Audiophile Myths Part 1: MP3 VS FLAC, Cables, Sample Rates, Tube Amps, ETC.

[denom]

In reply to the you tube link in post#1


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNsK8EBed0M

 

[captrajesh]

It's not a problem, it's a bit of a challenge. And if I can detect the difference between WAV and 320-MP3, then I need to admit it, and stop quoting authorities about it. Even if one of them is the guy who not only invented MP3 but probably knows more about digital audio than.

Hmm Thad, why can't you extend the same open mindedness to cable thingy too? hyeah:

 

[dheerajin]

As far as i know about THAD...he is not meant for cheap stuff ....he is an esteemed FM and would be favourate amongst us ..for not doing double edged sword like many others...
He is honest..
He is what he is..period

 

[asliarun]

I will be even nitpickier

CD bit rate is 1411 kbps. There seems to a slight error in in your calc.

DSD64 has 64x44100 kHz sampling rate, DSD128 is 128x and DSD256 is 256x.

Addendum: 44100 kHz x 16 bits x 2 channels = 1411.2 kbps

Thanks for the correction, Jls and Prem. You are right, the real CD bitrate is 1.4 Mbps.. which is half of DSD64 i guess. I was hasty in mentally calculating the bitrate.

On a side note, i listen to mostly rock and thus have got used to heavily processed music. Which is why i feel that for rock, mastering makes all the difference and bitrate etc is a negligible issue once a basic level of quality is achieved. Having said that, a bunch of musicians are now doing acoustic songs in open fields etc. That sounds so different and so refreshingly good!

So to me, i would look not necessarily for a difference but for a given format to be closer to the feel and tonality and atmosphere of these unamplified acoustic numbers.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

he is not meant for cheap stuff

Blue Jeans all the way

Rajesh knows that I don't use the stuff that used to be bundled with low to mid-price equipment. Mind you, I have a box full of it! Would make for an blind interesting test :lol:. I'll bring a few pieces over to Trivandrum. I'm only waiting for you to finish those speakers...

 

[jls001]

On a side note, i listen to mostly rock and thus have got used to heavily processed music.

Another aside: I used to listen almost exclusively to country and western, rock, hard rock and metal, and nearly zero pop. That was mostly on cassette tapes when I was a teenager and college student, and very few on CDs after college when I could afford to buy a CD changer midi system. As the two midi systems I went through were quite bass heavy, hard rock sounded rather nice. When I listen to the same CDs now, I realise that their masterings were really crappy. I find them quite unlistenable from sonics standpoint. I am in no way belittling your choice of music. Just putting forth an observation I found rather strange. Why aren't the majority of rock albums mastered that well (outside of the usual suspects like Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Eagles, etc)?

Back to regular programming.....

@Thad: even on very resolving headphones identifying a 320 kbps mp3 from the wave is quite a tough task. I recently bought a cheap and cheerful Sony headphone and I was quite surprised when I liked the 320 kbps mp3 version more than the uncompressed wav file. I'm not sure if it is dependent on the player (a Samsung Note II phone), the player app, and the headphone, or all of the above. The wav files had consistently too much bass for my liking, whereas the mp3 versions sounded quite balanced. And most tellingly, the 320 kbps didn't lose out on any details or dynamic swings.

PS: You may kindly stop writhing on the floor now And I hope the missus did not see you in the act

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

That's a relief! And no: she's usually away on Sundays, so I can writhe uninterrupted.

(as long as I don't do it with someone else!)

The really low-bit-rate lossy stuff, as per a lot of streaming services, is the pits. I hope everybody is agreed on that! Even so, it might take me a while to blind-test identify it, because, to me, the main symptom is fatigue. It affects even speech. Never mind music not being musical: 32kb-lossy-compressed comedy isn't even funny! However, higher up the scale, MP3 was saved by Variable bit rate. Which I think got talked about earlier in the thread.

 

[Ambio]

It's not a problem, it's a bit of a challenge. And if I can detect the difference between WAV and 320-MP3, then I need to admit it, and stop quoting authorities about it.....
......Spent the afternoon enjoying a great Veena concert,.........
.....It's a tough sample too, with the long gaps, but I suppose you chose that for assessing the decay tails.

Anyway...

Honesty comes with a price tag. Sorry about not having the golden ears.

Btw, since you mentioned about the veena concert, do you recall an ensemble of 200 Veena players in the opening/closing ceremony of a International sport event. It could be the Asian games or was it the Commonwealth Games. If you any info, please share.

I have now gone mad and am writhing on the floor screaming No! No more! I can't stand it!



This was my first impression: part A sounds less "natural" than part B. I therefore would have said that part B is probably the WAV.

When I opened the file in Audacity, part B seemed to have more information, or maybe just a slightly higher level.

.......

You are wrong. :lol::lol::lol: The extra info you see in B probably due to reconversion to WAV. But you scared me for a moment there when you said you could hear the difference. I took the trouble to play them in my main system and still couldn't tell the difference. Could it be the cables? Could it be the player?...Yes, Thad! I too was writhing on the floor trying to hear the difference.

because, to me, the main symptom is fatigue..

It could be. Maybe, that's the reason why I still prefer certain cable over another.

Once again. Thank You!

 

[captrajesh]

Rajesh knows that I don't use the stuff that used to be bundled with low to mid-price equipment. Mind you, I have a box full of it! Would make for an blind interesting test.

Oh Thad how I wish this came up while I was in Chennai. :sad:

I had quite a bit of collection of cables, most of which is sold now. We had done many a sessions comparing interconnects and speaker cables along with my trusted friend Sashi and FMs like Rajiv, Srinisundar, Mohamed naseer. Each cable sounds different. Only thing is, we didn't do a double blind testing. IIRC you were also there in one of the sessions.

Would make for an blind interesting test

Sure thing Thad. Let's settle the issue; once and for all. hyeah:

I'm only waiting for you to finish those speakers...

Aargh, these carpenters. I find them to be as elusive as Yeti.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Only thing is, we didn't do a double blind testing.

This is the thing. It is also impossible for a lone tester to do blind hardware testing, whereas it is actually pretty easy to do file against file testing using an ABX player addin.

We hear differences. I heard differences in Ambio's sample at first, but I was unable to substantiate that later.

To paraphrase Arnie Kruger, great-great-grand-daddy of the audio blind test and possibly patron saint of the cynics , when asked if he "heard" differences in sighted tests that could not be substantiated in blind tests, he replied, "Of course! We are all wired the same way!"

I am not saying that 100% of all interconnects sound 100% the same. I am sure that it is possible to engineer them so that they don't. Filters are made just from capacitors and resistors, right? And now that cable companies are including "black boxes" in the cables, they are circuits and not cables and all bets are off.

Maybe we'll do that test one day. I'll bring the coat hangers :lol:

You are wrong. The extra info you see in B probably due to reconversion to WAV.

So the second part was the MP3? hahahaha! I'm going to start an MP3-sounds-better campaign! :lol:

An aside on lossy compression...

When I was pretending to be a music student, I used minidisks a lot. It made cassette look like something from the dark ages, and (I used it for commuting music too) I'm sure that Sony was onto a very good thing with the compression algorithm, which they simply killed by their restrictive business practices. I could listen to any music from minidisk very happily, hifi or portable player --- but there was one sound it just could not cope with: the drone of an Indian electronic sruti box!

 

[prem]

Maybe very amateurish but you can try this Thad. Put in a cable. Sit at one place and sweep the room and get the frequency graph at that point. Now change the cable Repeat. See if there is any difference in the frequency graph

 

[Ambio]

It is almost impossible to get identical graph even with the same set of equipment.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Sit at one place and sweep the room and get the frequency graph at that point. Now change the cable Repeat. See if there is any difference in the frequency graph

I don't have a measurement mic.

In fact, I don't even have a proper hifi just now. CDP not working, amp and cassette in the attic from the last flood scare. All serious listening just now is on headphones, and they are scarily tough to measure. I think that only the real enthusiasts even try.

Loopback is an option --- but it is still a whole new thing to learn.

 

[tcpip]

Ok ...have you listen to stockfish record or laya project..just try to listen to them ..anyway i want you to visit my home to listen to the ssme...mp3,flac and then SACD rip

These comparisons won't make sense unless (i) the listening sessions are double-blind and (ii) they are all rips from the same source disk, and (iii) the MP3 has been encoded with the quality parameters I'd mentioned.

In the case of hybrid SACD, the rips must be from the same layer of the same SACD. One can't trust the album publishing companies to keep the same master source for different layers of the same SACD. A hybrid SACD can have three layers: multi-channel SACD, stereo SACD, and Redbook CD.

Any casual listening in a friend's living room are of very little significance for comparing for subtle differences. Wish it were otherwise -- I would have been able to spot a lot of defects in my speakers and amps much more easily.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

These comparisons won't make sense unless (i) the listening sessions are double-blind and (ii) they are all rips from the same source disk, and (iii) the MP3 has been encoded with the quality parameters I'd mentioned.

It's true... When I listen to damn good 96K music, I'm almost ready to subscribe to the high-bit-rate thing, until I remind myself that I do not have the 44.1 to compare, and, more especially, that most of my "CD-quality" music is damned good too!

 

[tcpip]

It's true... When I listen to damn good 96K music, I'm almost ready to subscribe to the high-bit-rate thing, until I remind myself that I do not have the 44.1 to compare, and, more especially, that most of my "CD-quality" music is damned good too!

I know the thread topic is about MP3 vs lossless, so I guess discussions about hi-res formats is OT, but while we're drifting, I might as well throw my two bits in. I guess you've seen this amazing report:

Comparison between 24 and 16 bit audio

The comparison process has been designed well to make it truly blind comparison, and just look at the results!

I can cite more equally amazing cases, but it won't make a whit of difference to the Believers. We will keep hearing comments like "But even my dog can make out the difference!"

 

[tcpip]

I guess I'm going to have to split the files and then try to ABX it. That means seeing if Foobar works in Wine (it does) and Wine audio works for me (it usually doesn't).

You are a Linux user, are you??!!?? A pleasure meeting you, sir.

In a way, I realise that I have cheated already: I know which has the most information, because I see the waves. I'm supposing that the one with the most information must be the WAV.

How are you able to look at waveforms visually and determine which sample has more information? I am not arguing -- I'm curious.

 

[tcpip]

The really low-bit-rate lossy stuff, as per a lot of streaming services, is the pits. I hope everybody is agreed on that!

Yes, I remember a promise unfulfilled -- Worldspace. When I first heard of so many channels of 2-channel music, ad-free, it seemed like a dream come true. I subscribed to it, hooked up the receiver to my audio system, and within a few hours, realised what a mistake it was.

Low-bit-rate compressed audio is duller than the Bombay monsoons. It's like a dead body -- it has all the right shapes in the right places, but has no life. At least, that was what the Worldspace audio was like.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I know the thread topic is about MP3 vs lossless, so I guess discussions about hi-res formats is OT,

Not at all! It's there in the thread title: we're just moving on

Comparison between 24 and 16 bit audio

The comparison process has been designed well to make it truly blind comparison, and just look at the results!

I can cite more equally amazing cases, but it won't make a whit of difference to the Believers. We will keep hearing comments like "But even my dog can make out the difference!"

Yes, I've seen Archimago's blog. Did you see his comparison of USB Cables? Hilarious! There's something for Audioquest to stick up their ...Oh sorry, I nearly forgot that this is a family forum

You are a Linux user, are you??!!?? A pleasure meeting you, sir.

And you! I'm ashamed to say that I'm an ex Unix systems manager who can't, now, even remember the syntax of a shell script. MS WinXP sat on my desktop from sheer inertia for ages, until I finally gave it the shove about four years ago.

How are you able to look at waveforms visually and determine which sample has more information? I am not arguing -- I'm curious.

That was a very dubious, spur-of-the-moment assertion, and probably just a bad choice of words. I don't know much about such things, but, what I think I was seeing there was simply that "part B" was slightly louder. Not "more information" at all.

 

[Ambio]

...Comparison between 24 and 16 bit audio

The comparison process has been designed well to make it truly blind comparison, and just look at the results!

..

Excellent link! Thanx!