Audiophiles huh
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.
converts mp3 to flac
Kalm
::: print vinyl from flac :::
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.
ChatGP3 Ultra Lossless
Strictly speaking, as soon as an analog signal is quantized into digital samples there is loss, both in the amplitude domain (a value of infinite precision is turned into a value that must fit in a specific number of bits, hence of finited precision) and on the time domain (digitalization samples the analog input at specific time intervals, whilst the analog input itself is a continuous wave).
That said, whether that is noticeable if the sampling rate and bits per sample are high enough is a whole different thing.
Ultra high frequency sounds might be missing or mangled at a 44.7 kHz sampling rather (a pretty standard one and used in CDs) but that should only be noticeable to people who can hear sounds above 22.35kHz (who are rare since people usually only hear sounds up to around 20kHz, the oldest the person the worse it gets) and maybe a sharp ear can spot the error in sampling at 24 bit, even though its miniscule (1/2^24 of the sampling range assuming the sampling has a linear distribution of values) but its quite unlikely.
That said, some kinds of trickery and processing used to make “more sound” (in the sense of how most people perceive the sound quality rather than strictly measured in Phsysics terms) fit in fewer bits or fewer samples per second in a way that most people don’t notice might be noticeable for some people.
Remember most of what we use now is anchored in work done way back when every byte counted, so a lot of the choices were dictated by things like “fit an LP as unencoded audio files - quite luterallyplain PCM, same as in Wav files - on the available data space of a CD” so it’s not going to be ultra high quality fit for the people at the upper ends of human sound perception.
All this to say that FLAC encoded audio files do have losses versus analog, not because of the encoding itself but because Analog to Digital conversion is by its own nature a process were precision is lost even if done without any extra audio or data handling process that might distort the audio samples even further, plus generally the whole thing is done at sampling rates and data precision’s fit for the average human rather than people at the upper end of the sound perception range.
When we talk about lossless in the audio encoding world, we aren’t comparing directly with the analog wave, as there will always be loss when storing an analog signal in a digital machine. Lossless formats are compared to pure PCM, which is the uncompressed way of representing a waveform in bits.
With audio, every step you take to transform it, capture it, move it or store it, even while working with the analog waveform, degrades it. Even by picking it up with a microphone you’re already degrading the waveform. However, generally, the official release CDs or WebDLs are considered the original, lossless, master file. Everything that manages to keep that exact waveform is lossless (FLAC, AIFF, WAV, ALAC…), and everything that distorts it further is considered lossy (MP3, AAC, OPUS…).
Additionally, a “bad transcode” (which is a transcode that involves lossy formats somewhere that isn’t the last step) is also considered lossy, for obvious reason. Transcoding FLAC to MP3 to WAV stores the exact same waveform that MP3 made, as it is the lowest common denominator, even though the audio is stored as WAV in its final form.
Transcoding between lossy formats also loses more data, even if the final lossy format can store more bits or is more accurate than the original. This is one of the main problems with lossy codecs. MP3 192kbps to MP3 320kbps will lose information, just like MP3 to AAC. That’s why, normally, we use a lossless file and transcode it to every lossy format (FLAC to MP3, then FLAC to AAC…). This way you’re not losing more than what the lossy format already loses.
My point being that unlike the misunderstanding (or maybe just mis-explanation) of many here, even a digital audio format which is technically named “lossless” still has losses compared to the analog original and there is no way around it (you can reduce the losses with a higher sampling rate and more bits per sample, but never eliminate it because the conversion to digital is a quantization of an infinite precision input).
“Losslessness” in a digital audio stream is about the integrity of the digital data itself, not about the digital audio stream being a perfect reproduction of the original soundwaves. With my mobile phone I can produce at home a 16 bit PCM @ 44.7 kHz (same quality as a CD) recording of the ambient sounds and if I store it as an uncompressed raw PCM file (or a Wav file, which is the same data plus some headers for ease of use) it’s technically deemed “lossless” whilst being a shit reproduction of the ambient sounds at my place because the capture process distorted the signal (shitty shit small microphone) and lost information (the quantization by the ADC in the mobile phone, even if it’s a good one, which is doubtful).
So maybe, just maybe, some “audiophiles” do notice the difference. I don’t really know for sure but I certainly won’t dismiss their point about the imperfect results of the end-to-process, with the argument that because after digitalization the digital audio data has been kept stored in a lossless format like FLAC or even raw PCM, then the whole thing is lossless.
One of my backgrounds is Digital Systems in Electronics Engineering, which means I also got to learn (way back in the days of CDs) how the whole process end to end works and why, so most of the comments here talking about the full end-to-end audio capture and reproduction process (which is what a non-techie “audiophile” would be commenting about) not being lossy because the digital audio data handling is “lossless”, just sounds to me like the Dunning-Krugger Effect in action.
People here are being confidently incorrect about the confident incorrection of some guy on the Internet, which is pretty ironic.
PS: Note that with high enough sampling rates and bits per sample you can make it so precise that the quantization error is smaller that the actual noise in the original analog input, which de facto is equivalent to no losses in the amplitude domain and so far into the high frequencies in the time domain that no human could possibly hear it, and if the resulting data is stored in a lossless format you could claim that the end-to-end process is lossless (well, ish - the capture of the audio itself into an analog signal itself has distortions and introduces errors, as does the reproduction at the other end), but that’s something quite different from claiming that merely because the audio data is stored in a “lossless” format it yields a signal as good as the original.
What I meant is yeah, you are right about that, but no, lossless formats aren’t called lossless because they don’t lose anything to the original, they’re called lossless because, after compressing and decompressing, you get the exact same file that you initially compressed.
Another commenter on this post explained it really well.
They’re deemed “lossless” because there are no data losses - the word actually comes from the broader domain of data handling, specifically Compression were for certain things - like images, audio and video - there are compression algorithms that lose some information (lossy) and those which don’t (lossless), for example JPEG vs PNG.
However data integrity is not at all what your average “audiophile” would be talking about when they say there are audio losses, so when commenting on what an non-techie “audiophile” wrote people here used that “losslessness” from the data domain to make claims in a context which is broader that merelly the area were the problem of data integrity applies and were it’s insuficient to disprove the claims of said “audiophile”.
By your definition, PNG isn’t lossless because it’s not an exact representation of every single photon of a picture that was taken. You’d need infinity pixels in order to be completely faithful to the “analog” thing that you’re trying to picture, in the same way you’d need infinity points to completely translate an analog wave to digital.
When you compress anything with FLAC, you will get the exact same thing you compressed out, so there is no data loss.
Of course, that wave which you compress will not be faithful to the analog thing, but that’s just a limitation of digital computers.
A PNG is indeed an imperfect representation of reality. Are you claiming that the lossness in the data domain of the compression algorithm in a PNG means its contents are a perfect representation of reality?!
(Funnilly enough, the imperfections in the data contained on a PNG are noticeable for some and the lower the “sampling rate” - i.e. number of pixels, bits per pixel - the easier it is to spot, same as audio)
As I’ve been trying to explain in my last posts, a non-Techie “audophile” when they claim FLAC is not lossless aren’t likely to be talking about it’s technical characteristics in the data domain (i.e. that data that you take out of a FLAC file is exactly the same as it goes in) but that its contents don’t sound the same as the original performance (or, most likely, a recording made via an entirelly analog pathway, such as in an LP).
Is it really that hard to grasp the concept that the word “lossless” means different things for a Technical person with a background in digital audio processing and a non-Technical person who simply compares the results of a full analog recording and reproduction pathway with those of a digital one which include a FLAC file and spots the differences?
This feels like me trying to explain to Junior Developers that the Users are indeed right and so are the Developers - they’re just reading different meanings for the same word and, no, you can’t expect non-Techie people to know the ins and outs of Technical terms and no they’re not lusers because of it. Maybe the “audiphile” was indeed wrong and hence “Confidently Incorrect”, but maybe he was just using lossless in a broader sense of “nothing lost” like a normal person does, whilst the other one was using the technical meaning of it (no data loss) so they were talking past each other - that snippet is too short to make a call on that.
So yeah, I stand by my point that this is the kind of Dunning-Krugger shit junior techies put out before they learn that most people don’t have the very same strictly defined technical terms on their minds as the junior techies do.
Not really infinite points since energy is quantized. In a crazy particle physics sense analogue data is effectively the same as digital, when resolutions match.
Fake it 'till you make it is not applicable to scientific or technical discussions.
Nice content-free slogan.
I’m not a Sound Engineer, I’m an Electronics Engineer - we’re the ones who had to find the right balance between fidelity, bit error rates, data rates and even circuit price when designing the digital audio sampling systems that capture from the analog world the digital data which the Sound Engineers use to work their magic: so I’m quite familiar with the limits of analog to digital conversion and that’s what I’m pointing out.
As it so happens I also took Compression and Cryptography in my degree and am quite familiar with where the term “lossless” comes from, especially since I took that elective at the time when the first lossy compression algorithms were starting to come out (specifically wavelet encoding as used in JPEG and MPEG) so people had to start talking about “lossless” compression algorithms with regards to the kind of algorithms what until then had just been called compression algorithms (because until then there were no compression algorithms with loss since the idea of losing anything when compressing data was considered crazy until it turns out you could do it and save tons of space if it was for stuff like image and audio because of the limitations of human senses - essentially in the specific case of things meant to be received by human senses, if you could deceive the human senses then the loss was acceptable, whilst in a general data sense losing data in compression was unacceptable).
My expertise is even higher up the Tech stack than the people who to me sound like Junior Devs making fun of lusers because they were using technical terms to mean something else, even while the Junior Devs themselves have yet to learn enough to understand the scope of usage and full implications for those technical terms (or the simple reality that non-Techies don’t have the same interpretation of technical terms as domain experts and instead interprete those things by analogy)
STFU and stop dropping your resume. Nobody gives a shit, and I can tell you I’m FAR more knowledgeable than you.
You literally don’t understand the difference between a sensor, data, compression, or anything else. You don’t understand energy, physics, or the underlying concepts.
You are not as informed as you personally believe.
Literally STFU
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.
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 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.
Aside from the Christopher Nolan thing, I was referring to music.
What I am saying is there’s a point of diminishing returns. That point might be a 192kbps mp3, but there is still a point where 99% of people or more will not know the difference and there’s no money in marketing to that 1% who will.
Yeah for sure… I would say even maybe 160kpbs for most music.
But I’ve encountered people (and in the past, blog posts/news articles etc) about how the human ear can’t discern the difference between 128kbps mp3 and a lossless format, and that’s just absurd.
I honestly agree with you quite a bit here. I would say the cutoff for what most people stop noticing is after 160kbps though. There’s a huge quality difference between 128 and 160, and 192’s a nice standard to preserve the subtleties without eating up space for no reason, but I don’t think most people can tell the difference after 160.
He obviously is right! I have a mechanical keyboard because it transmits better key presses. Aviator connector helps reduce the noise as well.
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.
Speak brother
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.
Zeus can hear a duck ovulating 100km away
He needs that ability, ok?
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
In the context that automated systems will compress files for transfer to save bandwidth then it could potentially result in loss.
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.
I like to witness this grey area in between misconceptions that comes up with a hybridation of absurd takes and obvious truth.
It’s a file, if you get it fucked by copying it will just break, not “degrade” in sound quality.
If you reencode a lossy encoded file you will turbofuck it, obviously.
That’s not really correct.
If you re-encode (at the same level) you could not lose some of the signals, but maybe you will.
If you lose data when “saving or moving” then both the formats are at risk.
IVE HAD THIS GIF SAVED FOR OVER A YEAR AND I FINALLY GET TO USE IT
the 320kbps mp3 is for listening to, the flac is for storage / archival so I can convert it to opus or other formats
I don’t… I don’t get it
TBH FLAC can’t do 32bit floating point encoding, neither more than 8 channels per stream, so he’s not technically incorrect that it’s not zipping a wave file.
The first one concerns recorded source material (there are 32bit fp recorders for the last few years really helped loudest and quietest recordings) and not a single end product.
The second one limits FLAC to 7.1, so as a container it’s not suitable for theatrical purposes, neither for Dolby Atmos/DTS, nor for higher order ambisonics (used in vr).
But neither of these limits concerns end users, and if we’re talking about music, they can get fucked with whatever exorbitancy they prefer.
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!
Saving music to a external memory thing also losses quality because it has to be copied twice
To keep the highest quality of the music, you need to listen to it on the device it was created
As an audio connoisseur, I will not settle for anything less than a private, live showing by the band without any digital assistance like microphones.
You see, when the audio goes into a wav file, it gets converted into BITS. That’s not audio, that’s food! And those bits aren’t even used immediately–they’re saved for later! They go STALE in the hard drive only to be used later to create synthetic bits, losing both quality and purity during the process. To make matters worse, those synthetic bits are used to make synthetic audio waves, which get turned into electrons and sent down a wire to make synthetic pressure waves. Nothing is REAL with digital audio. It’s fake music made from fake sounds made from fake waves made from fake bits made from a fake copy of real, honest-to-goodness music.
It may come at a premium multi-million cost for a single album, but gosh dang-it, I’m listening to music as it was made to be!
/s
And it’s all bits now! The 12" reel-to-reel tape that can’t be played in any device made since 1980 had KIBBLES to go with the bits!
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.
Ough or more loudness :-(
See the loudness wars.
Out of all shops that got nicked in the last 20 years by internet shopping, high-end audio stores with concierge salespeople are still doing great.
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/
Einbildung ist auch eine Bildung!
Hahahaha, that’s a good one. I’ll be using that
What’s the L stand for again…?
Lossy, of course!
