I can tell the difference between a 160kb/s and a 320kb/s mp3 but to me the difference between 320kb/s and CD is minimal. I can live with it.
I've got an old Sansa Clip player with 8gb of 256k stuff on it. It sounds pretty darn good considering. It even drives my audiophile cans OK.
Well yes (if the cd is burned from an mp3 file). Sometimes I can hear the difference in quality…with classical for instance. But even if I’m not noticing a real difference I am always more fatigued after any extended mp3 listening.
320kbps is indistiguishable from lossless to my ears. But I convert to flac just in case. Why would you tinker with the lp audio? Leave it flat!
An ALAC lossless file typically is 600-900kbps at variable rates. 320kbps would be 50% or less data. What are we missing?
In my main system at home, which is in a very quiet room and has electrostatic speakers, Redbook (CD) resolution sounds more open than 320 kbps when I've made the comparison. When I'm at the gym or in the car or anywhere with background noise, I can't tell the difference between 320 kbps and lossless. If someday I win the lottery and buy a Rolls Royce (old slogan: "At 60 mph, the loudest noise is the electric clock") maybe I'll be able to tell the difference on the road, too.
@Bristol411 (the OP), it would be helpful to list your hifi system components in your profile. It's a request from our host, and it helps people understand what you hear and how that may influence your opinion. It doesn't matter if your current equipment isn't as good as you would like it to be, we all started with ordinary systems and slowly built up over the years. From your other posts, I understand that you are new to HiFi, and you are wanting to learn. This community has a lot of good information and many knowledgeable and generous members. It could be possible that with your equipment the differences between mp3 and lossless may not be as noticeable as on more discriminating systems.
It has been stated allready in several posts, what is usually missing in the sound of a 320kbps mp3 vs. lossless...
Who would provide funds for such a pointless study and who would financially gain from either conclusion? There's your answer as to why it hasn't been done.
In my car a 320 mp3 sounds great, plus I can put 1000's of songs on a mini usb drive. For my home I stick with CDs or Flac files. I have old ears so I don't hear much difference unless it's a low quality mp3 like 128 or lower Fraunhofer.
I’ve not attempted it yet, but when I was looking for a man cave TT, I went with the AT120 USB, figuring I could rip some of my classic LPs for IPOD use. Prolly a project for next winter. My Amazon HD subscription is cutting into that urgency somewhat.
There’ve been threads on this forum with audio samples to test a listener’s ability to tell the file formats apart and naturally some snarky members claimed no problem, why can’t all of you do this easily. Personally I can hear the artifacts in a low bit rate Mp3 file but they disappear somewhere around 300kbps. It’s easy enough to see how much bigger the file gets when you successively go to 320, FLAC, and .wav. If you’re burning a Cdr, though, what reason would you have for simply using only .wav regardless of what your ears tell you? I can see where if you’re maniacally trying to save space on a storage drive, or let’s say if your Tesla refuses to play anything but Mp3 files… Good is relative and depends on the listener and what they can hear or believe they hear. Objectively the file sizes are much different.
If you're in a stereo forum it probably means that you care enough about sound to want a quality source. The biggest reason to rip to FLAC instead of just to an MP3 is that you will never have to rip that vinyl or CD again. 99.9% of the work is in the effort it will take you to do the rip. If you want mp3 later, then convert the file late.
I don't know how well those who say it's the same can hear, but the difference between mp3 vs (good) cd file can be heard on a good audio system even from "another room". Confirmed in practice many times!
Recently, I extracted a song from an ISO image of one of my CDs to .wav (using the PowerISO program) and sent it to a friend (Internet). Then I converted that same .wav song to a .flac file. I also sent him that version of the same song. My friend is not particularly computer literate, but he is an old and experienced audiophile. Later he called me on the phone and said: I don't know what you did with the second version of the song, but the first version (.wav) sounds much better: more details, bigger space/stage, even more dynamics. I also have a strong opinion that .wav sounds better than .flac, but I am also aware of the fact that many people, unfortunately, do not hear the difference.
I have done blind tests between FLAC and MP3 at various bitrates with several genres of music, using several different high quality headphones and amplification. There's an ABX comparator for Foobar that is really good for this. It automatically tracks whether or not you correctly identify if the randomly selected sample (the X) matches either the A or the B source file. You can go back and forth between the three as many times as you like before making a choice. For this test to be valid, the MP3 must be generated from the identical master file as the FLAC, otherwise you're just comparing different masterings, not the different file formats. With 320kbps MP3, I can only reliably distinguish between the FLAC and the MP3 for less than 50% of the recordings, and I have to listen really closely. (My success rate depends on the specific recording.) With MP3 at any lower bitrate, I can easily distinguish between the FLAC and MP3 nearly 100% of the time.
I got to this test without knowing it, so I can conclude there is a difference. Over the past few years I have loaded wav files onto a Brennan and stored the music in FLAC. Last year I had loaded some wav files from Bandcamp onto a jump drive and then moved those files to the Brennan. Little did I know, my son was using the same jump drive to store music that he acquired from somewhere but were mp3 files. When the Brennan uploaded the jump drive, it took all the files. While the playing the Brennan in random mode, I heard some music that sounded canny but not awful. I checked to the Brennan to see what album this music was taken from and saw the mp3 file notice. I played a few more of the mp3 files and compared them to the FLAC and there was a noticeable quality difference coming through the speakers. I have detected that if I listen to music via earbuds, the difference between mp3 and FLAC is negligible. However, there is a quality difference when played on good speakers.
Why would this statistical analysis be the only thing you believe? Why would you not believe another person concerning what they said they hear? This is a werid confirmation bias game you are playing where you don't believe what others can hear only because it has not been scientifically proven through analysis methods you prefer....at which point you would still be unable to hear the things you don't believe because your hearing is not acute enough to decipher the subtlties at this time anyway. There are valid hearing studies that have proven some individuals do possess hearing abilities outside the average range of human hearing....basically 20Hz - 20KHz. There are also valid studies showing some have the ability to regognize very subtle differences in frequency, tone, decible levels and other portions of hearing. Searching the web for such data is easy, thus making your position even more dubious because the very proof you base your premise on is already available as proof against your argument...even if it is not specifically boiled down to reflect the audio format focus being discussed here. With all that said, I find it okay that you just don't want to believe these hearing differences are real because....it's your choice. When it comes to these detail issues within the audio world I find it best to expirment and determine your personal level of ability and live with that, while allowing others to express what they experience and take it at face value. In the end it won't alter what I can, and can not, hear hear anyway so why get all negative and pushy about it?
I accidentally performed a blind digital resolution test this weekend with Cambridge Audio Edge NQ. There was a firmware update this week which upped Tidal Connect max resolution to 24bit / 192kHz. I was playing a Motown song based “radio” and certain songs jumped out as being “richer” each time, when I then looked on the iPad, these were all above the CD resolution of the others. I mentioned this on an facebook group and some idiot linked me into a Google search to the article that there can be no perceived difference! Was this in the belief that I would take online information over a fact I had physically verified?
MP3 has an advantage over the other audio codecs: It is playable on just about any devices that can play digital audio files. I can take the same MP3 files and play them on my digital audio player, in my car, on my game system, and on my computer. With other formats (including AAC, FLAC, ALAC, and WMA) this may not be the case. It's similar to CD where any device that can play a CD-sized optical disc can play CDs. As far as sound quality, I did a blind ABXY test using Foobar 2000. I used my normal headphones (I think it was a pair of Koss PortaPros) and using the same songs I compared a WAV, an MP3 encoded at 320kbs CBR using LAME encoding, and an MP3 encoded at the highest quality VBR using LAME encoding. The test results were that I couldn't really tell the difference between any of them. I might have heard a slight difference at times but I couldn't say which was better. A factor in this is that I did a informal test of my hearing (by listening to an audio file that plays all of the sounds from 20hz to 20,000khs and noting when I could no longer hear any sound) and found that my hearing cut off at around 13khz. I think that when you are younger it is easier to tell the difference, but as you age and your hearing changes the difference is less and less noticeable. Plus there is the matter of the equipment you use. Ear buds won't sound as good as on-the-ear and over-the-ear headphones. This brings forth a comment from The New Book of Rock Lists by Dave Marsh and James Bernard, where they state that vinyl might sound better than digital...if you have $10,000 (in 1994 dollars) to spend for equipment, but for those less blessed with money CD was an improvement. My view is that MP3s are good as a portable format as long as you encode them at a high bitrate. Even though encoding that way will require more storage space, it is still far less than with a FLAC file (where it encodes in the 600kbs range).
@Colin M....You gotta understand your ears are lying to you. They have a concerted effort to deceive your mind into hearing things that are not real. Be careful my friend, for your ears are out to get you. On a more serious note, this is exactly what I am talking about in terms of hearing what you hear, and letting the rest float by. If you hear the difference, you hear the difference...and if you don't, it's okay too. This reminds me of when someone tries to serve you food you don't like. Then they go into the spiel about how this tastes good and you should try it, you will like it. Oh, okay...I guess I was wrong the last ten times I tried this and did not like it one bit.....My taste buds were wrong, they were deceiving me....it will be good this time since you said so. Same goes for hearing the difference.....right up until you are told you can't hear that difference, even though you clearly did hear the difference.
Lossy codecs are good these days. I could hear a very slight difference between moderate bit rate (sub-100kbps) AAC, it was mostly in cymbals (little squishy sounding, not as crisp), but I had to really strain myself to hear it. I just go with lossless for the peace of mind and knowing there's absolutely no loss, but I probably wouldn't be able to hear the difference between 320kbps MP3 and lossless, even with really good gear.
