Maybe you can tell, but you certainly can't hear.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.
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Yep.
I just read an article about a blind trial between a present day ~3000$ hifi-set and an equally expensive (value adjusted, of course ) and perfectly restored late 70's hifi-set. Among the listeners were a couple of audiophiles, musicians, journalists and one pro audio engineer.
They listened to 5 pre-selected songs in FLAC via a top-of-the-line DAC plus one song of their own choosing.
Everyone else gave 7 or 8 points to either set, but the audio engineer gave just 4 to each. Most of the time the audiophiles were unable to recognize which set was playing.
Afterwards they did an audio labratory sweep on the sets and found them basically equal in terms of sound quality, the only major difference was a drop in the 70's set mid-hi frequencies, which was theorized to be the result of reversed polarity in one of the tweeter elements. None of the participants mentioned noticing this directly, but the audio engineer did talk about "unclear higher frequencies" in some songs.
I went to school to be an audio engineer and audiophiles amuse me. While it is true that expensive speakers and FLAC and so on will make music sound better than it would on the cheapest stuff- we mix so it will sound decent on the cheapest stuff. We never mixed with you guys in mind. When I was doing it, we were keeping mp3 players in mind. These days, most music is mixed with streaming in mind.
My professor told us to take our mix out to our cars and drive around somewhere noisy and listen to it and then go and remix it after that based on what you heard.
Sure, there are exceptions. Not very many of them. Because companies want to make money from albums and they know most of the people listening to the music aren't going to be listening to lossless audio on $4000 speakers.
I find it especially amusing because, until the digital era, all the greatest music that was recorded since multitrack recording started in the 1960s was on bits of magnetic tape held together with bits of scotch tape and the engineer prayed that nothing would go wrong when it they were making the final two-track mix. It is highly unlikely that "what will this sound like on super expensive equipment?" was given consideration.
When I was in a band, we had our albums professionally recorded, mixed, and mastered, but we had a pretty decent set-up in the studio. After every practice, I'd do some rough mixing and burn us each a CD to listen to in our own cars and email MP3s for those of us who used devices. We'd take that and decide what needed to be fuller, what was getting lost, etc. and change any arrangement as necessary. Of course we might do more layers in the album itself than we could do live (well, without sampling machines going constantly and whatnot), but we still wanted to make sure we had at least the basics of where we thought people would listen to us.
Audiophiles are flat earthers for music.
They really obsessed over something and need to feel superior about it. They're harmless at least.
Unless of course you're googling about speakers for a TV, in which case you're about to get some terrible advice from some middle aged dude who's really pissed about soundbars existing.
soundbars existing is annoying, why would someone spend more for something with fewer wires?
As a middle aged man who bought a sound bar once, planned obsolescence sucks.
What's the equivalent of people that buy ultra high-end stuff to trick themselves into getting high and orgasming from "binaural beats"?
Christopher Nolan certainly does not mix his movies for the cheap stuff...
I think people get a little silly about it when you get above maybe 192kbps, but there 1000% is a huge difference between a 128kbps mp3 and a 192kbps mp3, and I would take a blind test every day of the week to prove it.
128kbps mp3s sound like aural garbage. It's like when you go to a wedding, and you can tell that the DJ just downloaded "Pachelbel's Canon" from KaZaa because when played over the PA, it sounds like someone farting into a microphone.
Are we talking about movies or music? Movies are mixed to sound good in theatres and then they are later remixed to sound good on at least cheap surround systems, but, again, they aren't generally doing it thinking about the people who spent $4000 on their system. And, again, the chief concern outside of the theater these days is audio for streaming.
I am not denying that a $4000 home audio system will sound better than a $100 one just by virtue of at least some of the components not being cheap Chinese crap, but I doubt even Christopher Nolan is ensuring his Blu-ray releases (or whatever) sound best on expensive audiophile systems. There's a point of diminishing returns here.
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Some editions are edited with audiophiles in mind but youre correct, most aren't and since about 30ish years the mixing is made to be less requiring.
Audiophiles huh
This is why I only listen to audio formats that add information to the music, not degrade it by taking away.
Don't. Don't give them ideas. TruMotion like frame interpolation is fucked up enough.
But digital audio is interpolated. The DAC turns a digital signal, which is just a series of numbers, into a continuous analog waveform.
Persistence of vision and deliberate frame rates interpolate, too, and AI interpolation fucked it up. If you were to do the same thing to music, you'd take two points of the wave and interpolate linearly - which will definitely break the wave. All for the sake of "more information".
Like you say, it's already working fine. I'm asking them not to put AI anywhere near it, please.
converts mp3 to flac
Kalm
::: print vinyl from flac :::
lol. They can’t hear the difference even with the most expensive equipment. The resultant signal from decompressing a FLAC phase cancels with the original signal if you invert it. Meaning they are indeed 100% identical. Lossless, dare I say.
Literally all it does as a file format is merge data that is identical in the left and right channel, so as not to store that information twice. You can see this for yourself by trying to compress tracks that have totally different/identical L and R channels, and seeing how much they compress if at all
This is like trying to explain to a SovCit, why they need to have a license.
You're wasting your time.
No, it’s like explaining FLAC to anyone who happens to be curious about it after seeing this screen shot and wondering how something can be both compressed and lossless at the same time. Many people appreciate this type of information being accessible easily in the comments
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Audiophiles are just a victim of their own smugness. Human ears are pitiful to start with, but then the neural processing that goes on is even worse. We can't hear shit and what we hear we can't even all remember or recognize. And that's at a young age, at age 30 the hearing is already deteriorating. Hearing has never been a strong point for humans, when our fight or flight response kicks in, the processing of audio is the first thing to go. If we didn't use it for communication as much, we might have lost it even further. Even our sense of smell is better and compared to other animals our sense of smell is very weak. Audiophiles consider themselves special because they "honed" their skills and can hear stuff others can't. But you can't hone what isn't there, there's no fixing crappy hardware. In a double blind experiment almost all of them would fail even identifying a regular old Apple Music AAC file all the normies listen to compared to a lossless version. And when they buy expensive shit, that distorts the music in a way they like, they convince themselves that is the true version and all other versions must be wrong.
But hey, on the spectrum of all the bad and or dumb shit humans do, being someone with too much money who enjoys music isn't half bad.
You can quite famously (and easily) fool any "audiophile" into thinking a given system sounds better than another -- or after some mysterious modification -- by doing nothing but turning the volume up one notch.
This is easily demonstrable, and repeatable. And a tactic often exploited in oldschool hi-fi shops, back in the days when you were expected to walk into a high street store and be greeted by a salesperson rather than just order whateverthehell off of the internet.
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Yup, 100% all of this. It turns out that audiophiles can’t tell the difference between a “best-in-class” cable and a coat hanger: https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathanger-test-23553/
Every time I see audiophile stuff it makes my expetactions of them dig a deeper and deeper hole.
Why is it always some snublord jerking themselves off over they 25k setup, like their ears are blessed by Zeus themselves.
If your pre amplifier isn't laid on cones carved from the purest quartz inlaid with gold, are you even really an audiophile ?
I find sapphire to be quite superior to quartz, actually.
It has to be monocrystalline sapphire that was grown in a very specific model of vat from the Soviet era. Others just don't sound the same.
Well, yeah. Duh.
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I once realized there are audiophile speaker cables that cost hundreds of euros per meter because they are "burnt in" with some kind of awesome machine that pushes a specific amperage through it for a specific amount of time. I'm sure they improve the sound quality tremendously.
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Actually, you see, it is not the original bits, yeah? They get compressed, and that removes bits, and then they are uncompressed, and bits are added. Those are RE-CONS-TI-TUTED bits. It's like reconstituted tomato juice, the taste of the original water is gone forever! And you can hear that. With music, I mean, not with the tomato juice. Like, who says it's even the same kind of bits, the same quality? You can so hear the difference. You want a double blind study? Well that's just silly, if it's double blind, it means its not blind, because the two blinds cancel each others out. Basic science, duh!
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That's why I've always said using Optical/Toslink etc. is a mistake. Sending music with light just means you'll hear shade in your music.
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Technically, an issue with lossy formats is if they get saved, moved, and/or re-encoded then there is a risk of media degrading over time, over iterations. So you could potentially hear the difference.
But FLAC is lossless.
If the user likes the MP3 sound better then clearly they actually enjoy the lossy hum and buzz of compressed audio. I'm sure they would enjoy Vinyl.
Yes, transcoding. At least re-encoding, I'm not sure if simply moving the file degrades it...
All of this talk is making me miss what.cd. You'd get the boot if you uploaded a transcode
What.cd was the greatest collection of obscure music the planet has probably ever seen. I dont even particularly care about lossless codecs, I was fine with 320kb/s mp3 as it was more convenient but even their mp3 rips were way better than other places, and you knew everything would be tagged and sorted correctly. And they had EVERYTHING you could think of, it was wild.
Yeah, I am still doing everything I can to keep my collection backed up on external HDDs (probably should upload it somewhere). Not only obscure stuff, but incredible vinyl (and in some cases Reel-to-Reel) rips of classic albums.
And yes, you absolutely could tell the difference.
I would usually get v0, but would sometimes pick up FLAC, especially if it was one of the staff recs where you'd get upload credits but no download hit... Pumped that ratio up.
I ended up buying more things because of the interviews they had on what than ever before, and it kickstarted my bandcamp collection.
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