Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
At that quality of MP3 you’d really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.
Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.
For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it’s state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.
128kbps files are roughly 90% compression from raw, so not comparable. I’ll admit that I haven’t bothered with FLAC much, but in my limited experience it generally is pretty rare to see much above 50-55% compression from raw.
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent when compressed, no matter how hard I “audio peep.” It’s not even a question.
But something “dense” like System of a Down has audible distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense, though even the extreme end is hard to notice unless you know the particular song very well.
Also… a lot of recordings kind of suck. It’s crazy to worry about tiny bits of distortion when a bit perfect master is already noisy and distorted.
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
At that quality of MP3 you’d really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.
Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.
For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it’s state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.
I think FLAC is considered lossless so the comparison should be with WAV; whereas for lossy you have MP3/Vorbis.
MP3 patents expired a while ago i think, but for the longest time i’ve used Vorbis because of that.
128kbps files are roughly 90% compression from raw, so not comparable. I’ll admit that I haven’t bothered with FLAC much, but in my limited experience it generally is pretty rare to see much above 50-55% compression from raw.
Thing is, storage isn’t at a premium anymore, so there’s no reason not to use lossless even if you can’t hear the difference.
U sure about that?
Old mp3 players used to measure space in megabytes, so yes, I’m sure of that.
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent when compressed, no matter how hard I “audio peep.” It’s not even a question.
But something “dense” like System of a Down has audible distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense, though even the extreme end is hard to notice unless you know the particular song very well.
Also… a lot of recordings kind of suck. It’s crazy to worry about tiny bits of distortion when a bit perfect master is already noisy and distorted.
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.