[HN Gopher] How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (2015)
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How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? (2015)
Author : lisper
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-05-25 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| impowski wrote:
| I got 6/6, you can select the right question based on how long it
| takes to start playing audio initially :)
| mynegation wrote:
| You must be a security researcher specializing in side channel
| attacks.
| TheHideout wrote:
| When I was at Berklee [0] we had considerable ear frequency
| response training that would involve weekly hearing quizzes where
| they would boost/buck certain frequency bands of either pink
| noise or music and you had to pick out which band was made louder
| or softer. Additionally, we had a quiz where you had to listen to
| lossless vs mp3 at different bit rates and determine which was
| which. We also did neat things like trying to pick out what type
| of guitar and pickups someone was using in a recording simply by
| ear.
|
| 320 kbps mp3 vs lossless 16bit WAV (cd quality) is extremely
| difficult to hear the delta without training, but if you know
| what the source instruments are supposed to sound like, such as
| hats and you can focus on their frequency band, you can hear
| compression artifacts and comb filtering.
|
| This course really changed how I take in music and sounds in
| general.
|
| [0] https://online.berklee.edu/courses/critical-listening-1
| dang wrote:
| Some past threads:
|
| _How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9654758 - June 2015 (71
| comments)
|
| _How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9743877 - June 2015 (1
| comment)
|
| _How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688095 - June 2015 (2
| comments)
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| The only one I got dead wrong was Coldplay. That also happened to
| be the furthest from my usual listening habits, I don't know if
| that had any effect.
|
| For the others I picked at random one of the two that sounded the
| most similar. In no instance could I tell 320Kbps and WAV apart.
| Could have been just luck that I didn't pick 128Kbps more than
| once.
|
| Hardware is Bose QC II on low noise cancellation, connected by
| wire to a MacBook Pro and ears, one of which can hear crickets,
| the other not.
| fullstop wrote:
| I got 4/6 with a pair of Takstar Pro 82's (nothing special)
| connected over HDMI from my monitor.
|
| I missed Neil Young and, surprisingly, the classical music,
| although I suppose that classical music is used extensively when
| testing codecs.
| jkettu wrote:
| Curiously I picked 320kbps all but one occasion. Perhaps all
| those years of listening to MP3s have conditioned me to prefer
| the MP3s?
| Bancakes wrote:
| How is this still a debate? Just keep a .wav backup and convert
| it to modern formats as they come. At this point I can only
| assume people listening to actual mp3's pirated the songs.
| fullstop wrote:
| Or they use a streaming service, such as Spotify, etc.
| Bancakes wrote:
| Well high-quality (read: normal-quality) streams are a
| premium option. The more tech-enthusiastic might self-host a
| plex server or something similar.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Do you even flac?
| marcod wrote:
| You can assume, but it would be a pretty dumb assumption.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Music is engineered to sound good on every quality, up until the
| point when it is heard on low quality devices and adjusted so it
| is still perfect. It causes finding differences so difficult. It
| is not only that compression is so good, or that we don't hear
| the difference. It is also about the music being made in a way we
| shouldn't hear it.
|
| This test result is a tribute to sound engineers who make music
| good on every device.
| ipspam wrote:
| 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.
| sirbranedamuj wrote:
| The last part of the quiz literally tells people this.
| musicnotwords wrote:
| 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 :(
| legitster wrote:
| That kind of proves the point of the test?
|
| 128kbps on nice headphones will always sound better than WAV on
| garbage headphones.
| randomfinn wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| teawrecks wrote:
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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...
| silver_ears wrote:
| 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.
| randomfinn wrote:
| 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)
| Jiejeing wrote:
| This kind of test is really tricky because you are either trained
| to recognize the artifacts of MP3 compression, or you are not in
| which case you just "trust your gut". And if you are used to
| listen to compressed music (e.g. youtube), you will probably pick
| that.
|
| And that is not even taking into account that MP3 (despite being
| really old and not the most efficient at this point) is good at
| what it does, especially at 320k.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Usually what newer codecs buy you is the same quality for lower
| bitrates. AAC-HE, for example, would be pretty hard to pick out
| at 128K. Opus at 96K. Push either of those to 320K and I doubt
| anyone can really tell the difference.
|
| A similar thing happens with MPEG2. At a certain point, all the
| bits thrown at it make it indistinguishable from source. Where
| newer codec shine is when you start saying "what if we do this
| at 1000kbps" or "600kbps".
|
| https://opus-codec.org/examples/
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| This makes me wonder--these discussions usually assume that
| compression artifacts make audio sound worse, but is that
| always necessarily the case? Could they just as easily make it
| more pleasing?
| rozab wrote:
| I expect removal of very high and low frequencies could make
| some music sound subjectively better.
| Jiejeing wrote:
| They certainly can, it really depends on the music being
| compressed and the user's preferences. MP3 often sounds
| "cleaner" thanks to shaving off part of the spectrum that is
| not as audible.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I imagine that by now, skilled audio engineers who are
| working on distribution tracks for artists will well and
| truly have the hang of mixing for the various lossy codecs
| out there.
| Tomte wrote:
| MP3 Pre-echo demonstration:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtiRBFWkRKs (at 54 seconds)
| legitster wrote:
| I listen to a lot of music and got 1/6.
|
| I did a similar experiment to myself years ago with a MiniDisc
| player and found that 128kbps was indeed the sweet spot for
| myself. Especially when space mattered.
|
| While I am sure that more expensive equipment or years of
| dedicated study can help me discern the difference, I don't feel
| like my lack of refinement hampers my enjoyment of music in any
| way. If anything, I have no interest in training myself how to
| notice peas under mattresses.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| 3/6 they all sounded exactly the same to me. I just guessed.
| silver_ears wrote:
| 4/6, never picked 128kbps.
|
| Used $50 Audio Technica ATH-M20X on $90 Behringer UMC202HD.
|
| Did audio production in the past (amateur level).
|
| Failed Coldplay, and Neil Young, the latter I argue has such poor
| source quality that it's hard to tell a difference.
|
| Tip: listen to the "air" of you want to spot the difference,
| that's the first stuff the compressors throw away. "Air" is the
| ambient sound of the room, the tail of the reverb, the stuff you
| hear when you don't hear anything if that makes sense.
| echohack5 wrote:
| I was able to distinguish the 128 kbps file every time (they
| sounded "muddy" to me), but the 320 / uncompressed wasn't
| distinguishable.
|
| In particular, the coldplay song is one I've listened to alot,
| and I was able to instantly tell the difference in the
| instrumentation.
|
| Listening on Apple Airpods Max, audio is getting piped through a
| virtual audio device via Loopback.
| mynegation wrote:
| I picked 4 out of 6 and never picked 128kbps. I am pretty sure I
| can reliably weed out 128Kbps, but WAV vs 320Kbps is more or less
| luck. Jay-Z was the easiest as the chiptune sample is a
| rectangular wave and hence has a very high frequency component
| that actually makes sound less palatable, not more. "Hissiness"
| of strings helps on classical and Neil Young, but pop music (Katy
| Perry and Coldplay) with its flat wall of sound is much harder -
| I was listening for "z"s and "s"s and high hats. Acapella
| (Suzanne Vega) was the hardest for me and I think I just lucked
| out.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Same results.
|
| I'd love to see a similar experiment with newer codecs like
| Opus.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Suzanne Vega ought to be the hardest thing in the world to find
| an MP3 artifact in, since "Tom's Diner" was the primary litmus
| test used in the development of the psychoacoustical model.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%27s_Diner#The_%22Mother_of...
| d--b wrote:
| Listening on my bluetooth Plantronics headphones in a fairly
| noisy environment, I can't tell them apart at all.
|
| That said, maybe the headphones compresses the wav as well...
| teilo wrote:
| All bluetooth is compressed with a variety of algorithms. Some
| are better than others, but none are lossless (not even aptX-
| HD). I believe Apple is about to release a firmware update that
| they claim will allow some of their cans and buds to support
| ALAC, which is lossless, IF you have Bluetooth 5 devices, and
| only use it short range. My guess is that it will dynamically
| degrade down to AAC-256 if the devices are too far apart.
| Bluetooth 4 devices cannot support lossless simply because they
| do not have sufficient bandwidth.
| bena wrote:
| I used a pair of Powerbeats (Bluetooth earbuds) and picked either
| the 320 or the Uncompressed WAV (3/3) on all of them.
| RootReducer wrote:
| I got 5/6 with a Schiit Magni/Modi stack and Beyerdynamic DT
| 770s.
|
| On the flip side of the coin, my wife regularly listens to music
| just out of her phone speaker and claims to not notice the
| difference.
|
| Everyone enjoys music in a different way, and I'm glad there are
| plenty of options!
| knuthsat wrote:
| Interesting, whenever I failed it was between 320kbps and
| uncompressed wav. I know that I did a blind test about 10 years
| ago and could distinguish between ~192kbps variable bitrate and
| lossless audio with my left ear, mostly influenced by percussion
| (left ear for some reason can hear 21kHz frequencies).
| dehrmann wrote:
| Uncompressed CD audio is 1.4 Mbps. FLAC can do roughly 2:1
| compression, so that's 700 kbps. It's not crazy that modern
| mp3s (encoders have gotten better over the years) sound good at
| half the size of something lossless. They're only removing
| subtle details at that point.
|
| You can see the same thing with high-quality JPEGs vs PNGs for
| photos. There's a decent size reduction, but to see the
| difference, I have to open the files in Photoshop, zoom in, and
| toggle which one is visible. If I compute the difference in
| Photoshop, it's usually only a few levels different, and never
| more than ~8. That's really hard to see.
|
| Sadly, they're not even using a modern codec like Vorbis or
| Opus.
|
| That said, while I doubt I can tell the difference between FLAC
| and high-quality Vorbis, once I learned to listen for
| distortions on the high end, it's a little hard to unhear. Same
| as looking for blocking artifacts in JPEGs or video.
| teawrecks wrote:
| FLAC is lossless, and given a random piece of audio it would
| be impossible to always encode into 700kbps something that is
| originally 1.4Mbps without loss of information. So your 2:1
| samples claim doesn't sound accurate. Maybe file size, but
| not sample count.
| colanderman wrote:
| Yes, if you are encoding level-maximized white noise, FLAC
| cannot compress at that ratio, or likely at all.
|
| Music is not white noise. It does not maximize the channel
| capacity of the audio spectrum. As a rule of thumb, FLAC
| compresses most anything a human might call "music" in
| about a 2:1 file size ratio.
| bydo wrote:
| It's the sibilance that always gives it away for me. Even the
| 128kbps mp3 sounded fine for most of these, but when it fails,
| it _really_ fails.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I found a cheat. At least on my system, the WAV version takes
| ever-so-slightly longer to begin after you click play.
| acchow wrote:
| The Neil Young track sounds muffled even in the uncompressed to
| me.
| Answerawake wrote:
| Wow I kept picking the 128kbps MP3. Im using Sennheiser HD58X.
| I'm plugged into the headphone jack of my Desktop monitor which
| itself is getting audio via USB-C. Maybe the amp is bad in the
| monitor? Wonder if an external DAC would be any better.
| arprocter wrote:
| The sound from my monitor (DisplayPort) is definitely not as
| good as what comes directly from my PC, even without a DAC
|
| The Apple USB-C to 3.5mm doesn't break the bank, works with
| Windows fine and the headphone nerds seem to rate it
| simias wrote:
| If you keep picking the 128kbps track it does mean that you can
| hear a difference, and maybe that you subjectively prefer the
| more compressed audio.
|
| That's why usually good audio tests use ABX where it's not
| about seeing if you can identify what is best, but rather if
| you can identify a difference at all. See for instance:
| http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
|
| EDIT: I actually just tried the test and... ended up doing the
| same thing you did. On the Neil Young track I could hear a
| definite difference in the high pitched violin-like background,
| but I ended up selecting the 128kbps track as the "highest
| quality", maybe because the compression made it sound smoother.
| jordache wrote:
| high end consumer audio is largely snake oil
| daveslash wrote:
| Your honor: I give you "Exhibit A" - the _HDMI Cable with
| Anti-Virus_ that reduces _virus noises_.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/is-there-anyone-stupid-enough-to-
| believe...
|
| [Edit: Fixed Link]
| nr2x wrote:
| Which is why you should purchase studio equipment.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I do. I'm very pleased with the (relatively) flat response
| using powered studio monitors in my home theatre setup,
| which are (relatively) affordable compared to something
| with similar performance purchased from a hi-fi specialist.
| fullstop wrote:
| Either that or you've been conditioned to like the compressed
| sound. Or maybe your ears are not what they used to be?
| rodgerd wrote:
| Here's one way to think of it: spend money on audio gear until
| you can't hear the difference, or until you run out of money.
|
| If you can't hear the difference at a low price point, that's
| not a curse, it's a blessing.
| floren wrote:
| That's the road you walk down to $10,000 audiophile RCA cables.
|
| A man sits on a weight bench, wondering if the equipment is
| defective because he can't seem to bench press 800 lb...
| [deleted]
| smusamashah wrote:
| Doesn't it depend on decoder used by your browser? Will these
| sound different if downloaded and player with a music player
| software?
|
| Difference is too hard to notice in voice only audio example
| because it does not have that variation/detail in it anyway.
| silver_ears wrote:
| Decoders are supposed to be bit for bit identical. It's the
| encoders which are different.
| kurthr wrote:
| In addition to headphones, and hearing, there is also training.
|
| There are a number of audio artifacts in MP3s that are much more
| noticeable after training. However, many of them become much less
| discernable with variable compression rates and lower compression
| (>256kbps). It's possible to train on those artifacts, but I've
| always avoided it since I don't want the "projectionist effect"
| of making standard recordings less enjoyable.
|
| This is not the case for many audiophiles. They want to fix all
| the bugs!
| alexhjones wrote:
| What is the projectionist effect out of curiosity?
| shard wrote:
| Similarly, for sound effects, once you learn what the Wilhelm
| Scream is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_scream), you
| start noticing it everywhere it's used, and it can pull you
| out of the immersion in the film you are watching.
| benjohnson wrote:
| As I understand it from the context - if you make yourself
| able to find flaws, you'll constantly find them, or think you
| have found them.
|
| If it's something you love, it may make it your enjoyment a
| bit less.
|
| For me, it's why I don't watch my wife pop zits in the
| bathroom. It's nice to not know about those flaws. :)
| kurthr wrote:
| Projectionists needed to learn to spot the little white blobs
| in the corner of films so that they could switch reels. Once
| trained, you can basically never miss it and it will annoy
| you every time you see it. Also, if you develop visual
| compression schemes (e.g. MPEG, H264, etc) you will basically
| always see the blocking artifacts and chroma aberration in
| compressed video. That leaves you hating all DVDs, blueray,
| and digitally compressed video since looking at it becomes
| work.
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