Endless Paradigm

I (as well as some of you) have seen those comments across the internet about always trying to get albums/music in FLAC/lossless format.  Of course, this begs the question that is it really necessary?  Putting quality aside, perhaps people want it so that they have a "perfect copy" or something?  But if so, is this purely some psychological thing, rather than any distinguishable difference?...which begs the question - if I got a 192kbps MP3 album, and converted it to FLAC, would anyone be able to tell?

So let's see if you can really tell defects from lossy compression.  You can use any high-end audio equipment you may have for this (in fact, I encourage it).

I happened to find that I had a copy of the opening song from Mai-Otome in FLAC format on my HDD, so I did some cutting/speeding up of the end part to give a reasonable sample test clip (not the best, but should be reasonably adequate for most pop songs).
I then encoded this sample FLAC file into various lossy formats (eg MP3) and then converted these lossy samples back to FLAC, so you'll only be able to tell the difference by listening to the samples :P
There seems to be a wide consensus that 192kbps MP3 is basically CD quality transparent, so rather than give you audio encoded at insane bitrates, I thought I'd make things a little more fair (yes, one of the samples is a 128kbps MP3).

So here's five samples - one of them is the original, and one of them should be easy to identify as crappy quality.  I won't tell you which of them is the original however (since when you download a FLAC album, you don't know whether it was ripped from a CD, or just converted from an MP3...)


If you are willing to take the time and effort to listen to these samples and give feedback (which sample sounds poo poo/good/undecided?), it would be great :)
Thanks for reading!

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Inline listening (not sure if these work, if they don't, try below):
EDIT: looks like the browser may try downloading all of the file (~7MB) before starting to play...
Sample A | Sample B | Sample C | Sample D | Sample E




This is a 7z archive containing all 5 samples.
Download - 7z archive (~35.2MB)

I can't hear much of a difference to be honest. If i had a stab in the dark i would say that ( A ) was the best and ( C ) maybe the worst. But I really don't know. FLAC's would take up too much space on the two devices I use most for music (PSP 4gb, Sony Ericsson phone 1gb) so I always use MP3. A friend of mine CAN tell the difference. It just goes straight over my head. Now back to listening to aeriths tune from FFVII It makes me all teary eyed

it is pretty hard, but from testing, this is what I've found:
A=C=E > B=D
so basically A, C, and E to me sound very similar, with perhaps A or E being the best.
then i think that B is the worst, with D being fairly similar to it, but slightly better

I'd like to say I can hear it and I can distinguish sounds to a really good point
http://www.bored.com/musictests/pitchdeaf.htm
at least according to that


I don't really hear the difference, I just can't stand to think that my music is below "perfect" quality

it is more of a perfectionist thing

i can tell for sure, i have some 100 dollars earbuds that go almost all the way inside the ear.

Slushba132 Wrote:I'd like to say I can hear it and I can distinguish sounds to a really good point
http://www.bored.com/musictests/pitchdeaf.htm
at least according to that

Got everything correct down to 0.375Hz differences, but had to listen to the sample multiple times starting from a 1.5Hz difference.
That was interesting :P

lol I don't remember how well I got... I know it was really good...
somewhere in the higher above average range

Another thing...

Is your lossless originally lossless? I mean you could've downloaded it lossless, but do you know what happened before that?

I mean there are those anime encoders out there who are like "I'm using lossless audio, because everyone knows that lossless > lossy". But then is their source worth lossless? And thus they fail.

anytime you copy something the quality of it diminishes...

whether it be literally or because it suddenly lacks that uniqueness and originality it once had

Assassinator Wrote:Another thing...

Is your lossless originally lossless? I mean you could've downloaded it lossless, but do you know what happened before that?

I mean there are those anime encoders out there who are like "I'm using lossless audio, because everyone knows that lossless > lossy". But then is their source worth lossless? And thus they fail.

It's lossless.