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Re:Listen to what gets lost when an MP3 is made (2015) by mrob on Tuesday November 19, 2024 @07:46AM (#42182832)
We don't need to understand those things to determine if the differences are audible. We can simply perform listening tests:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test

A properly conducted ABX test is the most favorable condition possible for detecting a difference. If you can't ABX it you can't hear it.

There's an ABX testing website with various lossy formats you could try:

https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

However, failing to ABX those specific samples does not guarantee you are unable to tell the difference in all circumstances. There are some sounds that are unusually difficult to encode ("killer samples"). This is an especially big problem for MP3. The LAME project has a collection of killer samples for MP3:

https://lame.sourceforge.io/quality.php

More modern lossy formats are less susceptible to killer samples, but theoretically there could still be problematic cases.

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