"Lossy compression"?

It's been tested and the "best" audiophiles can't hear differences between 14bit and 16bit, nor can they hear differences between 44.khz and ANYTHING higher. In some tests they could use12bit sound with 36khz sampling frequency... The differences they hear are inside their head. Thus the description of improved sound is always "air", "brilliance", "organic" etc.. Don't be fooled by their fancy gear, most of it is for nothing. Cables: i am always willing to bet my months salary on doubleblind tests, 10 000€/m against a coat hanger, no audible differences.. It's all about confirmation bias, you think there's a change and suddenly you hear it.

About MP3s vs PCM:
Here we have audible differences. But. Put on high enough energy, ie turn your amp high enough, suddenly double blind studies can't find which is which. But it can be audible, mp3 is lossy format and even 320kbps can be heard. Not with all material, it's about in the limits of human hearing. Some might hear high end loss, if you're in your twenties. Once you hit 40, everything above 17khz is gone, forever. You will never hear 20k again. And to really notice the difference, you need good gear. Your laptop earphone output most likely won't even output anything past 18khz well and it's dynamic range can be represented with 8bit depth.. It can be just horrible. Fix that with usb box, around 80€: you can take that box anywhere on planet to the most "hifiest" guy out there and he can't hear the difference between his 10000€ A/D converter.. In fact, 5€ A/D converter can produce the same output as 3000€ one... That's not why i said buy a external.. It's more to do with RF and other shielding, protection against the noises a computer makes than A/D conversion quality. Note, i'm talking about audible differences, you can find faults with measuring equipment and 95% of the gear price is about "just to be sure".

If you want a good sound, first, treat your room. Dampen it, shape it.. If you spent 10k on stereo and 0 on acoustics, you will not have a good sound no matter what you do. Spend the same amount on acoustics than what you do on you equipment, room makes a lot more differences than gear. Next comes speakers, they are the worst link in the chain by a large margin. Quality costs, still wouldn't go to extremes here either, the changes are again "just to be sure", not always audible.. Then amps, beefy, low noise, A/B. You don't need to spend a huge lot of money but some. Then cables.. Take the 50€ version instead of 300€ or 3000€. Build quality and connectors, durability. Those are the reason to buy more expensive than 5€. Not because of sound quality.. There will always be group of people that will swear they can hear the differences, that's bullcrap. Human ear CAN NOT detect any chances, even meters are having a REALLY hard time getting any changes. You need to either amp up the signal to saturation point, or use frequencies in the Mhz ranges, thousands of times higher than what media needs to get any changes between cheapest crap and high end scams.

Audiophiles can't be convinced they are wrong, they are suffering from the same thing antivax people do: give them facts, they will be even more convinced they are right.

Thanks for the reply and sharing your expertise -- sounds like you'd confirm everything that the video said.

This probably just displays my ignorance more, but specifically with regards to the MP3 format, do you think it adds any noticeable compression artifacts even at high-quality settings? Part of my problem was that I was thinking of MP3 *bit*rate as sampling rate (128 kbit/s = 128 kHz, which is not at all correct). But still, MP3 is a lossy format (obviously since one can turn a 650M CD into ~60M of 128k MP3s, or still a large filesize savings even for 320k) and even my relatively untrained ear can sometimes hear the difference at low (say, 128k or lower) bitrates.

I guess that a music producer wouldn't record/master anything in a compressed format like MP3, so that is sort of entirely separate from the point of this video and your comment. But just out of curiosity, do you think that people can detect differences between a 16 bit 44 kHz uncompressed digital recording (flac maybe?) and a very high quality MP3 (say, 320 kbit)?

Lossy compression was not kind to this video.

>> ^shuac:

>> ^westy:
this is actualy a prity pore way to demonstrait evolutoin , and this tv show is utter shit . Im all for science education and sometimes this show demonstraits things well but for the most part its just dense.
compare this tv show with tomorrows world for example ( which I what I think they are trying to aim for)
Its a shame to me how educational programs for kids on bbc seem to have gotten worse over time with less and less content and facts.
I mean programs like mithbusters are 100x better than this.
with any luck kids will just get information and education of the internet and just abandon tv as it becomes less and less relivent in peoples lives.

Westy, it's one thing to merely say it's pore but you've got to demonstrate why it's pore. Er, poor.


Its pore for the following resoins .

1) creationist morons would take an example like this and say "LOOK IT PROVES AGENCY AS CENTAINT BIENGS HAVE TO TRACE THE LINE AND THIS IS ANALAGOUSE TO GOD"


2) it dosent relay explain or comment on how things change more or less from environmental factors , the core princapel of evaluation is that you have random changes that acour but depending on how beneficial these changers are to contune to exist in an enviroment denotes if something chenges in one way or another or sticks over time.

3) all it deomstraits is "noise" and degradation of something over time , its a grate example for lossy file formats and data curption , but I don't think its a good example for evolution, I am prity sure there are other ways that are as simple or more simple that would describe evolution to sum one in a better way.

I searched and couldn't find this on the sift, so I don't think it's a dupe. This youtube video has the full length, but visit the original for better sound quality. I consider "old school flash" those videos that were popular on the internet before youtube-esque lossy-video-embedded-inside-flash became popular. Wasn't sure if I could embed the original though, so I just linked to this youtube video.

Here is the author's site, but geocities is slower than albinoblacksheep.
http://www.geocities.com/clownstaples/swf/winnoise.html

From the FAQ on his page:
"The statement at the end of the movie is absolutely true. The soundtrack was made entirely in Sound Recorder. But that may be misleading, since it took more that just sound recorder to make the movie.

Structurally, the sound track is made of short clips of noises or combinations of noises. Each of these clips was made in sound recorder by distorting one of the four sounds used: ding, chord, chimes, and the Mircosoft sound.

Then sound recorder was used to mix each of these clips together into one synchronized file. Considering the amount of repetition in the song, this part was really quite easy.

Finally, the sound track was imported into Macromedia Flash, and used as the basis for the animation.

No, I didn't reprogram sound recorder to be able to play by itself. It is not a screen-captured movie of something that actually happenned on my computer. It is a fictional depiction of one way the soundtrack could have been generated (but wasnt).

The fake sound recorder windows were built out of pieces of screenshots of sound recorder, and then flash was used to animate their movement. I used mspaint (another of my favorite programs) to cut my screenshots up to get the pieces I needed."

I used the embed you so graciously suggested. I usually avoid myspace vids because of the thumbnails, but I agree that the quality itself is better. Thanks!

In reply to this comment by Pooterius:
I think this is a new candidate for crappiest audio on YouTube - and it's a musical piece. Video quality is likewise terrible. I much less lossy transcoding of the same recording can be found here:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=3321621

I think this is a new candidate for crappiest audio on YouTube - and it's a musical piece. Video quality is likewise terrible. I much less lossy transcoding of the same recording can be found here:

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=3321621

arrendek
FLAC is lossless by design, so it should be better audio-wise than any lossy codec (mp3, aac, etc). Since it is digital though, there can still be a loss of fidelity compared to an analog recording (although probably an unhearable one). Since you'd probably find digital components in your newfangled turntable though, don't go off and achieve a placebo effect.

FLAC is recording-quality. Absolutely no data is lost -- the only reason audiophiles prefer CD/SACD/DVDA/Vinyl is because high-end CD- and Vinyl-players tend to be better than high-end DACs (though there are some awesome DACs out there).

sometimes
The one downside to simply "turning up your volume", is that you're also turning up the volume on any hiss in your system.

Any system that has hiss is unacceptable. You have to have a pretty awful system to have audible hiss -- I don't even hear hiss with Bose systems (for the record, never buy Bose products). Maybe worse-than-average stock computer speakers would have hiss.

mp3's do a number on sound quality, but interestingly enough it's the subtle things that get removed, not the dynamic things like in the video. I saw a somewhat non-scientific study once (maybe in a music mag, I don't recall) that had various professionals listening to music (golden ear types) and only a small percentage of them could tell a raw recording from a 160 or 192kbps (again fuzzy on details) mp3.

Here's a good read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Audio_quality

As much as I'm not a fan of AAC, it is the successor, really, to mp3, as it was selected for the mpeg-4 protocol, as mp3 was for mpeg-1.

FLAC is lossless by design, so it should be better audio-wise than any lossy codec (mp3, aac, etc). Since it is digital though, there can still be a loss of fidelity compared to an analog recording (although probably an unhearable one). Since you'd probably find digital components in your newfangled turntable though, don't go off and achieve a placebo effect.

Is it just me, or is the compression on the audio of this even WORSE than an average YouTube video? It sounds SO lossy. Like a realaudio for dial up or worse.