Mp3 vs Wav,my musician neighbor can't hear the difference.

[IanU]

I recommended the Sound Liaison recordings on another thread.
It occurred to me that on their site you can listen to the whole album or song,before deciding to buy.
It is also possible to buy just one track.
The sound quality of the tracks on the site is very good,I believe it is Mp3 256.But compared with the 24 bit 96khz Studio Master Wav download I find that the difference is enormous.
But my dear neighbor,classically trained musician and music teacher and a person whom I respect enormously for his knowledge and taste in music,he can not hear the difference.It has to be said that my neighbors music installation is very average.so when he is at my place, he just finds everything fantastic sounding.
I guess the Sound Liaison people believe that their customers can hear the difference or they would not offer their music for free in a compressed format.
I think that maybe the reason that some people can hear the difference between compressed or Hi-Rez Wav files or SACD or blu ray, is because it is an acquired taste.The more one listens the more one learns to hear the difference if listening on good equipment.

The track I used for my small listening test with my neighbor, was the haunting
version of" Love in Vain'' from the Torn album by Carmen Gomes Inc.
you can listen to it here:
Carmen Gomes Inc - Torn (SE)
Sounds good,no? but the Wav version is so much richer,broader,deeper,well everything.
But my musician neighbor he did not hear it,he did love my audiophile Sennheiser headphones though, and the deep musicality of the singer,the tasty guitar playing and the marvelous intonation of the bass player playing ''double stops''which he explained is two notes at once and supposedly very difficult on a bass.
So is my suggestion, that high end listening is something one learns by doing, true or is our individual hearing just very different,or has the years of playing in orchestras and listening to students hours on end in rooms with bad acoustics, destroyed part of my neighbors hearing(that is what he believes.)
Or as he jokes: ''you have to hear the difference considering the amount of money you spend on your equipment!!!''

What do you think?

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I think you should blind-test yourself on the comparison. I'm saying, or predicting, in any way, that you would not pass the test, because of course there are differences, and, of course some people can hear them. But I would have a little bit less certainty without a blind test.

There are many, many people, including self-called audiophiles and musicians, who cannot tell the difference between 256 or 320 MP3 and WAV. Especially with VBR, the higher-rate MP3s are damned good. I do not say that I can tell the difference. You might try asking your friend to compare the effects of extended listening. That can be telling.

The other thing that can be a mistake is to assume that musicians, just because music is their business, are good at listening. In my experience, they are quite often the opposite. They might notice the smallest deviation in pitch, and scream that something is out of tune, but completely ignore the quality of the recording or the quality of the playback equipment. It is my theory that musicians listen differently.

Another very simple thing is that many musicians, and not only rock musicians, suffer hearing loss as a result of their trade. You might well have much better hearing than your neighbour! Even if that is not the case, then his trade, as he suggests, may well have developed his tolerance for bad sound.

I do believe in my signature. A lot of what we hear, and how we hear it, has a strong psychological/psycho-acoustic element and, at a very basic level, yes, that includes the factor of how much we paid for it. I am unable to understand why "audiophiles" are often in denial about this, because it seems to me to be a rather interesting aspect of our hobby.

Going back to MP3s... I sometimes download music from Wolfgang's Vault. They used to make their concerts available as FLAC files, now they are 320MP3s. I very much regret the change! To me, the difference between lossy and lossless is almost a matter of principle. But, I have to admit that I can listen to such concerts of well over an hour without finding anything wrong with them, or suffering the symptoms of what I identify as compression fatigue.

Of course, I don't have lossless versions to compare. I can say, without hesitation, that I'd rather be listening to lossless, but, with this bitrate, I wouldn't put money on being able to tell the difference. And yes, my headphone setup is resolving, quite refined and rather unforgiving.

 

[prashant_dv]

The track I used for my small listening test with my neighbor, was the haunting
version of" Love in Vain'' from the Torn album by Carmen Gomes Inc.
you can listen to it here:
Carmen Gomes Inc - Torn (SE)
Sounds good,no? but the Wav version is so much richer,broader,deeper,well everything.


What do you think?

Hello IanU,

The link on your post shows file sizes of 100MB and above which cannot be the case if the files are 320kbps MP3 which at the maximum would be only 10-15 MB with the best possible software.

I havent heard the songs as such, but i would be inclined to think that these files are definitely of better quality ( may be lossless compression probably?? ) going by the site and quality of downloads offered there.

From my experience ( even my better half's ) I can hear a lot differences in listening to a normal MP3 versus listening to original ACD or a FLAC/WAV version. My better half used to have most of the songs in mp3 ( 128kbps ) format and when she heard the same songs in my music system with full quality flac files she asked me how it sounded so clean and clear ( she wasnt aware of the source files ).

So atleast for me, everything is a chain and even one component on low quality will affect the whole setup as such.
It starts right from your source files -> Player -> Cables -> Amp(s) -Speakers /headphones.

Goedenavond,
Prashant D

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

The link on your post shows file sizes of 100MB and above...

I guess that this is for the purchased download, which the footnotes says is 24/96. I guess IanU made the purchase, and then compared with the online playback from the site.

IanU, how did you determine that this is 256MP3?

 

[Staxxx]

I somehow feel that it is easier sometimes to tell a good recording from a bad one than a difference in resolution (especially between 16/44.1 and higher resolutions). I recently bought and downloaded about 10 albums in WAV and two of them sounded very compressed and lacking dynamics. I immediately reported them and they were replaced for me. I checked if they were lower resolution on Foobar and they were not...but the difference was very clear. I do believe I am very sensitive to dynamic range and find this the most telling difference between a low res recording and a high res one.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

There is a tool which will analyse the dynamic range of a recording, assuming that the recording is in a file on a computer.

But I can't remember what it is called or where I saw it!

I think it just gives a comparative score, and it might have come from the organisation that campaigns against loudness compression in recording.

???

 

[ranjeetrain]

It is true that a lot of people can't make out the difference between high bit-rate MP3 and WAV. There can be a number of reasons for this

(1) Not all recordings are great enough to contain so much information that can't be encoded by a high bitrate MP3 leaving out a lot of information.

(2) Not all people have ears so sensitive that they can pick the very minute difference between high bitrate MP3 and WAV. And it has nothing to do with someone's profession. Her being a musician is no guarantee of her picking a difference between two recordings because she is a human first and a musician second. We are talking about the limits of her hearing ability.

I can see why you would trust her to be able to pick the difference. But let me clarify here. She can easily pick the difference between two recordings immediately if one is in minor note and the other in the major note. Her ears are trained in picking the those differences, but she need not necessarily be able to pick up lack or abundance of details / texture / space / separation / sound-stage.

People with high end systems gradually learn to discern between these aspects of music playback, which most musicians mostly don't pay much attention to.

(3) Not all playback systems (player/DAC/Amp/speakers) are resolving enough to make those minute differences obvious to everyone.

 

[iaudio]

There is a dynamic range plug in for foobar

Free Downloads | DYNAMIC RANGE | pleasurize music!

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

That looks familiar, but I thought there was something for Linux, and I can't find that. Never mind... offtopic I guess

 

[Shivam]

One of my friends who is a very famous professional singer herself also can't hear the difference between mp3 and high resolution flac files. She however can immediately point out if the tone of the instrument is not proper even if minimally.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I know this is an unpopular idea (and I've admitted my own prejudices) but it is possible that, at least in some instances, there is no audible difference!

The whole point of the lossy-compression algorithms is that they remove the part of the music that we cannot hear. It takes a bit of genius to do that sort of stuff: did they get it all wrong? Well, sometimes yes, perhaps: the algorithm is one thing, and the implementation another, and, apparently, early MP3 implementation was not good --- and there is still a lot of it about.

So, MP3 can be extremely good --- but is not necessarily so.

As a matter of principle (or prejudice! Might well be more accurate!) if I have to use lossy compression (eg for portable player) I prefer to use OGG. I have no idea about the relative quality (partly because I don't use the portable player much, so really can't be bothered to do comparative testing), but OGG comes from the same stable as FLAC, and I guess, those guys have earned my respect. It is not commercial. When we encode/decode into OGG, the performance of the program we use should be the same, whereas MP3 implementations may not be.

 

[IanU]

I guess that this is for the purchased download, which the footnotes says is 24/96. I guess IanU made the purchase, and then compared with the online playback from the site.

IanU, how did you determine that this is 256MP3?

Hi Thad,
Well it was a guess. I converted the 24/96 Wav file to 256 Mp3, and they sounded similar.

They are having a couple of free downloads as well now, for those who are interested, you can download them, convert them a carry out your own test.
Mind you to start with the lower resolution when comparing and then move up in bit rate, as the mind tends to fill out the gaps when going down in resolution.
The difference I hear when listening on my Sennheiser HD 800 headphones is a smaller less wide sound stage, shorter decay and a generally ''colder'' sound.
Free Tracks (WAV)

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Something that I have noticed recently: Software resampling can really spoil the sound of music.

I have been using Aqualung media player, with the JACK audio interface. One has to set the sample rate on starting JACK, it is not flexible. Aqualung has built in SRC software (perhaps all players do?) Up to now this has not mattered to me because almost all of my music has been 41000, but recently I have acquired some 96K, and even 192K stuff.

I have sat here, wondering what's wrong with the music? 96 resampled to 41 looses all its presence and "musicality," 41 resampled to 96 sounds rough!

It's a pain in the neck to have to reconfigure according to what I want to hear, so I downloaded DeaDBeef, disabled software resampling, left JACK out and set it to play direct. Problem over, the DAC resets itself according to what it is receiving.

However, I have tried the DeaDBeef software resampling, and it is considerably superior. One supposes that, albeit waaay over my head, that SRC software is just doing maths --- well, it seems that some people, and the programs they write, are better at than others!

Lossy compression must be orders of magnitude more difficult than re-sampling. No wonder there is no born equal there!

 

[Nikhil]

A well recorded/engineered 128 kbps mp3 will sound better than a badly recorded wav file.
Content quality comes first. The file type is just a container.

Only after Content Quality being equal can you do a file type comparison.
This again will require some quality in the equipment being used for replay.

I have found computer audio to have so many variables that you just can't make a general statement.
Most listeners in a true ABX test may not hear the difference between WAV and mp3 files.

 

[IndianEars]

This again will require some quality in the equipment being used for replay.

Yes, its like weighing a feather on a bathroom scale, and then Insisting that the feather has ZERO weight

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

Good points.

I recently acquired some 96k and 192k (I can only play up to 96 on my gear) vinyl rips to FLAC. They are just divine to listen to! Because of the bit rate? No Idea, because I don't have the 44.1 or MP3 for comparison. I suspect that the 44.1, at least, would also be divine to listen to, and the high quality of the sound is due to almost-perfect LPs, with good equipment in the Analogue to Digital chain, and a good deal of hard work by the guy who made the rips. It's a pity I don't directly know the ripper: comparison with the LP would be interesting!