Comments on Profile Post by imackler

I did some ABing years ago. Not sure about loudness, but mostly some resolution in drum reverbs and room reverbs are lost. Air around instruments might be lost Other differences are harder to hear.. Need to keep in mind that files come from same master.

I don't listen at high SPLs but was able to discern the difference between FLAC and MP3s in a blind test some years ago. Of course that was back when my ears were a bit better. Same things as dark_energy described: improved trailing decays in higher frequencies, air, bit of a sense of space.

Interesting. I get the "feeling" (subjective) that those kind of details are easier for me when the music is louder and less noticeable when I'm listening at normal levels. Or at least I have to look harder for them at lower levels. Just curious if anyone else found out that such details are more noticeable at higher levels...

Given well-produced source material, I can always hear the difference. At least for 320kbps MP3 encoding. Horns have a grating vs. smooth decay. Acoustic strings, too.

Definitely easier at higher SPLs, just meant that I think one needn't go 80dBA+ for differences to be discernible. Sorry, was a tad unclear :))

I wouldn't say it has to be at high volume but definitely not low. The small differences that i can perceive (sometimes) are lost, at least in my ears.

This makes sense because around 90 dB you can hear more detail vs 60dB. Might be personal too, some listen at 100 dB so hearing is tuned for louder sounds. Coming back to the earlier point. It is hard to recreate a drum kit at 60 dB.

Castanets.mp3 flashbacks D:

Mental scars aside, it depends on a lot of things. With certain tracks on a neutral setup volume doesn't make a difference. Those of us who were involved in the early days used to be able to tell what encoder was used, let alone the file format ... glad those days are past.

http://soundexpert.org/encoders

Except for some older mp3 encoders, >=256kbit/s mp3 is transparent for me at any volume.

In the past I could't tell the difference between 128kb mp3 and flac.
Now with a bit more experience and much better gear the shortcoming are painfully obvious. I can tell when it doesn't sound right and it's because of mp3 compression. Mind you I do have mp3 320kb/s that sound exceptional. Mastering matters.

@james444 I'm looking forward to looking at that link! I'm confused by your post though. Are you saying that above 256 is less transparent?

He meant with bitrates greater or equal to. Anecdotally I agree, to me 320 CBR and max-rate VBR (around 256) are ~identical, and transparent for most music. Fast, high-frequency transients remain the principal issue for perceptual codecs. Brushed snare drums are noticeable.

It’s not subjective, just listen to anything not in the foreground. (Conditional on having a good enough headphone/chain)

LAME has been the best mp3 encoder for years now. They keep a list of "nasty" test samples that are known to cause problems:

http://lame.sourceforge.net/quality.php

AFAIK, no one has submitted a sample in quite some time that causes problems at high bitrate encoding with the more recent builds of LAME. Pretty much all remaning issues are @128kbit/s or lower.

Need to watch out for Joint Stereo. I personally prefer 320CBR (stereo).

Besides MP3, AAC and OGG should work fine.