Audiophile or Audio-Fooled. How good are your ears

[PHC1]

Kate Perry question.

The words "It's a YES or a NO baby", the YES, the sibilance and the SSSSS sounds are always more artificial with lower res samples. Once again, 128 is rather easy but hard to tell the 320 from WAV.

The more complex the recording, more sounds/instruments, the harder it gets to tell them apart.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by Rex Anderson

A very telling test: listen to some classical music that was recorded in a good concert hall with a decent length natural reverb (2 seconds or more). Pay close attention to the ends of movements when the reverb tail dies off before silence/hall noise.

Reverb time (RT60) is defined as the time it takes to drop 60 dB, basically to inaudibility.

If you turn up the volume as the sound level decays so you can hear detail, you will
hear a natural sound with higher resolution files and a good DAC. With lesser quality A/D encoding and on down the line, reverb tails sound "grainy".

Good headphones may help hear detail, but a great system with loudspeakers could/should be used for tests like this. I'm not a big fan of headphones, so my speakers are much better at resolving detail than the headphones I own.

I am using Focal Utopia headphones. Beryllium driver, no crossovers, no room to speaker interaction. Linear out to 50Khz even though my ears are not.

[PHC1]

Jay Z question.

The giveaway is the harmonic complexity and the naturalness of the "cow bell" or whatever that is at the end of the track and not much else.

[PHC1]

I give up on the Neil Young question.

With Cold Play, I can never tell the difference with all that dynamic range compression. It is a mess of a recording.

[PHC1]

And there you have it. We have to struggle most of the time to hear a significant difference between the various resolution recordings. The recording quality itself is MUCH more important than resolution.

[Soundmig]

Originally Posted by PHC1

And there you have it. We have to struggle most of the time to hear a significant difference between the various resolution recordings. The recording quality itself is MUCH more important than resolution.

I wholeheartedly agree with that statement!

[Soundmig]

What I noticed is that when the woman in the video did get it wrong, she actually chose the lowest, most compressed file as the right answer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought she chose the 320kbs version in the first example (which she got wrong)?

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by Soundmig

What I noticed is that when the woman in the video did get it wrong, she actually chose the lowest, most compressed file as the right answer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought she chose the 320kbs version in the first example (which she got wrong)?

Yes, it was the last one she chose as 128. My bad.

[KMC45]

I knew I suffered from pretty bad hearing loss, then a few years ago I finally got tested.

Results=Profound hearing loss.

I use to turn music up so loud that it would cause headaches and actually change the experience of listening to music.

Now I use hearing aids, which helps me hear, but the quality of what I hear sucks.

For all you old guys (guys like me) get your hearing tested.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by KMC45

I knew I suffered from pretty bad hearing loss, then a few years ago I finally got tested.

Results=Profound hearing loss.

I use to turn music up so loud that it would cause headaches and actually change the experience of listening to music.

Now I use hearing aids, which helps me hear, but the quality of what I hear sucks.

For all you old guys (guys like me) get your hearing tested.

Sorry to hear that. Besides the "normal" loss as a process of aging, any prolonged exposure to loud sound will unfortunately cause hearing loss in a hurry. Listening to music that loud certainly played its role. It's not just the "old" guys but anyone at any age can suffer permanent hearing loss.