I can’t at all lol. I have Edifier S2000MKIII speakers and Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones.
Yes, but only if A-B-ing. But the more I listen to lossless, the more I hear.
And it slowly builds a deeper landscape.
Same, and only on one pair of speakers and a few sets of headphones. I can’t tell on AirPod Pros or in my car; where I listen to 99% of things overall.
I still go with flac because I’m stupid and stubborn.
Only in how much space the songs take up
Let me share one of the best explanations of digital audio recording ever produced:
D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org)
The premise of the video is to address the common “stairstepping” misconception about digital audio:
Monty at Xiph presents a well thought out and explained, real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit-depth, and dither on real audio equipment using both modern digital analysis and vintage analog bench equipment.
But Monty goes further into explaining how bit depth affects the stored audio information and playback:
This is a video about the digital vs analog audio quality debate. It explains, with examples, why analog audio within the accepted limits of human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz) can be reproduced with perfect fidelity using a 44.1 kHz 16 Bit digital signal.
For street cred, xiph.org is the group that created the Ogg Vorbis and FLAC audio codecs - they know a little about this topic.
I recommend watching the entire demonstration. You will understand your audio files and equipment very differently.
Some years ago we were making a test with my friends, and for me: 128kbps to 300, lossless or cd audio - easy
128 to 192, 300 to cd, etc- only one of my friend could easily say, I was right in like 60% cases, but it was hard, so it’s basically negligible in real life when you really listen to music.
Yes, we did have a good setup - not audiophile level, but quite decent stuffMy experience was the same. Especially when you’re in your 30s or older, the degredation is real.
The range is falling for some people, for some it’s ok I can still hear really high pitches in my 43, I could hear an ultrasound rat spooker that was installed in a supermarket bakery isle (so it was kind of a “me spooker”, because the pitch is really annoying.
But speaking of listening to the music - you still can analyze the whole range, so I’m not sure it really degrades with age. I am still really picky about my headphones and speakers :)
Really? It depends on the quality of the equipment, but 128kbps sounds like absolute trash to me.
I’ve been to weddings where they’ve played a recording of Pachelbel’s Canon or whatever during the service that was clearly 128kbps mp3, and it sounded absolutely atrocious.
But yeah, when you get above 192, it gets harder to tell.
Most of my listening is through Bluetooth earbuds, and the bandwidth on those would crimp any kind of quality from lossless files. 320k is good enough for me.
I found once I hit 192kbits I couldnt tell any difference between it and any higher quality. Altho that is from testing over 15+ years ago, so probably not valid anymore but minor details.
Similar to when YouTube first started doing 50/60 FPS videos. I could easily tell when something was either 50 or 60fps. Now not so much.
Absolutely not. With my experience using similar prosumer grade gear, I cannot tell the difference between 128 and lossless. My ears just do not work well enough. I doubt that even top-of-the-line audiophile grade gear would make a difference to me, but I may be wrong.
Tried a long time ago with my sound guy when my ears were younger. Couldn’t tell between setting between 200 & 320 kbps mp3, but the change for FLAC could be heard on some types of music. The most noticeable change I found was on second bad vilbel from Autechre’s tri repetae++
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zappj-P0-HE
On some tracks (classical music, brickwall compressed rock, heavily mastered pop) nothing could be noticed (but the signals are simpler).
I’m by no means an audiophile, or a music nerd. I enabled lossless on Spotify, plugged in my headset to my laptop via usb-c, picked a random song I’ve listened to a lot, and I heard details in the song, that I’ve never heard before. Excitedly picked another song I knew well and I could not hear any difference at all.
But since then, I’m always connecting my headset to my laptop via cable instead if Bluetooth, and have the settings set to lossless. I feel like I get less “tired” or saturated by the music, when I it’s on lossless
Yes, I can. I can even here a difference between CD quality and Hi-Res. The jump from MP3 and lossless is bigger in terms of quality however. It’s the artifacts in MP3 that I here. Once I heard it, I couldn’t unhere it. OPUS, AAC 320, and AC3 are the only lossy codecs I can stand listening to. I used to listen to CD’s as a teen and thought they sounded better than the 256 AAC rips I did in iTunes. Later on I realized it wasn’t just my imagination.
Depends on the music too, a lot of genres don’t really suffer from compression that much.
And I need to listen real careful, the differences are so miniscule that I get used to them almost immediately.
Yes. But it’s got to be in a quiet room with decent speakers or headphones/headset. It’s in higher pitched singing or cymbals I notice it the most. The genre of music also makes a difference.
It becomes more apparent when listening via Bluetooth because lossless is only made lossy once. Starting with lossy and then using the compression on Bluetooth audio multiplies the flaws.
And I find I have more fatigue when listening to lossy compression. It’s subtly harder to hear.
320k VBR, highest quality can actualy go higher bitrate when called for… so no.
Been using those settings for decades.
320k VBR, highest quality can actualy go higher bitrate when called for
Can you provide a citation for that? According to my understanding, 320 kbps is the highest the codec can go, a 320k VBR file might drop to a lower bitrate when appropriate but as far as I’m aware it will never exceed 320k.
It’s been probably like a decade (or longer. Shit) since my private music tracker days, but I know back then that V0 was the highest quality level for variable bitrate. Maybe that’s what they meant?
Not sure if it ever went above 320 though in that case
I can’t tell the difference in anything above 192Kbps, and even if I could I’m usually listening to music in my car anyways, so it’s a moot point.
Maybe. Most people, including myself, use some brand of wireless buds, lossless is irrelevant. Convenience > high quality when you want entertainment.
I have 450k mp3s in 320k, I can’t hear the difference even on nicer bose and audio technica headsets. Most people couldn’t pass a quiz to pick the 320k vs 128k.
