Mythbusters I-Need volunteers- blind test b/w lossless/320/256/192 kbps MP3

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I am willing to be a scap goat, errrr......... mean, to be a Volunteer. Hope you will treat me with an apple pie atleast. :D
 
hmm, so finally ended up doing a ABX test on a Dire Straits track, Private Investigations

The FLAC came courtesy Rahul...

a best quality (thats what foobar terms the highest rip bit rate as , which is around 275kbps vbr) mp3 was ripped off the flac using LAME on foobar

The playback was done on foobar running in ASIO mode

Now even though the results may convey otherwise, hunting for differences was pure torture..

the song sounded equally beautiful on both high bit rate mp3 and the flac and it took a double shot of cognac and repeated listening to start noticing the extremely subtle difference :P

The results



My conclusion: Like I said, even though the results may seem loaded in favor of FLACs, finding the difference was almost torturous

give me a high bit rate mp3 tomorrow and I have absolutely no reason to complain

BTW Rahul is going to try out the same tomorrow and I am hoping to hear him post back
 
superczar said:
a best quality (thats what foobar terms the highest rip bit rate as , which is around 275kbps vbr) mp3 was ripped off the flac using LAME on foobar
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Could you paste the lame details for this high-quality mp3 using lametag

its cmd line, just copy+paste the ouput here
 
My conclusion: Like I said, even though the results may seem loaded in favor of FLACs, finding the difference was almost torturous
give me a high bit rate mp3 tomorrow and I have absolutely no reason to complain
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Thats correct. :) Though, at higher volumes, the difference might be more apparent. But normally we wouldn't be listening at high volumes, so thats irrelevent.
Also, whether the song is in mp3 or flac cannot tell you anything by itself. Many of the flacs which I've downloaded sound worse than 128kbps mp3s :O So it depends a lot on the source, the ripper, and the encoder used.
 
Those flacs you have might be transocded from a lossy source !!

only way to have a better picture is to get a program like adobe audition and look at the frequency spectral for the file. if you dont see any cutoffs above 19khz chances are you have a good rip.

If its mp3 or other lossy you will see a line already cutting off all frequencies above 16khz if they used low settings or an older mp3 encoder.
 
superczar said:
Waiting for you to post your results Rahul :P
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here are they :P

Untitleda.jpg


it was damn tough really ...... listened to the both songs at least 5-6 times .... still i was not able to make out the difference ..... all the lows seems same to me, its highs where i can make out the difference and that too not possible on low volumes after 25-30% volume its clear .....

after 192kbps it gets very very close to flac but again all depends upon the source ..... anyways bought a CD after 1-2 years i guess and its totally worth it ..... recording is awesome :D
 
Those flacs you have might be transocded from a lossy source !!

only way to have a better picture is to get a program like adobe audition and look at the frequency spectral for the file. if you dont see any cutoffs above 19khz chances are you have a good rip.

If its mp3 or other lossy you will see a line already cutting off all frequencies above 16khz if they used low settings or an older mp3 encoder.

Reply With Quote
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the flac i used was ripped from a cd rahul bought last week

and you are right, a flac of the same song we got last week from hd-bits iirc sounds infinitely worse than the mp3/flac from rahul's cd

I suspect even a 128kbps ripped from this cd would sound better than the first flac we tried (last week)

as for frequency analysis, i don't believe in that.....

listening to music is not like a benchmarking program...numbers and graphs don't tell a story there! :P

as for the tag, here you go

Tag revision: 0

Encoder string: LAME

Version string: 3.97

Quality: 97 (V0 and q3)

Encoding method: vbr new / vbr mtrh

Lowpass: 19,500Hz

RG track peak: <not stored>

RG track gain: <not stored>

RG album gain: <not stored>

nspsytune: yes

nssafejoint: yes

nogap continued: no

nogap continuation: no

ATH type: 4

Bitrate: minimal (-b) bitrate 32

Encoder delay: 576 samples

Padded at end: 1,308 samples

Noise shaping: 1

Stereo mode: joint

Unwise settings: no

Source sample freq: 44.1kHz

MP3Gain change: <none>

Preset: V0: preset extreme (fast mode)

Surround info: none

Music length: 12,076,932 bytes

Music CRC: 1F98

Actual Music CRC: 1F98

Info tag CRC: 13C1

Actual InfoTag CRC: 13C1
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PS: I had bought a CD of Love over Gold back in 2001 so I guess I was within my legal rights to get a backup copy of the flac
 
superczar said:
as for frequency analysis, i don't believe in that.....
listening to music is not like a benchmarking program...numbers and graphs don't tell a story there! :P
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Helps when you dont have a known reliable source :)

Throws a little more light on the problem...and once you get used to it, it can help prove the converse as well, that the copy you have is indeed most likely to be the orginal even tho your ears might tell you otherwise.

There was a mix i was listening to once and the artist had used older more obscure tracks and for quite a while i thought it was just a transcode until i asked a friend (who had the cd) to do an vbr mp3 for me. Surprise, surprise, the filesizes were very comparable, proving to me that the source was not transcoded after all. This is another advantage of vbr, only uses what it needs, so if your filesize comes out shorter than expected, you become suspicious, but the spectral here worked to clarify the doubt.

This is not an exact science, its just another piece in the puzzle. Easier to agree on a picture than what it sounds like, not to mention much faster.

The other ..really.. remote posiblilty is that the flac you got was a promo and had not been mastered yet. Unless of course the album has been out for many yrs now :)

So what did i learn from your experiments, thats its possible to maybe distinguish flac from mp3..but only at high volumes..interesting. I wonder if thats because the way mp3 works is it zeroes in on the dominant sounds and excludes the others to a certain extent, so at a higher volume those excluded sounds become apparent *only* in a lossless copy ?

So when u say you can tell the difference, is this the reason, that you can hear those softer sounds more clearly in the flac whilst they might be slightly muffled in the mp3.

I'd imagine as far as the dominant sounds are concerned the difference is minimal, since as you say if volume is less than 30% then hard to tell the diff.
 
Helps when you dont have a known reliable source

Throws a little more light on the problem...and once you get used to it, it can help prove the converse as well, that the copy you have is indeed most likely to be the orginal even tho your ears might tell you otherwise.

There was a mix i was listening to once and the artist had used older more obscure tracks and for quite a while i thought it was just a transcode until i asked a friend (who had the cd) to do an vbr mp3 for me. Surprise, surprise, the filesizes were very comparable, proving to me that the source was not transcoded after all. This is another advantage of vbr, only uses what it needs, so if your filesize comes out shorter than expected, you become suspicious, but the spectral here worked to clarify the doubt.

This is not an exact science, its just another piece in the puzzle. Easier to agree on a picture than what it sounds like, not to mention much faster.
Click to expand...

agreed!

So what did i learn from your experiments, thats its possible to maybe distinguish flac from mp3..but only at high volumes..interesting. I wonder if thats because the way mp3 works is it zeroes in on the dominant sounds and excludes the others to a certain extent, so at a higher volume those excluded sounds become apparent *only* in a lossless copy ?

So when u say you can tell the difference, is this the reason, that you can hear those softer sounds more clearly in the flac whilst they might be slightly muffled in the mp3.

I'd imagine as far as the dominant sounds are concerned the difference is minimal, since as you say if volume is less than 30% then hard to tell the diff.
Click to expand...

my take on the experiment is though it's theoretically possible to distinguish between high bit rate MP3s and FLACs with well tuned and decently setup equipment, the whole idea remains just that...an experiment

Whats the point of wincing and concentrating hard when you are listening to music , not writing an exam... :P

for all practical purposes, high bit rate MP3s remain an excellent choice given their easy availability (yeesh...:ashamed:) and relatively mucho lower space requirements...
 
Just look at those scores 7/8 & 8/9 !!!..for a dbl blind test..:O

..that means 9 times out 10 you could tell the diff between the flac & the v0 mp3.

..but it was real hard..yeah right :P
 
it took multiple tries to reach this kind of a score :ashamed:

also, like I said, it was so terribly boring and difficult that it felt almost like writing a calculus exam
 
but overall i will say flac is better ..... not as better as the size increases from MP3 to flac but if u don't have issue with size of the file ..... IMO keep the flac :)

in the end it all depends upon the source :)
 
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