I'm using my beyerdynamic dt990 pro and fiio e6 amp and I can't get past silver mp3 artifacts. They said look or tremolo effects or high-hats. Searched on google but didn't get much help. Any advice?
Hi,
For me also, this was the hardest part, I'm using Sennheisser HD280 stock and a Sound Devices HX-3 amp. I could get it all the way to 112 kbps by just hearing the artifacts (the watery chirpy sounds in the background), but above 128 kbps I couldn't hear them anymore, even if I turned the volume up. Eventually I closed my eyes and really focused on the voice, not sure how to put this into words but I found the best quality by paying extreme attention to the "edges" of the words, there is a lot less definition in the compressed version, like the "edge" of the sound is blurry, the mid-bass blends blurrily into the noise floor at 128kbps, as opposed to the crisp definition in the higher quality reference. My guess is that it would have been much harder to spot at 160kbps. I wonder though, if the reference is a PCM wav or just another lossy compression (albeit at a higher bit rate)
I actually went through each level in about an hour, doing the basic level on an Ipad 4 with the hd280, had a little trouble with the bass extension, but everything became clear bass-wise when I plugged my headphone amp into the laptop (using the laptop's internal sound card), so I did the remaining 3 stages in this setup.
Apart from the mp3 tests, my headphones are really lacking at soundstage so stereo width gave me a bit of trouble and the timbre in the last section also required some learning.
Overall I found the tests entretaining and I feel like they will be of real use to me, I will send them to all my clients before we start mixing
About the reverberation part - I really hated that they stated that the reference was direct sound, with no reverberation. This is simply not true. The violin had a small-room reverberation to it most likely originating in the recording itself... the double-bass as well (different kind of reverb actually, a larger room), and the accordion had a large reverb to it also. The only dry sound was the rythm guitar strum, which plays an edifying strum in at about a third of the song.