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Comment by ipspam | Hacker News Reader

A worthless experiment. Audio is only as good as the weakest link. All phones will be insufficient for this test. All computer jacks and all monitor jacks will be insufficient. Most headphones will be insufficient.

Only upon using a dedicated headphone amplifier with a moderately good pair of headphones should the answers become easy.

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I often see claims like this from audiophiles yet the research with AB tests has generally found that no such differences actually exist.

https://hometheaterreview.com/why-do-audiophiles-fear-abx-te...

That may be true for sources and amplifiers, but not for speakers/headphones.

Go to any audio store with speaker rows and listen to a few. They are hugely different, and none of them are cheap quality.

Which basically means that we are far from solving the accurate speaker problem.

There are also cases where the differences in amplifiers are obvious - for example some headphone/amplifier combinations have issues with low frequency response (related to impedance IIRC)

Genelec/Revel/Kef beg to differ. You can measure speakers and there are a fair few accurate ones out there.

The problem that we are far from solving is the problem of people buying inaccurate speakers.

Isn't that kind of the point of this being posted? It shows that you don't really need lossless audio on your phone if you need special equipment and an otherwise silent room to tell the difference.

I didn't notice any difference between the three files in any of the cases...and that leads me to question:

Can we verify that the website choices are in fact legit? i.e. the 320k mp3 is in fact 320k and the uncompressed wav is in fact that. And also, that the browser isn't messing with the choices either (by e.g. caching the first file you play and reusing it for the other choices).

Also, I ordered an optical cable so I can use my amplifier's DAC rather than the onboard soundcard DAC.

i'm sitting in front of a 3.5k playback system, decent room, and i produce music for a living and i work in a lossless daw every day, and i did horribly :(

A few pieces were easy to identify even with a phone and regular headphones. I tried a Pixel 4a directly to Philips SHP9500 and got 4/6.

That kind of proves the point of the test?

128kbps on nice headphones will always sound better than WAV on garbage headphones.

The last part of the quiz literally tells people this.

I took the test several months ago with my nice DAC/amp headphones and got 5/6. Just tried again on my phone and got 0/6. And at the end it asks you what you were using.

Seems to me like the experiment has value.

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