I did a blind test between 128-mp3, 320-mp3 and flac hearing classical music. While it's true that the 128-mp3 is obvious to find, it also isn't too difficult to find the 320-mp3. Flac just sounds better. Described as a feeling, flac is more voluminous and doesn't feel cut short. For fun, I also let my parents take this test and they could tell, too.
That's why I converted all our CDs to FLAC. Storage is cheap anyway.
Other than that MP3 (or Vorbis or Opus, which would probably do better on that song) is great for portability, but I'd still use FLAC for storage.
The only artifact I can reliably hear in 320 kbps MP3s is pre-echo, for instance with castanets, and only in a few very specific situations. Apart from this, V2 and above sounds completely indistinguishable from the original to me.
but what if in the future you could hear the differences? And now your entire collection is in MP3 V2 - now what?
No reason to not rip everything in uncompressed FLAC these days.
But if your happy with your audio now, great!
And even though you may have diminished hearing you still have awareness of frequencies above 8Khz.
Imagined artifacts will probably remain or might even increase though, since people typically have much higher spending power at 40. :)
I worked in audiology for my entire 30's and tested my own hearing (biocalibration) once a week.
Never once saw a reduction in my hearing thresholds (250Hz - 8kHz)
Nor have I read any supporting documentation that agrees with a reduction of 8kHz thresholds before the age of 55.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...
Stick to FLAC and keep your fingers crossed for cochlear regeneration tech ;)
Something also ends up missing in the midranges. I was working on a track once where all I had was 320 mp3 version of the vocals. At some point I replaced it with a flac copy of the same vocal recording, from the same original wav source and the difference was noticeable right away without changing any of my equalizer settings or anything. It just punched through more and the clarity improved.
I have a room-corrected setup with two properly adjusted subs, and MP3 does just fine on deep bass content.
Regarding solo vocals, the history of the MP3 format says: "The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3. Brandenburg adopted the song for testing purposes, listening to it again and again each time refining the scheme, making sure it did not adversely affect the subtlety of Vega's voice".
That's not to say that they did a perfect job, but human voice was a very high priority.
And the encoders have continued to improve. So an earlier encoders may have messed with the voices, but a reasonably recent version of LAME would do so much better.
MP3's real weakness is fast sharp transients, such as castanets and harpsichord in sparse recordings, where no other sounds can mask them. It's a fundamental weakness in the format, and cannot be completely solved.
Newer formats such as Ogg Vorbis, Opus and AAC do not suffer from this weakness.
Well for me it came from running multiple copies of the same bass heavy tracks encoded in different formats through spectrum analysers. But I guess those lie?
>Regarding solo vocals, the history of the MP3 format says: "The song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega was the first song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg to develop the MP3. Brandenburg adopted the song for testing purposes, listening to it again and again each time refining the scheme, making sure it did not adversely affect the subtlety of Vega's voice".
Human voices come in a wide range of tones and frequencies. Optimizing something for one voice doesn't mean all voices will benefit from the same optimizations. The specific track I was referring to had a lot of variation in high and low notes. You can tell me all you want what I did and didn't hear.
Of course it's going to look different in a spectrum analyzer, the whole point of lossy compression is to discard parts of the audio to save space.
You can't evaluate the quality of a lossy codec by looking at spectrograms. They're designed to fool human ears, not measurement software.