[maverickronin]

So why don't you demonstrate that you can actually hear all of these allegedly obvious differences?
 
Put up or shut up.
 
Stop trolling...

 

[cjl]

  I can spot lossy vs lossless everytime, it's always in the cymbals, MP3 esp 128 just can't reproduce them cleanly.
 
Ask anyone who has spent serious time in a recording studio. If you know what instruments are meant to sound like 
it's not hard to spot.
 
It's not blatantly easy either, but even on PC speakers with a bit of concentration it's quite obvious.To me anyway.

I agree - 128kbps MP3 is fairly obvious, especially in the higher frequencies. However, LAME 320CBR or -V0 is a different story. Any differences are extremely subtle, and usually require a fast-switched comparison of specific short sections to be able to tell.

 

[mironathetin]

Repost of Bigshot's challenge

http://www.vintageip.com/test/abbado.m4a

my player doesn't play Apple stuff. Do you have flac?

 

[bigshot]

Krismusic, I have a stack of samples in different orders and I randomize the names of the files so people can't compare notes. If anyone wants a file to take the test, they can PM me and let me know if they want ALAC or FLAC and I will send it to them privately.

 

[bigshot]

  inkjet printed art

 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giclée

 

[krismusic]

When being "adequate" is all you demand from your music, there's MP3.

That's not actually what I said. I said that no one would claim that 128kbps is adequate.
I use Spotify Premium. It claims to be 320. I don't know but what I do know is that Spotify has enhanced my listening immeasurably.
To have a vast library of music with me at all times is little short of miraculous to me. Whatever SQ they are delivering is fine by me. More than adequate. Verging on wonderful.
Take the challenge FFB. You may prove your point.
For the record, instant coffee? Bleugh!

 

[mironathetin]

Repost of Bigshot's challenge

http://www.vintageip.com/test/abbado.m4a

 
I took the challenge. Bigshot has send a different flac to me and I listened first through my Cowon i10, but then through my 17 inch Macbook (last gen) , because there it was easier to set markers and compare subsections.
To listen, I used Sennheiser ie7. They are famous for rolled off treble. A simple, nonsophisticated setup.
 
In three listening rounds I first tried to find the best and the worst group and then tried to detail within these groups.
 
I think best is 10 > (8 > 9). The brackets mean, I cannot distinguish between 8 and 9. 8 better than 9 is a guess.
The worst are 6 < 3 < 4 < 1 
In the middle remain 2 > (5,7). I cannot say which is better than the other. Even to put 2 on top is more a guess.
 
So finally, this is my result from best to worst: 10, (8,9), 2, (5,7), 1, 4, 3, 6
 
I publish this openly. Bigshot, feel free to add your comments.
 
 
The main things I compared were indeed cymbals, sparkle of trumpets, the clarinet and the flutes also helped. It seems to be more in the subtle overtones and the naturalness of the sound. I couldn't find much use for the choral section though.

 

[FFBookman]

  So why don't you demonstrate that you can actually hear all of these allegedly obvious differences?
 
Put up or shut up.
 
Stop trolling...

Blah blah I put up or shut up whenever I mix my own music and various sample rates and whenever I review the sessions at different qualities and dithers when my mastering engineer delivers them back to me.  I have been moving resolutions up and down for 20 years now, it's no mystery. It's you MP3 defenders that are stuck in some time warp to 1996.
 
Whether or not I "pass or fail" some A/B test of someone else's music I really don't care. If you've followed anything I've posted you would know my primary issue is with these tests in the first place. They are made to trick because our ears can't review quality in serial order like that.  Our ears don't naturally try to detect resolution and digital artifacts, and our ears most definitely don't compare stereo programs in parallel over top of each other.
 
It's very hard to capture emotion at the moment scientifically. There is no measurement for how much I like something audible, I have to apply that after the fact. Any comparison after a switching mechanism makes the current program a memory, and we don't hear memories the same as we hear in real time.
 
Smarter people than me have written on this subject before. Google "problems with A/B tests" and follow links about the problem trying to measure sound quality quantitatively if you are interested in more of my viewpoint.
 
That said, when I do the test I'll listen to the highest quality first, and learn that material as well as possible. That will inform me of the best available master and I should be able to pick it out of the bunch after I have that knowledge. 

 

[FFBookman]

   
I took the challenge. Bigshot has send a different flac to me and I listened first through my Cowon i10, but then through my 17 inch Macbook (last gen) , because there it was easier to set markers and compare subsections.
To listen, I used Sennheiser ie7. They are famous for rolled off treble. A simple, nonsophisticated setup.
 
In three listening rounds I first tried to find the best and the worst group and then tried to detail within these groups.
 
I think best is 10 > (8 > 9). The brackets mean, I cannot distinguish between 8 and 9. 8 better than 9 is a guess.
The worst are 6 < 3 < 4 < 1 
In the middle remain 2 > (5,7). I cannot say which is better than the other. Even to put 2 on top is more a guess.
 
So finally, this is my result from best to worst: 10, (8,9), 2, (5,7), 1, 4, 3, 6
 
I publish this openly. Bigshot, feel free to add your comments.
 
 
The main things I compared were indeed cymbals, sparkle of trumpets, the clarinet and the flutes also helped. It seems to be more in the subtle overtones and the naturalness of the sound. I couldn't find much use for the choral section though.

 
I'm not taking a test where I am not informed of the master quality first, and allowed to review that material.   No point in guessing which way is north in a round windowless room. 
 
I am pretty confident I can pick the master out from the degraded versions, as long as I've heard the master first and have had time to determine cues and review passages.
 
I am also pretty confident that my ears will protest this exercise and could throw some bad results in there.  A big flaw of these tests are that our ears react adversely to them and skew data. Our ears hate being tested like this and immediately feel tricked and confused. Which is why A/B tests are the gold-standard amongst low-fi lovers.

 

[Ruben123]

But.... you say you hear vast differences between 2 formats, mp3 and 24 bit wav. They are not played simultanuously are they? If you can hear differences between song.wav and song.mp3, you also can hear the same differences between song.X and song.X
Why dont you let us see that? Nothing to do with memory, you do hear differences or you do not.
 
EDIT
thought it'd be nice to share this quote on youtube's sound. or does youtube actually REALLY output/stream flac? never seen it though

  I have to say, if that FLAC channel on youtube is playing 192k AAC's  -- that was the most fooled I've ever been by an mp3.
 
I have a hard time believing what I heard that night was 192k AAC. I listened to 5 songs or so and was impressed with the clarity and lack of artifacts.  Towards the end of each song I did get a bit fatigued but I didn't hear obvious degradation.
 
This was on 2 playback systems - a new Yamaha living room receiver ($200) and a PS4. Both were powered by the Yamaha's amp and running cheap monoprice surround speakers so I don't know what to make of it. I will have try this test again.

 

[bigshot]

The first person to take the test who is brave enough to post his results publicly!
 
Quote:

  So finally, this is my result from best to worst: 10, (8,9), 2, (5,7), 1, 4, 3, 6

 
From your ranking of best to worst...
 
aac256, (aiff, aac320), frau320, (lame320, frau256), aac192, lame256, frau192, lame192
 
That's the best anyone has done so far. Congratulations! My analysis of your ranking is that you are pretty good at picking the 192s out, but at 256, it starts turning into pretty much a random dispersion. I'm betting the top half all sounded pretty much the same to you. There after the middle of the pack, it starts getting more more accurate and you pick all three 192s at the bottom.
 
From my experience, the perfect answer of best to worst would be...
 
aiff, aac320 (aac256, lame320), (lame256, Frau320), (frau256, aac192), lame192, frau192
 
Your results are pretty close to my own. My own point of transparency is somewhere around AAC256 and LAME320. Frau320 is *almost* transparent to me, but I found one sample that artifacts at that codec/rate.
 
Good job!

 

[bigshot]

 
I'm not taking a test where I am not informed of the master quality first, and allowed to review that material.

 
You knew that up front and agreed to the test in PM on March 31st. I think you know what your results would be and you just don't want to lose face.
 
I'll give you a tip I learned long ago... It's better to find out that you are wrong and admit it than it is to be wrong and never allow yourself to admit it. One way, you can learn from your mistakes. They other way, you never learn.

 

[bigshot]

The highest that YouTube will record sound is AAC256. If you upload in HD, YouTube will automatically encode your audio in AAC256. YouTube does not support FLAC. The FLACs on YouTube have been converted to AAC256.

 

[mironathetin]

Thanks for the laurels, Bigshot.
 
Personally, I am a bit disappointed, because I was pretty sure about the best sounding piece, which turned out to be aac256, not aiff. But on the other hand, I am happy that I came close to nailing at least the lowest bitrate. 
Lesson learned: aac256 is very hard to distinguish from uncompressed.
Interesting test. Impossible to prepare that at home (because, if you know the encoding...), so thank you for your effort.
Please everybody note the low-fi hardware that I used. It seems to be possible to hear differences even through intermediate quality portable earphones and iPods.
 
Quote:

The first person to take the test who is brave enough to post his results publicly!

 
No problem. I am a scientist. With every new paper, we risk public embarrassment. Not a big deal. For a bit more understanding, (some) scientists go the extra mile

.

 

[castleofargh]

  I'm not taking a test where I am not informed of the master quality first, and allowed to review that material. 

all is said.
 
 
on one hand you claim the differences to be so obvious that we're all really stupid to pretend like they're small and hard to notice.
on the other hand you're so insecure that you need to know 100% of the test before taking it.
seems pretty conclusive to me.
 
anyway those blind tests are for ourselves, they don't prove that another guy might not ear more differences, or simply cheat to prove a point. but I happen to be the one listening to my music, so my own ability to tell the difference seems like a good start to decide what I should use.

 
 
@bigshot, 10codecs are already a lot, but it would give a better idea to have a few doubles to reduce the probability of guessing. maybe just one or 2 as not to make the test too heavy and tiresome.