on how HD Radio performs today. Next time I rent a car, I will have to scan the dial to see what, if anything, has changed.
Umm did I miss something? ...This for a music streaming service.
Who's to say that Apple now or in the future might not want to do what amounts to dynamic "re-mixing" on-device? Presumably whatever adaptive tricks they might like to pull to make your music sound better or sync up to AR scenes or ... would benefit from the uncompressed source.
So some day I'm listening to that album as I'm wont to do and I notice there's some cracks missing. After questioning my sanity a bit it turns out the mp3 ones somehow managed to sneak into my playlist.
I tbh think "sound(s) bigger and stronger" is actually a pretty decent layman's phrase for "has a higher dynamic range".
That Scoopertino post never fails to amuse me.
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-what-if-apple-m...
Translated article: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=27324.0
And about people getting used to compression artifacts: https://web.archive.org/web/20090315092806/radar.oreilly.com... and https://gizmodo.com/ipods-and-young-people-have-utterly-dest...
> J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...]
There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger".
The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, as the inaudible loss of quality with minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) is audible when the sound is sped up or slowed down.
But, and this the article does not mention, is not what Apple Music wants you to do. The formats will be proprietary with DRM.
I prefer FLAC/OggVorbis/etc when it comes to music. But then I like to be able to mix/remix.