[soundperfection]

So I have a pretty good mobile listening setup with chord mojo+poly with a few high end iems and I discovered something strange.

It seems when I listen to modern music that has been loudness boosted and devoided of dynamic range actually sounds abit better and smoother on 320kbs mp3 than flac.

I dont know why that is but it seems cuz the dynamic range is already killed there isnt any obvious benefit to lossless quality, instead flac seems to introduce more glare and abit sharped edges.


Again im not talking about well recorded music here where lossless will have a clear advantage. Have anyone else who listened to modern music on their hifi gear also noticed this.../

 

[bigshot]

That might be a level match issue. Try racking up both, level match and then do a blind comparison to see if it sounds better, or even different to you. I bet with a controlled test, the difference disappears.

 

[HuoYuanJia]

Just an idea here, but could it be that the recording has noise (obviously it has, but I mean just barely audible noise)? Maybe it's beyond the threshold of MP3 and actual the non-useful information gets cut away because the encoder thinks it's not audible. The lossy file might just end up sounding better without the information that didn't add to realism in the first place?

 

[soundperfection]

Just an idea here, but could it be that the recording has noise (obviously it has, but I mean just barely audible noise)? Maybe it's beyond the threshold of MP3 and actual the non-useful information gets cut away because the encoder thinks it's not audible. The lossy file might just end up sounding better without the information that didn't add to realism in the first place?

ye Im starting to think so too. Its seems like the bad stuff in the recording does come out more on flac and that the mp3 doesnt bring it out as much. Similar to more high res gear tends to bring out the bad stuff in poor recodings than non hifi stuff.

 

[bigshot]

Compressed audio with a decent data rate isn't supposed to omit audible sound. Are we talking about low bitrate lossy? If you encode at a higher bitrate, it should eventually sound the same.

 

[soundperfection]

Compressed audio with a decent data rate isn't supposed to omit audible sound. Are we talking about low bitrate lossy? If you encode at a higher bitrate, it should eventually sound the same.

my mp3s are all at 320kbs so they arent superlow bitrate.. maybe the mp3 does cut out some info in the upper regestries that makes them abit softer or something compared to flac

 

[bigshot]

Not likely. Have you done a level matched blind comparison?

 

[soundperfection]

Not likely. Have you done a level matched blind comparison?

No just compared same songs mp3 vs flac and the flac always came out more siblent.

 

[bigshot]

At 320 the MP3 should sound identical to the FLAC. At least with human ears. Could your encoder be funky? If not, I’d suspect you should try doing a controlled listening test.

 

[HuoYuanJia]

There's many possibilities that the encoder could change the information. Especially if the FLAC has a higher sampling rate than than the MP3. Sometimes it's configurable how the encoder handles the cut-off frequency and the slope. Also, DAC filters can have an audible influence - though if the MP3 encoder did not resample, this shouldn't matter (both are PCM). Could also be your source. Care to share more details? Perhaps even upload snippets and we can analyze the data and chime in with impressions.

 

[bigshot]

At 320, there shouldn’t be a roll off. Are you using LAME?

 

[71 dB]

mp3 joint stereo encoding reducing channel difference?