[FLCL]

Curious and wanted to get some others opinions on this. Taking a laptop, a Macbook Pro for instance, with everything default; including the built in speakers you are listening to the music through. Will lossless really make a very noticeable difference over mp3 (320kbs) or is it just the placebo effect? I'm thinking it's more of a placebo effect rather than hearing such a grand difference that would get an average person hooked on lossless. Thoughts/opinions?

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Quote:

Curious and wanted to get some others opinions on this. Taking a laptop, a Macbook Pro for instance, with everything default; including the built in speakers you are listening to the music through. Will lossless really make a very noticeable difference over mp3 (320kbs) or is it just the placebo effect? I'm thinking it's more of a placebo effect rather than hearing such a grand difference that would get an average person hooked on lossless. Thoughts/opinions?

i agree with you, mp3 files cut out the frequencies people can't hear so hearing a difference between 320kbps and flac is all going to be based on placebo effects. personally if i file is 192kbps or more i am usually satisfied.
 

 

[FLCL]

Well I'm not saying that lossless does not make a difference on quality equipment where the difference can be heard. I'm just saying that on a built in laptop speakers, hearing a difference between lossless and 320kps mp3 isn't going to be heard, and if it is it's going to be very slight. I see it almost as if someone were to have just waxed their car to let the shine show and then poured mud on it and expect to see it nice and pretty (horrible analogy, best I could think of at the moment lol)

 

[Satellite_6]

It must be the placebo effect at that level. 

 

[Currawong]

Someone produced two WAV files, one from a lossless source and the other first having been compressed to 128k MP3 first.  People were invited to attempt to tell which was which.  My memory of it was that on a high-end system it was easy, but those who attempted to tell just listening out of an iPod had considerable difficulty.  Considering how much the LAME codec, especially when VBR is used, has improved and considering I own a MacBook Pro, I can assure you that it'd be highly unlikely you'd be able to discern whether a file was lossless or not using the built-in speakers.

 

[Mkubota1]

Quote:

Well I'm not saying that lossless does not make a difference on quality equipment where the difference can be heard. I'm just saying that on a built in laptop speakers, hearing a difference between lossless and 320kps mp3 isn't going to be heard, and if it is it's going to be very slight. I see it almost as if someone were to have just waxed their car to let the shine show and then poured mud on it and expect to see it nice and pretty (horrible analogy, best I could think of at the moment lol)

Definitely won't hear a difference on the bottom end. 

  If you're a Mac user, try this for fun: 
 
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Audio/ABXer.shtml
 
I hope that's not 'illegal' outside of the the Sound Science forum.  If it is, then I would just say listen to both mp3 and WAV and decide- although it's hard to eliminate said placebo effect without some sort of assistance.

 

[elwappo99]

I'd definitely agree. When I was using $200 worth of audio equipment, plus headphones, I wasn't readily able to spot the difference in two files of different bit rates. I would really have to listen to detail, and even then, it was really song dependent.

Now with a Reference 1, I can usually spot the difference. Still, there are many songs that are too poorly recorded for me to spot much of a difference. Some other stuff, I can really easily pick out the difference.

I always get a little confused by people talking about how vital it is to have a lossless collection, when they don't have the equipment at a level I think it is justified. Of course, my findings, YMMV.

 

[Buyer no 1]

I guess it will be very difficult to hear the difference between loseless and 320 kbs on built in speakers in a MacPro. It might even be difficult to hear the difference between loseless and 192 kbs, or perhaps even lower resolution. Fortunately, it shouild be quite easy for you to try the different types, and decide for your self

 

[ABXG]

I have a bunch of files in MP3 of various bitrates as well as a bunch of lossless FLAC files. I use a combination of an upsampler and a plugin called DFX. With these two plugins I can't tell the difference between the MP3 and FLAC files. If I disable these plugins the MP3 files tend to feel lifeless compared to the FLAC files. This might not necessarily because the files are in the MP3 format, but the MP3 files I have tend to feel lifeless as I have stated above.
 
I will say that some of my highest quality MP3 files sound just as good as my FLAC files, but for the most part I stronger prefer the FLAC files.

 

[Gatepc]

With built in speakers on my macbook pro I can tell a difference between 192KBs MP3 and lossless even with the built speakers. With my headphone setup I easily can tell 256KBs MP3 from lossless, but its pretty hard to tell 320KBs from lossless with my setup. I think if I upgraded I would be able to tell though.

 

[steve1979]

The speakers on my HP laptop are so terrible that I couldn't even tell the difference between 128kbps MP3's and FLAC!
 
With my hifi speakers I can tell there's a small difference between 320kbps MP3's and FLAC but there's not that much in it. In blind tests I guessed which was which correctly most of the time but it was pretty close and I occasionally picked the wrong one.

 

[FLCL]

Someone produced two WAV files, one from a lossless source and the other first having been compressed to 128k MP3 first.  People were invited to attempt to tell which was which.  My memory of it was that on a high-end system it was easy, but those who attempted to tell just listening out of an iPod had considerable difficulty.  Considering how much the LAME codec, especially when VBR is used, has improved and considering I own a MacBook Pro, I can assure you that it'd be highly unlikely you'd be able to discern whether a file was lossless or not using the built-in speakers.

Interesting, I was hoping to catch a macbook owner to give me their personal view on this. I know personally my laptop speakers are trash so I doubt I would be able to tell the difference at all lol. I didnt' think you could really hear the difference on the low-end. I want to subjugate myself to blind tests on my equipment now just for the fun of it

The reason I was asking is my friend who I've been trying to get into hifi audio (he seemed relatively interested) recently got his hands on some lossless and was talking about how his music library sounded like crap now. I figured it was the placebo effect, but hey, whatever gets him excited

 

[elwappo99]

Quote:

Interesting, I was hoping to catch a macbook owner to give me their personal view on this. I know personally my laptop speakers are trash so I doubt I would be able to tell the difference at all lol. I didnt' think you could really hear the difference on the low-end. I want to subjugate myself to blind tests on my equipment now just for the fun of it

The reason I was asking is my friend who I've been trying to get into hifi audio (he seemed relatively interested) recently got his hands on some lossless and was talking about how his music library sounded like crap now. I figured it was the placebo effect, but hey, whatever gets him excited

I'd recommend blind testing. It's not too hard to set-up, you just need assistance from one other person. I was genuinely surprised how much more critical of equipment I am after doing these tests.