Digital Music

darthed1981

RocknRollDave said:

My entire music collection is on my iPod, ripped in Apple's format, not FLAC or WAV. I can certainly tell the difference between lossy and lossless.....

Steady on there...

Maybe, MAYBE at 128kbps made with an old encoder you could successfully BLIND A/B the difference between the lossy file and the original/lossless, but even at 128kbps AAC is exceptionally good, I mean really really good.  AAC is actually far cleverer than MP3 and at 128kbps it actually cuts everything about 17khz and leaves the bits for encoding the stuff you can actually, well, hear.  MP3 is rarely quite so daring.  This is one of many reasons why some experts say AAC 128kbps is all you ever need.

If you are using 256kbps VBR AAC, the current default in itunes (I believe, it was last time I used itunes anyway) I will be very impressed if you have beaten an ABX test on that.  Very few people can.

You are (probably) basically experiencing the placebo effect.  In reality, most of us (possibly not including your good self, like I say you could have beaten an ABX test on this) if we think something is better, we hear it as better, the same as with worse.  I feel like I can hear noticeable differences between a 128kbps AAC file I used to use in the days of my 40GB ipod (stolen by some bastard when my car was being serviced) and the same file at say 320kbps LAME MP3, but even using the basic ABX tool in foobar 2000, I proved myself totally wrong.  It's actually scary.

beed84

TheBigDipper said:

@beed84 Thanks for starting this thread. I already owned a Cyrus/Mission-based CD system that lives in the lounge, but the posts have inspired me to buy a DAC/headphone amp to use with my iPhone/iPad/Macbook (storing the data on a fairly empty 2TB NAS that's attached to my network). I bought an Oppo HA-2 SE and it's really decent with all my headphones, but especially with some rather old Sennheiser HD580s. I've gone ALAC rather than FLAC, but it's all the same once the DAC gets to see the data. 

Lovely!

I'm glad to hear it. Honestly, you won't regret it. I highly recommend the Soundblaster E5; however, there are plenty of other options on the market. Cambridge Audio offer some desirable options, it just depends what your budget is, I guess. In fact here's an article and a video explaining what a headphone DAC is and the also the point of having one:

https://www.cambridgeaudio.com/blog/what-is-a-USB-DAC

Have fun!

Rocker

darthed1981 said:

RocknRollDave said:

My entire music collection is on my iPod, ripped in Apple's format, not FLAC or WAV. I can certainly tell the difference between lossy and lossless.....

Steady on there...

Maybe, MAYBE at 128kbps made with an old encoder you could successfully BLIND A/B the difference between the lossy file and the original/lossless, but even at 128kbps AAC is exceptionally good, I mean really really good.  AAC is actually far cleverer than MP3 and at 128kbps it actually cuts everything about 17khz and leaves the bits for encoding the stuff you can actually, well, hear.  MP3 is rarely quite so daring.  This is one of many reasons why some experts say AAC 128kbps is all you ever need.

If you are using 256kbps VBR AAC, the current default in itunes (I believe, it was last time I used itunes anyway) I will be very impressed if you have beaten an ABX test on that.  Very few people can.

You are (probably) basically experiencing the placebo effect.  In reality, most of us (possibly not including your good self, like I say you could have beaten an ABX test on this) if we think something is better, we hear it as better, the same as with worse.  I feel like I can hear noticeable differences between a 128kbps AAC file I used to use in the days of my 40GB ipod (stolen by some bastard when my car was being serviced) and the same file at say 320kbps LAME MP3, but even using the basic ABX tool in foobar 2000, I proved myself totally wrong.  It's actually scary.

This post MUST be an attemp to windup someone. The writer probably never heard music through a decent well setup system. If he/she did, rubbish like above would never be written.

darthed1981

Rocker said:

darthed1981 said:

RocknRollDave said:

My entire music collection is on my iPod, ripped in Apple's format, not FLAC or WAV. I can certainly tell the difference between lossy and lossless.....

Steady on there...

Maybe, MAYBE at 128kbps made with an old encoder you could successfully BLIND A/B the difference between the lossy file and the original/lossless, but even at 128kbps AAC is exceptionally good, I mean really really good.  AAC is actually far cleverer than MP3 and at 128kbps it actually cuts everything about 17khz and leaves the bits for encoding the stuff you can actually, well, hear.  MP3 is rarely quite so daring.  This is one of many reasons why some experts say AAC 128kbps is all you ever need.

If you are using 256kbps VBR AAC, the current default in itunes (I believe, it was last time I used itunes anyway) I will be very impressed if you have beaten an ABX test on that.  Very few people can.

You are (probably) basically experiencing the placebo effect.  In reality, most of us (possibly not including your good self, like I say you could have beaten an ABX test on this) if we think something is better, we hear it as better, the same as with worse.  I feel like I can hear noticeable differences between a 128kbps AAC file I used to use in the days of my 40GB ipod (stolen by some bastard when my car was being serviced) and the same file at say 320kbps LAME MP3, but even using the basic ABX tool in foobar 2000, I proved myself totally wrong.  It's actually scary.

This post MUST be an attemp to windup someone. The writer probably never heard music through a decent well setup system. If he/she did, rubbish like above would never be written.

This post MUST be an attempt to wind up someone, the writer probably has never read up on this otherwise he'd have done some research and realised hi-fi enthusiasts are regularly made to look like pillocks in properly set up ABX testing when they claim to instantly hear differences between codecs and compressed/uncompressed music, if he/she did rubbish like this would never be written...

Not that those differences cannot be heard, they can, but if you "hear it" when you expect to hear it, without a properly set-up BLIND comparison, then that is likely just the placebo effect.  

Sporky

Rocker said:

This post MUST be an attemp to windup someone. The writer probably never heard music through a decent well setup system. If he/she did, rubbish like above would never be written.

Thing is, lots of us here take audio seriously, and have done properly controlled blind tests.

You haven't, so your opinion on the matter is pretty much irrelevant.

darthed1981

FWIW - if anyone wants to do some relatively informal ABX testing, Foobar 2000 (comfortably one of the best PC audio players I've ever used) has an add-on that allows you to ABX two samples.

You need to rip the same recording at two different bit rates, or (for example) 2x compressed (for example as discussed above 128kbps AAC and 320kbps LAME MP3) and an uncompressed format like WAV (or use FLAC, same difference on playback).  Then test them all, by default if I remember correctly you have 20 goes.  Randomly guessing would by normal probability mean you get it right 10 times, so you need to get 17 or 18 our of 20, ideally 20, before it starts looking reasonable.

It is very important to ensure the rips have the same volume level, as elsewise would be a dead giveaway.

I found the results genuinely surprising, although I could get a reasonable percentage on the odd one or two tracks, a lot seemed basically identical.  This process can be routed through however expensive a system as one likes of course.  On no sample could I reliably tell the difference between hi-res MP3 and CD.  

I suspect you could if you train your ears to look for certain artefacts, but that was not the purpose of my personal testing.  My AAC 128kbps files were made years ago with an older encoder as well, the newer encoders are likely transparent even at 128kbps (for AAC anyway, it generally produces transparent quality at lower bitrates than MP3).

There are flaws with ABX testing, and a lot of hi-fi enthusiasts will argue their multi-thousand £ systems allow them to hear "atmospherics" that bounce off the walls etc.  Some may even have underground soundproofed rooms for listening so you really do have a noise floor low enough to hear some of the dynamic range of high-resolution audio without having the speakers so loud you do permanent hearing damage. 

The noise floor of even a very quiet room will be about 40db, lets assume yours is incredibly quiet at 20db, therefore to hear the entire 96db dynamic range of CD from quitest to loudest you would need to get to 116db for the loudest sounds, or like a pretty damn loud gig.  For high resolution audio you would need to be reaching a level of 160db - this can actually kill you stone dead!

Of course, expensive well set-up systems do sound bluddy fantastic, but it is unlikely really that even with such a system you can ever REALLY hear a difference between a decently encoded MP3 or AAC file and the original CD.  

As I said up-thread, none of this invalidates the pursuit of great sounding music in the home, or the possession of great quality speakers, amps or DACs.  Nor does it mean someone who prefers vinyl or CD has to chuck it all out and get Spotify.

I just find it one of the most interesting debates I've ever seen between technical/mathematical calculations and psychoacoustics, and the perceptions, beliefs and well, faith, of the hardcore hi-fi enthusiast.

It is all ultimately personal choice.  Fill your boots all, every penny you spend on high-res audio is another penny going to support the creation of great new music, so no harm, no foul!

Sporky

One of my fondest blind test memories is with the demonstration manager of a significant pro audio brand; we were running a shootout of three wildly price-differentiated speaker systems (his being the priciest). He kept blathering on about compressed audio "sucking the air out of music" so I proposed a listening test. I'd already told him that I was going to do the shootout with MP3, but I hadn't told him that I had the tracks as raw ripped WAV as well.

He was very grumpy when I played the original WAV - he launched into the tired old "yeah, no air, no dynamics" script within ten seconds of me hitting play. He hadn't spotted that my laptop was on the giant projector screen behind him - everyone else in the room could see it was uncompressed.

The irony was that his speaker system won the shootout in terms of overall sound quality - the others were good, but it was best in a proper double blind test. For a lot of the systems I design the users will be putting Youtube and Spotify through at best.

thomasross20

Digital convenience is too great. Though it does remove some of the experience. I remember buying an album was a big thing and I'd sit on my bed and listen to the music while reading the notes, and do only that. These days music is something on in the background while I do something else, which is a shame.

Your DAC will just give higher resolution, it's probably a sigma Delta architecture - those also have the benefit of shaping the noise floor so that a lot of noise in the audio band is shifted to higher frequencies and is then filtered out. 

It's mainly the "experience" that I miss. 

Wazmeister

beed84 said:

english_bob said:

I ripped all my CDs to FLAC last year (yes, I know CD is digital too) and cleared a load of space in the living room. Much more convenient, and it's got me listening to stuff I'd forgotten I had. 

I've not tried FLAC yet as I've not really had the reason to do so. Is it any different to Apple Lossles? Either way, what're the main benefits of it?

Having been a HUGE Apple fan for years, and now having the difficulty with iTunes (and losing a load of songs Id uploaded) I took the step this year to buy a Brennan B2 - check them out.

And Ive started uploading all my CDs now 'for life'... the B2 then converts them to FLAC, and the sound difference is absolutely incredible on my Astel and Kern player.

I've hear stuff on songs Ive been playing all my life that Ive never heard before...

So, yes I've come to appreciate digital in an even newer way the year

richardhomer

For anyone ripping CDs to FLAC, it's well worth investing in db Poweramp software that makes bit-perfect copies by rereading the disc muiltiple times. Aparently this means less error-correction when replaying the file.

Comparing Tidal lossless to a CD rip on my NAS drive of the same song, there's a significant difference using my Naim streamer.

english_bob

richardhomer said:

For anyone ripping CDs to FLAC, it's well worth investing in db Poweramp software that makes bit-perfect copies by rereading the disc muiltiple times. Aparently this means less error-correction when replaying the file.

Comparing Tidal lossless to a CD rip on my NAS drive of the same song, there's a significant difference using my Naim streamer.

I used a ripper called Exact Audio Copy (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) which makes similar promises.

Rocker

I listen to low bit rate videos on the Web when trying to learn a song, there are dozens of instruction sites that do this job. Not listening for musical enjoyment so the poor sound hardly matters.

But when listening to music, it stands to reason that the more information stored in the file the better. Modern DACs can make sense of this additional information, information that was recorded for a purpose.

Some people get hung up on details like ABX, repeatability, Placebo effect and specifications and so on. By all means go down that road if that is your bent. I prefer to sit in front of my stereo and enjoy the music.

Sporky

Rocker said: 

Some people get hung up on details like ABX, repeatability, Placebo effect and specifications and so on. By all means go down that road if that is your bent. I prefer to sit in front of my stereo and enjoy the music.

Wouldn't you enjoy the music more if it was being reproduced at its best? You've claimed as much in the past, but you show little interest in following up on the claims.

darthed1981

Rocker said:

But when listening to music, it stands to reason that the more information stored in the file the better. Modern DACs can make sense of this additional information, information that was recorded for a purpose.

So you make a technical claim there... but...

Rocker said:

Some people get hung up on details like ABX, repeatability, Placebo effect and specifications and so on. By all means go down that road if that is your bent. I prefer to sit in front of my stereo and enjoy the music.

...reject the only things that could potentially support said technical claim?

The reality is, if you enjoy the music, however you buy/rip/stream/pop the needle on it, then great!  Fair play to you and every extra penny you spend goes to support people in the industry, which is also great.

But why weigh in on the technical posts if you don't care about the technical side?

It is an extremely old debate online, and we are not going to resolve it here, but none of the technical niceties of encoding, bit rates or compression discussed above actually affect the quality of reproduction or pleasure you get from your stereo in your own head, really only your head does that.

Even if it is the placebo effect that makes you feel that an SACD sounds better than the exact same recording on CD, or ripped as a 192kbps MP3, that doesn't invalidate your own personal pleasure.  The placebo effect cures people of diseases every day!

So ya know, peace out