Theres a lossy vs lossless comparison thing on Tidal and if you pass you get 14 days free trial. I got 5/5 the two times I did the test. Not sure how reliable it is after all it is a marketing tool for Tidal to get you to subscribe.
Do they say exactly what format and bitrate the lossy format was? Because Harman did something similar to market their "Clari-Fi" which claims to put back what the lossy codec removes. And how they did it should be criminal.
First, although the subject was lossy
data compression, throughout their video, they kept conflating this with
dynamic range compression, which are two
completely different things.
But where they committed an absolute fraud was when the did a "comparison." This was done both audibly and graphically, by playing a snippet of music that played for a little while and was labeled "Uncompressed Audio," and then at a point in the clip they switch to "Compressed Audio." Here's a still capture from the video:
The "Compressed Audio" starts where you see it highlighted in yellow.
Looking at this, two things are evident. First, what they're showing is
not the result of lossy
data compression, but of
dynamic range compression. Even if you apply data compression down to 96kbps and even lower, at the scale displayed here, the waveforms look identical. This is very severe dynamic range compression, if not hard limiting.
Second, not only has it been dynamic range compressed, they significantly reduced the
level. Normally, if you just did dynamic range compression, the "Compressed Audio" portion would sound
louder than the "Uncompressed Audio" (dynamic range compression is what is at the root of the "loudness wars"). So they had to resort to reducing the level so that it will sound muted by comparison. You can easily hear a difference even over an iPhone speaker.
Again, a fraud such as this should be criminal.
se
