Comment by miav | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miav | Hacker News Reader

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Unless I'm reading it wrong, your second source does very much imply some people can tell the difference quite reliably. As expected, regular people can scarcely tell the difference, but musicians are better at it and sound engineers are in fact quite accurate.

This matches my own experience well: most of my friends do not care about various levels of compression, nor what headphones they use - that's fine, I'm glad they're enjoying art in their own way - but I, and some others, do in fact stand to benefit from less compressed audio.

I've personally done blind tests on myself using a python script that randomly plays compressed and uncompressed snippets of the same track and mp3@320 was not transparent to me (though opus@256 was).

Can I tell the difference when casually listening? I don't know, but when the cost of lossless is having my music collection take 60gb instead of 20gb on my 512+gb device, I have no reason not to go for lossless.

Examine Figure 1 - The key is the 4th and 5th columns there, CD/256 and CD/320. The results show no significant ability to discriminate between them.

The thing about being or not being able to point out differences in audio quality is that it all boils down to pattern recognition. If you know anything about pattern recognition, you understrnd that you can't have pattern recognition without prior training through provision of tagged samples of such patterns.

If you would give high quality audio experience, to a person that has been listening through 80s general store headphones, to low quality radio rips on magnetic tapes, you might be surprised how few people are going to describe one as "better", without prior description of work and technology required to produce each experience.

And one would be even more surprised by how many people choose the cassette tapes because of nostalgia and a long time satisfying experience.

isn't perception itself a matter of mere pattern recognition? hearing? the whole point is that you can hear the difference. whether or not it sounds "worse"... is certainly debatable, but is definitely a value judgment. and the burden of proof is definitely on the "it doesn't matter side" to prove that a lower fidelity version is "better" than one truer to the original master.

I've done the same blind test with decent but not amazing headphones (HD590) and I could tell the difference all the time as long as the music was slightly complex.

If loudness was artificially boosted, I had a harder time but could still often tell. I think the sound engineering of the music played a big role and a lot of modern music isn't mixed with complexity in mind.

I also go for lossless ;-).

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