[bigshot]

  Legitimate positive results aren't unheard of.

 
Never underestimate the power of the desire to cheat. Making yourself seem superhuman is a big temptation for some personalities. Blind testing is great. But unsupervised and unmonitored tests aren't necessarily any more authentic than sighted subjective ones.
 
I did a test on another forum where I took two clips, one of choral music and one of orchestral music. I bounced it out to a half dozen different codec/bitrates including lossless and then edited it together and upped it to lossless. A bunch of people had a very hard time identifying anything over mp3 128. One guy who had made a big deal about how he had golden ears identified a specific time in the track that he said was lossless. He was correct, but he had missed the choral piece that came before which was also lossless. (They were paired in every sample with a big space between, so if he had listened, he should have known that the beginning of the choral piece was the spot, not the beginning of the orchestral.) I asked him if he had just looked at the frequency spectrum with an audio program and chosen the only place in the track with high frequency info at the edge of human hearing. Choral music doesn't have any sound up that high, so it was invisible searching for the lossless that way. He promptly shut up and disappeared and hasn't been seen since. Later, I found a post where he said that he had an Mbox setup and sent the output of his computer through a pair of severely band limited wireless guitar amps to a set of computer speakers. Good luck hearing anything with that.
 
Can anyone cite an independently verified listening result where someone is able to consistently ID lossless vs AAC 320. I don't believe anyone can do it.
 
And for me, "small enough" is anything I can't hear.

 

[mikeaj]

Yeah, you can even do some cheats for identifying when running say foobar ABX, but I wouldn't think everybody posting ABX logs is cheating. Could be naive though.
 
Also I'd be more surprised of positive results on say high-bitrate AAC than high-bitrate mp3. There's enough people passing through here with positive ABX logs for 320 kbps modern LAME mp3 (and claims of no positive ID on some tracks but yes for others) that I believe that, for example.
 
"Small enough" for me is also stuff I can't hear, but I don't think I can confidently define that level for other people.

 

[bigshot]

I figure if a human can't hear it, other people can't either.

 

[StanD]

  Yeah, you can even do some cheats for identifying when running say foobar ABX, but I wouldn't think everybody posting ABX logs is cheating. Could be naive though.
 
Also I'd be more surprised of positive results on say high-bitrate AAC than high-bitrate mp3. There's enough people passing through here with positive ABX logs for 320 kbps modern LAME mp3 (and claims of no positive ID on some tracks but yes for others) that I believe that, for example.
 
"Small enough" for me is also stuff I can't hear, but I don't think I can confidently define that level for other people.

One brief visit to Capital Hill at Washington DC will cure any niativity.

 

[adupree]

  I figure if a human can't hear it, other people can't either.

Not all humans hear the same way, just like vision is different. 

 

[StanD]

  Not all humans hear the same way, just like vision is different. 

So what happened to null balancing the test files?

 

[MemoryLeak]

  Yeah, you can even do some cheats for identifying when running say foobar ABX, but I wouldn't think everybody posting ABX logs is cheating. Could be naive though.
 
Also I'd be more surprised of positive results on say high-bitrate AAC than high-bitrate mp3. There's enough people passing through here with positive ABX logs for 320 kbps modern LAME mp3 (and claims of no positive ID on some tracks but yes for others) that I believe that, for example.
 
"Small enough" for me is also stuff I can't hear, but I don't think I can confidently define that level for other people.

You would think that is enough for anyone to go CD quality on their entire library. I fully agree, most recordings most will not hear any difference. But there are those tracks where you can, whether or not the studio engineer that mastered the track intended for you to hear the difference or not. Personally, I do not like mixed libraries, but that is just me.
 
Obviously music portability comes in to play when deciding on library format. But then again, we are on an audiophile forum right? 

 

[adupree]

  So what happened to null balancing the test files?

By level matching the files it will be balanced, I ran it in a DAW not a analog console.

 

[bigshot]

  Not all humans hear the same way, just like vision is different. 

 
find me someone who can see through a wall.

 

[bigshot]

  You would think that is enough for anyone to go CD quality on their entire library. I fully agree, most recordings most will not hear any difference. But there are those tracks where you can, whether or not the studio engineer that mastered the track intended for you to hear the difference or not.

 
Can you point me to a track that AAC 256 VBR can't render audibly transparent? Because I have been looking for years for one and haven't found any.

 

[StanD]

  So what happened to null balancing the test files?

 
 

  By level matching the files it will be balanced, I ran it in a DAW not a analog console.

You can only find the difference by null balancing the two files, Only then you will get the true differences. If you haven't done that you are wasting everyone's time. You could do that many ways on a PC, Linux or a MAC, no excuses dude.

 

[adupree]

   
 
You can only find the difference by null balancing the two files, Only then you will get the true differences. If you haven't done that you are wasting everyone's time. You could do that many ways on a PC, Linux or a MAC, no excuses dude.

Please enlighten me why you say this and how you would do it.

 

[adupree]

   
find me someone who can see through a wall.

No need to get testy. People see colors differently. What about the boy in China that can see in pitch black?

 

[StanD]

   
 
You can only find the difference by null balancing the two files, Only then you will get the true differences. If you haven't done that you are wasting everyone's time. You could do that many ways on a PC, Linux or a MAC, no excuses dude.

 
 

  Please enlighten me why you say this and how you would do it.

Windows or Linux have a sound mixers. You can also do this with DAW software. Please understand that if you don't null balance then there is no value to what you've tried to do. Just one last step and you'd get meaningful results. Since both files, even if out of phase are not going to be exactly equal in volume. By balancing them for a minimum output you will be able to hear the true differences. Go for it. You can probably find some simple free DAW software or a free trial version to use for this.
Also if you can hear something very low in volume you may not be able to perceive this while the entire music is playing in its full glory. Try to get the null balance going.

 

[adupree]

   
 
Windows or Linux have a sound mixers. You can also do this with DAW software. Please understand that if you don't null balance then there is no value to what you've tried to do. Just one last step and you'd get meaningful results. Since both files, even if out of phase are not going to be exactly equal in volume. By balancing them for a minimum output you will be able to hear the true differences. Go for it. You can probably find some simple free DAW software or a free trial version to use for this.
Also if you can hear something very low in volume you may not be able to perceive this while the entire music is playing in its full glory. Try to get the null balance going.

I did this in both Logic Pro and Pro Tools 10 which I use daily for work. I did match them in levels(volume) when the level is then changed the cancelation then decreases. So how is this not null balancing?