MurrayL@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and an uncompressed file, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent. No matter how hard I “audio peep
But something like System of a Down has distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense.
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
Heh. Spotify used to stream 384K Vorbis, which should be sufficient. But now the web app is apparently AAC. And the app-apps are conspicuously listed with “equivalent to” bitrates, whatever that means:
support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Very high: Equivalent to approximately 320kbit/s
Most people don’t have proper home stereo setups any more either, and they prefer shitty overcompressed music through earbuds. They don’t know any better, sadly.
And Ive probably spent less than 400 dollars on my home setup. But it blows away anyone who hears it. Just takes some smarts in setting stuff up and getting good used equipment.
Just another part of the cheapening of everything in society , and why music isn’t appreciated as much anymore. No wonder everyone has depression.
Depends on the song really, if it’s just a standard pop song it’s mixing well usually come through just fine on a shitty MP3. The more layers a song may have the muddier it gets at lower bit rates. Like I’ve found the noisier spectrum of punk always benefits from higher bit rates.
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can’t hear all that well anymore.
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can’t tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
It’s still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.
My hearing isn’t extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
With quality headphones, back to back, I’m confident that you could
And even if you can - is it worth it? I mean - do I care and should I care? Is the point of music detecting every detail of the recording or can I appreciate it without paying that much attention to production? For instance, I find it much more convenient to use Bluetooth headphones as it allows me to move around the house. Flac immediately stops being relevant, as Bluetooth codec is really bad compared to almost any codec. I recently tried ldac codec on my headphones - couldn’t really tell the difference. Mp3 128kbps is just fine for me. Almost any situation. I care about musical content much more than production details. Other people might care more. I don’t.
This is the other part. Idk if it’s me, or my equipment, but like… I listen to music for the music. I might like certain genres (noise music comes to mind) more on higher end equipment, because that’s the point, but also… Eh? Not why I’m here.
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
I kinda want to start a snake oil audio cable company. It’s gotta be one of the easiest paths to retirement
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 hours ago
I’d be surprised if anyone could.
However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it’s especially obvious with better equipment.