Can you hear the difference?

[martin manning]

Anybody else see this? An opportunity to test your golden ears...
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2 ... g-randomly

[sliberty]

Just goes to prove I have been right all along. My ears are so shot, there is no reason for me to bother with loss-less formats like WAV, FLAC, etc. I only got 1 right out of 6, and frankly, I was guessing - I could not hear the difference at all.

[Phil_S]

3/6. Curiously, I went with the crowd on the Coldplay tune. I want to say the 3 I got were obvious. The others were not and pretty much a random pick. I am thinking they should survey for age and they'll find the failure rate rises with age. I am reasonably sure it is an established fact that the high end drops out with age.

[martin manning]

Your listening gear is important as the article states. I used in-ear phones plugged directly into the computer's audio out. I find headphones to be the easiest way to get good sound when trying to listen to the finer points.

[Leo_Gnardo]

I am reasonably sure it is an established fact that the high end drops out with age.

True 'nuff, the fancy name is presbycusis. "Ancient ears." For vision, loss of focus starting generally in your 40's, presbyopia. And if you have those two already, and you're a Presbyterian, you win the hat trick.

[deeder]

4/6 with head phones, but I think that my Marshall’s are slowly destroying my ears, damned…

[jam-mill]

3/6. Curiously, I went with the crowd on the Coldplay tune. I want to say the 3 I got were obvious. The others were not and pretty much a random pick. I am thinking they should survey for age and they'll find the failure rate rises with age. I am reasonably sure it is an established fact that the high end drops out with age.

I got the exact same result and concur with age being a significant factor.

I suffer from middle-aged and high-SPL induced (played in a relatively loud jazz-fusion band 20+ years ago) hearing loss; makes hearing high frequency (in the formants and siblants range) a bit difficult.

[xtian]

True 'nuff, the fancy name is presbycusis. "Ancient ears." For vision, loss of focus starting generally in your 40's, presbyopia. And if you have those two already, and you're a Presbyterian, you win the hat trick.

I win. Though I am a Left Coast Presbyterian, and a liberal one at that.

[Ron Worley]

I flew C-130s for 20+ years. I'm not even gonna try this.

[Structo]

I seemed to pick 320 kbps every time.

I have ratty PC speakers.

Usually I stream the mp3's to my AV receiver.

About radio quality.

[tony hunt]

2/6. Mostly I was picking the 320kbps too.
I only got the classical and Neil Young ones correct.

Listened through highly abused Etymotic in ear buds from my construction sites on a mac air in a hotel room at 5:30 am.

Personally, I find the special effects and compression built into modern playback systems more of an issue than the quality of the original audio.


Make your own DIY ear tests with your sweep generator!

[vibratoking]

3/6 with ADAM-A7s and HD24 DACs. That chamber orchestra was one horrible recording. I've had pretty severe tinnitus for 30 or more years...thank you Eric Johnson.

Thanks, Martin. That was fun.

[ampmike]

Never used ear protection trimming new homes for 30 yrs.I ran the miter saw every 15 sec or more. 9 hrs a day not including routers and saws i nicknamed screamers Im shot

[Ken Moon]

I was into DVD-Audio when it first came out (96KHz/24-bit), and I still think the Eagles Hotel California DVD-A is a masterpiece, but you have to have the right system to hear how much better it is than the WAV version, and the hi-resolution audio must have never been down-converted to 44/16 during the creation process if you want to hear any difference.

I keep this disc to show off the music system in my car, and it would blow your minds to hear how much better it sounds than the CD version.

Since many of my over-25-years-old CDs are starting too go bad because the metal layer is flaking off, I've been spendingg some spare time ripping them to both WAV and MP3 formats and saving on an external USB drive.

I've been using Exact Audio copy V.10 beta 6 from 9 April 2015 for ripping (free at exactaudiocopy.de) for ripping, and LAME 3.99.5 for compressing, using EAC's default of "hi quality" and 192k bit rate.

This gives about a 7-to-1 compression ratio, using variable bit rate compression, and is virtually indistihguishable from the WAV version through most systems.

I think codecs like LAME have improved to the point that they killed any impetus towards higher bit rate/sampling frequency storage of music.

The ironic thing is the growing popularity of vinyl records, whose fidelity problems were one of the main drivers towards the CD format so many years ago.

[deeder]

I flew C-130s for 20+ years. I'm not even gonna try this.

I know what you mean.