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Great lessons, thank you :)

The most common defence line of good-quality lossy formats, which I to some extent endorse, is that just because one can hear the difference between, say, a 320k mp3 and a flac file, it may not matter musically. Some even have argued that there are cases where the loss of spatial precision may actually be preferrable. This post argues that:

someone heavily involved in the music may benefit from decoupling their ears from the forced locality of an ultra linear source and it may feel more like a live acoustic recording they have experienced where there was a lack of this precise spatial locality. […] For artificially created sound-spaces, if it is a requirement that everything stay perfectly still, FLAC is good, otherwise MP3 can give the fake environment a touch of uncertainty which many ears will find more pleasing.

While I have no idea if this is correct or not, it certainly is an interesting idea.

One more thing, which I forgot to say in my previous post: the outcome of the ABX test was a surprise for me for two main reasons: one: I’ve always been suspicious towards people claiming there is such a big difference between lossy and lossless, and two: I’m half deaf on one ear (strangely, that’s always the ear that is turned towards my wife when she yells at me to turn down the music or something like that) and way past 40 so there are loads of sounds I will never hear again (Beethoven, here I come!). And still, I could hear the difference. Amazing.

Just my 2 cents.

An ABX test is a test where two sound clips (“A” and “B”) with different versions of the same track are played first, and then another clip (“X”), randomly chosen from either of the two former, is played. One then guesses which of the two it is. This is repeated for as long as one wishes.

I had chosen a flac file (lossless, cd quality), and 128k and 320k mp3 versions of the same file. There was no problem at all distinguishing the 128k version from any of the others. I made one mistake in ten, and that was because the auto-generated series began with five As in a row, and I thought: there must be a B in here somewhere.

What surprised me — having been generally sceptical towards the whole “ooh, the sound quality is soooo poor in mp3s” hysteria — was how marked the difference was also between 320k and flac. Nothing that will ruin my experience and enjoyment of the music, certainly, but noticeable nonetheless.

On the other point: yes, mp3 conversion does cut off the high frequencies. See, e.g. this post with a table that shows the various cuts. You’re right that it mostly discards things that are not within what the human ear can hear, but it’s not only that.

So, guiseppe (and my apologies for not having answered until now): yes and no. Something is lost, but the difference you hear, is mostly not caused by missing overtones.

It should perhaps also be mentioned that the main reason for bad sound on ipods and other places where mp3s are used, is caused by the sound system: bad earphones, bad soundcards in computers, listening in loud places, etc. No bitrate can fix that…

This is wrong in many ways. First, a good-quality mp3 (>= 128k) isn’t “poor”, you can’t hear a difference compared to a CD (provided the volume and quality of A/D converters is the same, and you heave healthy (!) ears). Second, mp3 doesn’t cut off overtones. It really analyzes the signal spectrum, und cut’s away thing’s the human ear is not able to hear anyway from the signals spectrum. Think of an orchestra, timpani and triangle playing the same note (say, very loud). Do you think you are able to hear the later?

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