Can you hear the difference between lossless and lossy audio?

[Bob]

(Now that was a trolling question.  )

https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9237727/How_big_is_the_sound_of_music_

[zezhyrule]

Uh...

Yeah. 

This is like that "Can you see the difference between 480i and 1080p hd?" question. I still meet people who swear that they can tell no difference at all.

[lloyd_cdb]

I still meet people who swear that they can tell no difference at all.

They probably have used car sale commercials on repeat. Fully understandable.

[oxy60]

Yes, of course. I think any musician should be able to tell the difference. If you send the outputs through a good system and switch between them you will hear it. You should also be able to hear the difference between 16 and 24 bit wav.

[iansinclair]

Silly question!  Indeed one can -- or at least I can.  And I am 71, although my hearing is still pretty good (although I have a good bit of loss above 15 khz).  Can I tell the difference between vinyl and a CD?  Well... that's more difficult, since most of my vinyl is older, and has been played a good bit.  So at least for my vinyl and the exact same recording on a CD, I'd have to say that there, no, I can't.

But the same recording from CD or vinyl vs. a compressed format?  Oh yes indeed I can.  No problem.

Now of course I'm playing the stuff on a pretty decent, if somewhat elderly, sound system, not an iPod through $50 earphones on a subway...

[Bob]

What about higher? 16/44.1 vs. above that?

[ted]

I tend to answer no, but perhaps I am just easily satisfied through years of listening to less than optimal quality. My hearing is pretty acute for my age, so I expect my brain, through habit, just shuts out what it doesn't want to hear.

[iansinclair]

The whole thing -- from the "scientific" standpoint (what you can see on an oscilloscope, for instance) -- is pretty esoteric.  I well remember some of the first CDs I heard -- some 30 or 40 years ago now -- and they were pretty awful.  Could best be described as harsh.  Theoretically, the 44.1 khz sampling rate should be able to reproduce up to 22 khz -- which should be ample.  The problem arises with random noise affecting the precise instant sampled.  I'm not sure, honestly, how the more up to date analog to digital converters operate, but my suspicion is that they have a very sharp roll off filter (12 db per octave or greater) for high frequencies.  Digital to analog converters would, of necessity, have the same sort of thing.  In principle, a higher sampling rate would reproduce higher frequencies, subject to the same filtering concept.  Most high fidelity equipment won't reproduce much above say 20 khz anyway -- but some very strange intermodulation things at much lower frequencies can happen on the way to the speaker, if the higher frequencies aren't filtered out at the source.

What I have heard with lossy files, however, is different -- and is almost always a perceived loss in low frequency response, oddly enough, at least to my ears.  More evident in organ music, perhaps, although also noticeable (to me) in piano music -- but the first time I noticed it was in listening to an .mp3 squashed recording of Wagner's Rheingold; the opening contrabass E flats (about 21 hz fundamental) just weren't right at all.  And honestly I have no idea why this should be the case -- but now that I've noticed it, it's pretty consistent.

[iansinclair]

I might add, for the numbers obsessed, that the lowest fundamental on a piano (all A=440 here) is 27.5 hz, and the highest is 4,186 hz.  For an organ, if you have a 16' stop it's 32.7 for the low; if there is a 32', is 16.3 hz (a few organs -- mostly English -- have a 64' stop, which rumbles along at 8.1 hz...).  The highest for an organ, if you have a 4' stop it's the same as a piano; if there is a 2' it's 8372 hz and a 1' would be 16744.

It's no wonder that our instrument (and organs) are among the hardest musical instruments of all to reproduce accurately!  Or even acceptably...

[oxy60]

To improve the quality of your mp3 recordings try to fatten them up a little. If you make them too thin you will get really noticeable losses. It's about 10/1 from wav to mp3 so who cares if your fatter compression becomes 10/1.1 or so?

What "iTunes" sells is almost criminal, because it is so thin. Designed I think to be played over those tiny speakers in a docking station...

I just upgraded my router and noticed a huge improvement on youtube sound. I'm now running at 65Mbps wireless and listening over very good earphones.


 

[maul]

Oxy60, do you like oxycodone?

[oxy60]

Oxy60, do you like oxycodone?

Isn't that only used by junkies these days? Can't be for anybody else because it tears up the body. Are you taking it? For what?

[Bob]

I suppose it's really the recording/playback options, isn't it?  You could take something with very high resolution and 'loss' it back to CD quality.    Or record 'fully' at a crappy quality level.

What's the cut off for quality that it becomes noticeable?  256kbps sounds crappy to me.  I think it's 320kbps on my iPod for mp3's that sounds ok.  It wouldn't record any higher.

[oxy60]

Can you get your iPad into a different mode, like wav? OK, it's 10 megs a minute but then you can decide which compression engine to use. All mp3 conversion software programs are not equal. It took some investigation with trial and error to get it right. My recorder can do both at the same time. However there is no need because I always need to adjust levels to maximize bandwidth use before converting to mp3.

[maul]

My question has definitely been answered. Ignorance indeed. 

[nystul]

The question is too broad in my opinion.  If the compression is aggressive enough darn near anyone can tell the difference.  At higher quality levels it is practically impossible unless there is something particular about the material that is tough to encode.  Anyone who claims to tell the difference at -v0 or 320 kb/s based on being a musician or audiophile probably hasn't actually tried it without already knowing the answer.

The vinyl vs. CD question is more pointless because it is usually a case where the CD was remastered with different EQ etc.  So they will intentionally sound completely different.  I would have to say vinyl is a more limited format than CD audio in terms of what it is actually capable of.  Unfortunately with so much music the goal is to make it as loud and bright as possible.  So what CD is capable of is largely irrelevant.

[oxy60]

Let me just add a few points to what I said before.

The sound recording capability built into phones and iPads is very convenient, along with the video. But you should check first what you'll get when you're done. Do you have a destination in mind?

Wouldn't it be logical to get as much detail during the recording and decide later what to loose?

For a decent recording you should have some basic controls, like input level, etc. And leave the controls alone once you start.

[slane]

Yes on my Hifi (are they still called Hifis these days?) but I wouldn't think so on my phone with earbuds.

I am also getting impatient with old analog recordings. Its all jolly well to wax lyrical about Schnabel's performance but I would much rather have a modern recording, with clear, clean sound and separated instruments, from a *good* label, than be distracted by a muddy old recording.
In the bad old days conductors had a lot of say over the sound of their recordings too and that wasn't always sensible.

[oxy60]

Yes on my Hifi (are they still called Hifis these days?) but I wouldn't think so on my phone with earbuds.

I am also getting impatient with old analog recordings. Its all jolly well to wax lyrical about Schnabel's performance but I would much rather have a modern recording, with clear, clean sound and separated instruments, from a *good* label, than be distracted by a muddy old recording.
In the bad old days conductors had a lot of say over the sound of their recordings too and that wasn't always sensible.

I'm glad there are people out there who still remember analog recordings. What we all forget is what it took to get the maximum quality out of them. I kept my belt driven turntable with a special motor and a pick-up arm scale for the day I want to transfer some vinyl to digital. (It will probably take a half day to set it up.)