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ABX Test of 320kbps VS FLAC - Results - Page 3

post #31 of 64
4/10/10 at 4:59pm
thanks chef! i can tell the difference between lossless and mp3 direct from ipods but once i amp it i can't tell the difference anymore. so i guess sometimes it makes a difference sometimes it doesn't. and since i can afford the space for lossless now, i'll get whatever i can in lossless, and keep whatever mp3 files i have that i can't get lossless for. no biggie =)
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post #32 of 64
4/10/10 at 5:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by krmathis View Post
WAV (the audio file format) can contain lossy audio, like MP3, GSM, and others. While FLAC is always 100% lossless to the source.
That doesn't make sense. You can encode the data of an mp3 file as wave or flac (actually, people who do that deserve to be punished) and there's no difference. The format cannot dictate the source to be lossless.


And it should strike you like lightning that the sentence "WAV is even more lossless than FLAC" can only be a joke.
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post #33 of 64
4/10/10 at 6:18pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by xnor View Post
That doesn't make sense. You can encode the data of an mp3 file as wave or flac (actually, people who do that deserve to be punished) and there's no difference. The format cannot dictate the source to be lossless.
Does not make sense?
WAV is an audio container (not a codec). It can contain both lossy encoded audio data (like MP3 and GSM) or uncompressed audio data (like PCM). So if the WAV file is lossy or not all depend on the encoder user or not used on the audio data stored within it.

FLAC on the other hand always encode the input audio stream without any data loss.

Do not believe me? Please read:
WAV - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Free Lossless Audio Codec - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quote:
And it should strike you like lightning that the sentence "WAV is even more lossless than FLAC" can only be a joke.
Sure! Cause it makes no sense at all...
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post #34 of 64
4/10/10 at 6:48pm
Afaik, WAV is used commonly for PCM data only (and I was talking about the encoding) in which case it's not an apples / oranges comparison like it is in the case of comparing WAV as a container with FLAC.

And any way, it doesn't matter if I take an mp3 and encode it into PCM WAV or "embed" it directly into a WAV file because I can also encode the same mp3 with FLAC.

Clearly this is a semantics thingy. By saying "FLAC is always 100% lossless to the source" we're talking about the encoding, which you cannot compare to WAV as container format.
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post #35 of 64
4/11/10 at 1:29am
Quote:
the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio in the linear pulse code modulation (LPCM) format. The standard audio file format for CDs, for example, is LPCM-encoded, containing two channels of 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits per sample. Since LPCM uses an uncompressed storage method which keeps all the samples of an audio track, professional users or audio experts may use the WAV format for maximum audio quality.
WAV (with LPCM) is what people editing and working with audio use because it runs natively and thus is easy to work with. It's also about two or three times as big as FLAC files. When you run a program like EAC, it extracts the PCM files from the CD as WAV, and then if you chosen to, transcodes to a compressed format, such as FLAC or MP3.

The joke was that it's completely ludicrous to use for regular listening, because the files are gigantic and don't support meta-data, afaik. The idea is that for some reason people think bigger, more annoying files = higher quality, so introducing people to uncompressed music on head-fi sounds like a great experiment to see how dumb people get. Every player supports WAV, so it might seem like a dream come true to some people
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post #36 of 64
4/11/10 at 1:49am
You should tell them that adding 200mb of (redundant) zero-byte padding to the header of the WAV file will give the DAC a chance to "calm down" before playing the audio, and that it results in audio nirvana.

Do it for the children.
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post #37 of 64
4/11/10 at 3:07am
I do what I can to get lossless files, but I am usually satisfied with VBR V2 and up.

320 may be almost as good as lossless, but with terabyte hard drives and 5Mbit+ Internet, why would you compress music at all (except for portables)
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post #38 of 64
4/11/10 at 4:15am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazy*Carl View Post
320 may be almost as good as lossless, but with terabyte hard drives and 5Mbit+ Internet, why would you compress music at all (except for portables)
Because the lossless world has not (and likely will not ever) standardized on a format that is supported by all portables, all desktop players, and all hardware devices. MP3 works almost everywhere on almost every device and almost every player. The same cannot be said of any of the lossless formats (FLAC, ALAC, WMA Lossless, etc).

Until the lossless world gets its act together and supports interoperability and broad support it will remain far more convenient to just use MP3. The audio geeks will do lossless, but regular people are going to continue to use MP3 for the convenience of having it just work.
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post #39 of 64
4/11/10 at 4:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crazy*Carl View Post
320 may be almost as good as lossless, but with terabyte hard drives and 5Mbit+ Internet, why would you compress music at all (except for portables)
To add features not present in the non-compressed audio formats, like full support for metadata (tags) and artwork (album art).
Plus the fact that you can use compression to save space without loosing audio data, as long as you use lossless compression (like FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, ..).
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post #40 of 64
4/13/10 at 4:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ham Sandwich View Post
Because the lossless world has not (and likely will not ever) standardized on a format that is supported by all portables, all desktop players, and all hardware devices. MP3 works almost everywhere on almost every device and almost every player. The same cannot be said of any of the lossless formats (FLAC, ALAC, WMA Lossless, etc).

Until the lossless world gets its act together and supports interoperability and broad support it will remain far more convenient to just use MP3. The audio geeks will do lossless, but regular people are going to continue to use MP3 for the convenience of having it just work.
It's true that lossless is not standardized; it's also true that MP3s "just work" on a very wide variety of devices. But I chose my Clip+ in part because it does play FLACs, and FLAC support seems to me to be turning up on more and more devices. Given that it is free and encoders are widely available, I feel pretty secure with the format. More secure, in any event, than I would be with a proprietary format that could disappear from the marketplace (ATRAC, anyone?)
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post #41 of 64
4/13/10 at 7:14pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by krmathis View Post
To add features not present in the non-compressed audio formats, like full support for metadata (tags) and artwork (album art).
Plus the fact that you can use compression to save space without loosing audio data, as long as you use lossless compression (like FLAC, ALAC, WavPack, ..).
Sorry, I said it wrong. What I meant to say is why would you not go with lossless (since FLAC and ALAC are still compressed)
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post #42 of 64
4/18/10 at 3:31pm
Wow interesting. And thanks a lot for putting so much time and effort into your studies. If I knew of a great audio converter I would use it and convert my FLAC files to 320kbs :/
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post #43 of 64
4/18/10 at 4:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Berlioz View Post

...... Even with Symphony No.1, I was focusing on the music so ****ing hard, to the point where it wasn't even enjoyable anymore........
Get write up Berlioz. I know what you mean about getting fed up trying to hear differences. I have found if I just chill and go for the overall 'feeling' of the music, rather than trying to listen for tiny differences, it is easier and I have been more accurate in picking out the differences.
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post #44 of 64
4/18/10 at 4:24pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by jinp6301 View Post
You might want to try this with a better source. With the headphone jack off my laptop, I only get around 50% correct. With a high end dac, I can get about 90+% right most of the time

^based on previous tests I've done
And you know that 90% is not statistically significant, or in other words you were not able to reliably tell one from the other, right?
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post #45 of 64
4/18/10 at 5:01pm
first of all,thanks to the op for all the efforts invested in this test.
I think that most portable players these days do support some kind of lossless format. I never did a direct comparison of mp3 vs flac (or any other lossless format) but since i got into this hobby a few years ago,it was always lossless for me, cd's on my home system and flac on my portable.
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