Audiophile or Audio-Fooled. How good are your ears

[W9TR]

I got 5 out of 6 correct. LCD-4 phones and a Benchmark DAC-1. Didn't get the ColdPlay track correct - it all sounded bad.

Couple of notes in the video:
1. The guy doesn't know how MP3 works. 128k MP3 does not roll high frequencies. It just uses a much more aggressive compression algorithm. MP3 breaks the audio band into 572 bands and determines what info bands to throw away due to masking and other psychoacoustic effects. At 128 kHz it throws more stuff away.

2. A score of 66% is damn good for listening to tracks for a few seconds each. That tells me the differences would be more evident with a longer listen.

3. Good comments on how recording engineers work and what they listen for.

Some people are more sensitive to the effects of MP3 compression than others. I get fatigued after listening g to MP3 for any period of time - it could be streaming or xmradio or files I have. I end up turning it down or off completely. 16/44.1 I can listen to all day long.

[W9TR]

Keith - great advice for all of us. Thank you.

[Cohibaman]

A good article on digital...

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniq...oes-your-music

[GaryProtein]

Originally Posted by Soundmig

. . . . I listen to spotify premium sometimes and it is a 320kbs stream. It sounds pretty good, but it always seems to me to have a bit of an "edge" to the sound that my higher rez files don't have - coming through the Gumby. I'd like to think that I could do well on such a test (using equipment I'm familiar with), but who knows - maybe not. I know that nothing much above 14kHz is really audible to me any longer, so .... I'm 58 btw

That "edge" could be similar to the euphonic distortion aka additional information described by tube lovers!

[GaryProtein]

Originally Posted by PHC1

. . . . Here is the test. https://www.npr.org/sections/thereco...-audio-quality

Through the teeny weeny speakers in my laptop I couldn't tell the difference on any of them!

[GaryProtein]

Originally Posted by Cohibaman

A good article on digital...

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniq...oes-your-music

Regarding dynamic range, I won't dispute the dynamic range of the ear to be 130-140 dB, but I will add that if you hear anything that loud, it will be quite a while for your ear anatomy to relax before you will be able to hear anything below 70 dB.

There are notable important errors in that article, most glaring is the chart showing the sine wave superimposed over the boxes said to be the samples. That is WRONG. The samples should be illustrated by lollipop graph not a stair step.

The errors are well explained by a guy whose videos were posted here before but I don't recall his name. I will look.

EDIT: HERE IT IS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Everyone should see this at least once

[nicoff]

It is a good time to be an educated audiophile. With the internet, it is now so much easier to dig and learn for yourself. Videos like that of Monty Montgomery goes a long way to debunk so much misinformation that has been spread over decades by reviewers that we thought knew what they were saying.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by W9TR

Some people are more sensitive to the effects of MP3 compression than others. I get fatigued after listening g to MP3 for any period of time - it could be streaming or xmradio or files I have. I end up turning it down or off completely. 16/44.1 I can listen to all day long.

I am still convinced that resolution has very little to do with fatigue but dynamic range compression does have much to do with it. I don't ever recall being fatigued by vinyl or cassette tapes for that matter and a cassette tape is the equivalent of 6 to 7 bits depth in digital? Don't recall ever being fatigued listening to a car audio system at normal volumes and not the Sonos mid-fi sound. The combination of high resolution gear and dynamic range compression amplifies the effect of the unnatural sounds bombarding the brain which gets tired quickly of processing those unnatural sounds. The lower resolution recordings, when not dynamic range compressed just don't sound as exciting but they do not fatigue.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by GaryProtein

Through the teeny weeny speakers in my laptop I couldn't tell the difference on any of them!

That's something the industry figured out a looong time ago.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by GaryProtein

Regarding dynamic range, I won't dispute the dynamic range of the ear to be 130-140 dB, but I will add that if you hear anything that loud, it will be quite a while for your ear anatomy to relax before you will be able to hear anything below 70 dB.

There are notable important errors in that article, most glaring is the chart showing the sine wave superimposed over the boxes said to be the samples. That is WRONG. The samples should be illustrated by lollipop graph not a stair step.

The errors are well explained by a guy whose videos were posted here before but I don't recall his name. I will look.

EDIT: HERE IT IS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Everyone should see this at least once

Good video. I also suspect that the stair model is flawed for one other reason, the slew rate. To get that perfect stair model, one has to assume a slew rate of nearly impossible magnitude. That in itself "relaxes" the stair steps to resemble more of a rising sine wave I would think.