will be converting to bananas tonight, thanks op
Im certain I could tell the difference between a $50,000 setup, and the one i have cobbled together for a couple hundo over the past decade… And i would love to have that setup. But that cost to performance is only worth it if you have way too much disposable income. Eff the audiophile market.
I’m jealous of people who can’t tell the difference and have no need to buy audiophile grade SSDs
They tested the stupid audiophiles apparently.
Try it yourself.
Have a some switch between them for you.
Bet you can’t tell either.We made test once with a friend, where we could hear a difference.
The setup was a Denon reciever, and one speaker was connected with a random cable, the other one is a pure copper, braided audiophile cable. The pc was connected with toslink to the reciever. Played the music as mono, and we switched between the left-right speakers.
The only difference we could hear were very high pitched glockenspiel sounds from a flac file. That’s all. Any other music sounded the same. But the point was, there is a very little difference, even it’s rare to find a song where you can actually hear it.
This was the song where it was clearly audible, but I guess you can’t hear it on youtube, as mp3 already cuts off that high frequencies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kh-3xkye6A
Which are all of them who claim to hear a difference.
I love how autistic lemmy is.
The Internet is a weird place where people know how to read without actually understanding what they’re reading.
Reading everything literally has to be the most confusing thing in the world. Though it does make The Onion a bit better.
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
Depends on the song really, if it’s just a standard pop song it’s mixing well usually come through just fine on a shitty MP3. The more layers a song may have the muddier it gets at lower bit rates. Like I’ve found the noisier spectrum of punk always benefits from higher bit rates.
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless
I’d be surprised if anyone could.
However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it’s especially obvious with better equipment.
People who say 128kbps mp3 is fine, are full of shit. I’ve been to weddings where it’s been so obvious that whoever’s in charge of the music is just blasting 128kpbs mp3s and it’s brutal.
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent when compressed, no matter how hard I “audio peep.” It’s not even a question.
But something “dense” like System of a Down has audible distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense, though even the extreme end is hard to notice unless you know the particular song very well.
Also… a lot of recordings kind of suck. It’s crazy to worry about tiny bits of distortion when a bit perfect master is already noisy and distorted.
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
That makes sense.
Heh. Spotify used to stream 384K Vorbis, which should be sufficient. But now the web app is apparently AAC. And the app-apps are conspicuously listed with “equivalent to” bitrates, whatever that means:
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Very high: Equivalent to approximately 320kbit/s
Heavy classic music is a beast too, vivaldis energetic parts in the 4 seasons for example. Or Rimski Korsakoffs the flight of the bumble bee I’d wager. Or painkiller/turbo lover/… by judas priest 😁
At that quality of MP3 you’d really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.
Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.
For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it’s state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.
128kbps files are roughly 90% compression from raw, so not comparable. I’ll admit that I haven’t bothered with FLAC much, but in my limited experience it generally is pretty rare to see much above 50-55% compression from raw.
Anything that requires remuxing multiple times pretty much requires lossless compression. Else it’d become like screenshots of memes because the compression adds up.
That being said, last time I was working with professional audio people, they still preferred WAW as their intermediary format.
Thing is, storage isn’t at a premium anymore, so there’s no reason not to use lossless even if you can’t hear the difference.
Thing is, storage isn’t at a premium anymore,
U sure about that?
Old mp3 players used to measure space in megabytes, so yes, I’m sure of that.
Good for you, i had one of those.
Now go check the storage prices now and please define what “premium” is, 'cos last i checked they’re being overhyped - not as much as RAM, but on a similar trend.
I think FLAC is considered lossless so the comparison should be with WAV; whereas for lossy you have MP3/Vorbis.
MP3 patents expired a while ago i think, but for the longest time i’ve used Vorbis because of that.
Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
And even if you can - is it worth it? I mean - do I care and should I care? Is the point of music detecting every detail of the recording or can I appreciate it without paying that much attention to production? For instance, I find it much more convenient to use Bluetooth headphones as it allows me to move around the house. Flac immediately stops being relevant, as Bluetooth codec is really bad compared to almost any codec. I recently tried ldac codec on my headphones - couldn’t really tell the difference. Mp3 128kbps is just fine for me. Almost any situation. I care about musical content much more than production details. Other people might care more. I don’t.
This is the other part. Idk if it’s me, or my equipment, but like… I listen to music for the music. I might like certain genres (noise music comes to mind) more on higher end equipment, because that’s the point, but also… Eh? Not why I’m here.
With quality headphones, back to back, I’m confident that you could
My hearing isn’t extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
It’s still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.
Isn’t Ogg a container format?
TIL that Opus replaces both Speex and Vorbis (the latter of which i was about to question on).
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can’t tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
I recently switched from 320kbps to lossless, and there are very few moments where I can tell a difference. The biggest one is in the cover of “Tom’s Diner” by AnnenMayKantereit. There’s a section of the song at 320kbps where it goes almost silent, other than faint whispers of the band counting out the silence, but in lossless you can hear them actually singing the song quietly
I kinda want to start a snake oil audio cable company. It’s gotta be one of the easiest paths to retirement
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
Most people don’t have proper home stereo setups any more either, and they prefer shitty overcompressed music through earbuds. They don’t know any better, sadly.
And Ive probably spent less than 400 dollars on my home setup. But it blows away anyone who hears it. Just takes some smarts in setting stuff up and getting good used equipment.
Just another part of the cheapening of everything in society , and why music isn’t appreciated as much anymore. No wonder everyone has depression.
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can’t hear all that well anymore.
I’m lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.
It’s rather fascinating in a way. I’ve been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.
I think a lot of it is a sort of sunk cost fallacy.
They bought the expensive shit, so they have to believe it’s better.
Apple Syndrome
I have a set of Sony studio monitor headphones. I can hear more nuance and parts of the music I simply can’t hear in any of my ear buds or noise canceling headphones. They aren’t wireless, so I don’t really use them that often though.
It doesn’t matter the cable, the amp, shitty 128kbps mp3 or vinyl. I can’t hear much, much better with the drivers in them.
I’d say 90% of anything that matters is the driver. But past a certain midrange point, there just isn’t really much or any improvement.
I’m a musician. I swear by Beyerdynamic DT700. Fucking great headphones for like an insanely reasonable price
Awesome headphones. If you don’t mind the beyer peak. My favorites are my grado rs2. But I prefer music on speakers not headphones, so much space is lost on headphones. Hear a pair of magnepans in a room and you’ll be blown away. Got some original SMGa’s from 1989!
Real audio enthusiasts know the room is the most important, followed by the speaker itself, followed by the actual source. Then the amp etc.
And when you record and mix music you realize how much of it is bullshit in the end. The source is all that matters, really.
Isn’t it more of the weakest link? Bad amp and you can have the nicest room etc.
Stereo is overhyped IMO too 😋 except if you have a dedicated listening room.
Yeah it is. Right, room is very important. Ive always been able to designate a listening area where I am, thankfully.
It’s a rich playground for the price-equals-value fallacy, and there are plenty of well-heeled rubes that’ll fall for the technobabble.
It mattered more back in the analog days, I think. Now that it’s all digital, and going through dac’s, its all just about being good enough for 1’s and 0’s to get through. “Noise” doesn’t exist for digital audio. It either works, or it doesn’t.
It definitely mattered a hell of lot more in analog days. Getting a properly calibrated reel tape machine through a properly calibrated tube amp in a properly dimensioned room with good speakers is a feat, and absolutely sounds amazing.
Nowadays, it’s about how they mastered it. I can tell you for a fact Ozzy’s no more tears CD sounds like shit and the double record mix is FARRRR better, because it doesn’t have the life squished out of it from brickwalling. Is that digital vs analog? No. Its mastering.
Analog will sound better if you spend a SHIT ton and have an insanely good source. Digital will also sound amazing if you spend a lot. I myself very much enjoy listening to my original reels of 50s-70s music because you really can get so close to being in the studio and hearing everything, because they couldn’t edit it to death.
Bridge over troubled water on a reel is a real experience.
Nowadays, it’s about how they mastered it. I can tell you for a fact Ozzy’s no more tears CD sounds like shit and the double record mix is FARRRR better, because it doesn’t have the life squished out of it from brickwalling. Is that digital vs analog? No. Its mastering.
This is 10000% true!! I worked as a mixing and mastering engineer for a while, and lemme tell you… the loudness wars never ended. This is why I still collect vinyl, the medium is kinda shit, but the masters are so much better that it’s hugely worth it for a about 2/3 albums I own (1/3 are duds; I can live with that).
A tube amp isn’t necessarily expensive and they sound very good.
We transport audio digitally today but it still is all analog in the end.
True!
Happy cakeday! 🥳
The one time I was absolutely blown away by a pair of headphones that are not in the insano area, are the beyerdynamic dt1990. They aren’t cheap by any means but not insanely expensive. When I listened to music I’ve listened to hundreds of times, somehow they showed me even more detail I haven’t heard before. For example a Nena 99 red balloons LP, the amp was still the same as always but I couldn’t believe the amount of detail there was in the background, the soundstage those headphones were creating.
something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance
I think it’s the lack of a shared vocabulary.
Everyone likes some music better than other music, and so everyone think they can tell the difference between good and bad music. However, nobody can explain the difference in plain words.
This easily leads to the conclusion that it is fully subjective, and this is where the ignorance comes from. If nobody can explain what good music is, then my own voodoo explanation is as good as any.
However, we can talk about music theory, audio production and sound analysis in scientific terms to the point where we can even reproduce certain sounds based on the description. But we can’t really understand the description without actually experiencing the sound.
It’s similar to somebody saying “I don’t like this cake” or someone saying “my taste receptors react to the umami in this cake”, but I still wouldn’t have a clue about how the cake tastes.
Sound is also different from other sciences in that there is very little proof of one thing being more correct than others. And that goal changes constantly. Whenever somebody does crack the code to what people enjoy, it’ll get boring really quick.
I had a music teacher long ago who said that there is no bad music, only wrong audiences. His point was that the music that makes it through to the recording and publishing will already have passed the filter where someone made a decision if there is an audience for it. If you hear bad music, then you’re just not the right audience.
Anyway, cables. Who cares. The end result is the most important part. However, I’d prefer to hook up the instruments on stage with thick cables instead of bananas. Same thing applies at home. Any wire will do, but cheap wires do break.
It’s been like this for decades, according to my dad. Well before the internet.
I worked for Philips Research 30 odd years ago (weeps)… It was a source of great amusement then that we could sell two pieces of equipment that were identical in every way except one had a Marantz label and cost twice as much as the Philips one, and the Marantz would get 5 stars in the audiophile magazines, and the Philips would get 3 or 4.
That’s amazing. It’s almost hard to believe, yet it sounds about right.
I fucking love audio and have an extensive collection of equipment. The last thing in the chain before your ears (so headphones and speakers) will absolutely make a difference and the thing that provides power to that can make a difference. But the cables? The fucking cables?! Absolutely no impact once you’re above like $10. Turns out, electrons are electrons and they behave like electrons. Shockingly that doesn’t change in copper, gold plated copper, pure silver, or mud. Doubly so for the non analog part of the chain. Hell I’ve even seen “audiophile grade” ethernet cables.
The other part of the equation is if the differences made by the things that do make a difference actually matter to the listener. They do to me, but my dad is more than happy to just use the speakers on his Dell monitors.
Well, that’s not entirely correct. Given a long enough run, attenuation will absolutely cause bad cables to perform poorly. Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas. That said, for any modern cable, that run has to be greater than 50 meters for it to even start mattering. So if your wiring up a warehouse, you probably need to care about the type of wire your using.
Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas.
Source? /s
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 10 metre banana.
That’s what she said
Oh yeah, definitely. The wiring needs for an industrial space or event venue are different than a domicile, but I don’t think anyone’s buying audiophile snake oil for those. They really seem to market that kinda crap to the fool and their money crowd.
I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market
Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds can provide that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders
You sound like the right person to ask then—how much should I spend on a soundbar for a tv? Or at least do you know a place to ask these questions that give realistic answers with less fanboyism and faux-intellectuals?
I would never recommend a soundbar unless you’re absolutely stuck to that form factor for spacial reasons. Bookshelf speakers are still superior and don’t take up that much space. But I’m also not familiar with any I just got tower speakers that sounded really good at a friend and been loving them.
Honestly I just want something that sounds better than tv speakers that won’t break the bank. It seems like everything everyone recommends is $400+, which isn’t crazy compared to the price of a tv but I just need the most basic thing possible that’s better than built-in for occasional movie nights with friends and family
I get that but is a 400 dollar soundbar really any good? Even the 1000 ones sound tinny and small to me but maybe I’m just spoiled.
I bought a pair of Edifier powered bookshelf speakers (R1280T model, I think) for my living room setup and they work fine for casual TV and movie watching. Cost about $110 total. No subwoofer necessary, but I would add one if I had movie nights with more than just me and my partner (and didn’t have downstairs neighbors, lol).
Gotta love those people with fiber optic cables with gold plated connectors.
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys.
The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick you into thinking it sounds better.
Like many hobbies, it’s mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don’t, I called it quits.
I don’t about you, but in my country Tidal is cheaper than Spotify. But that might be placebo
/jk, though tidal is actually cheaper here. I can’t tell the difference in blind testing between 320 kbps mp3 exported in Reaper and the original wav; they’re indistinguishable to me. Actually, I can tell them apart with some airwindows dithers, but that is a pretty esoteric exception.
Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering compared to another. The service that has on their service the album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with non ideal mix and mastering
Oh, 100%. I actually tested this by recording bit perfect copies from different streaming services and comparing them with Audacity.
I found that they only way to hear a difference between the same song played on two different platforms was 1) if there was a notable difference in gain or 2) if they were using two different masters for the same song. If two platforms were using the same master version, they were impossible to tell apart in an ABX test.
All of this is to say that the quality of the mastering is orders of magnitude more important than whether or not a track is lossy or lossless, as far as audible audio quality goes.
Not here to argue I can hear the difference, because I can’t. But in audio collecting where the size and burden of even large lossless files isn’t much different from lossy files, why care? I download the flac files and compress upon delivery to the client where the space might be of a larger concern.
I do the same, as it happens, so I won’t argue with you.
As for “why care?”, I’d say it’s about making informed decisions and not spending money unnecessarily in the pursuit of genuinely better sound quality.
I think it depends on your source.
If we are talking about a downloaded good high bit rate MP3 and a FLAC, then yeah, I can’t hear a difference.
For streaming, I CAN hear a difference between the default spotify stream and my locally stored lossless files. That difference might come down to how they are mastered or whatever spotify does to the files, but whatever it is the difference is pretty perceptible to me and I don’t have especially sensitive ears.
If we’re talking free tier Spotify, then it could actually be due to the bitrate (96kbps OGG vorbis, IIRC). However, if you’re a premium subscriber then the standard bitrate is 160kbps, which is definitely not audible to 99.99% of people.
In fact, after much ABX testing, I found that a noticeable audible difference between a local file and the same song on a streaming service is almost always due to either a loudness differential or because the two tracks come from different masters.
I really noticed when I switched from Spotify to Tidal that there is something different about Spotify’s sound quality that makes it worse even at the highest streaming quality. I was surprised since I fully admit that in 99% of cases I can’t tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a FLAC of the same file.
Could be poor mastering. You can’t always just take a track and squish it down to a low bitrate without tweaking some settings.
The push for lossless seems more like pushback on low bit rate and reduced dubamic range by avoiding compression altogether. Not really a snob thing as much as trying to avoid a common issue.
The video version is getting the Blu-ray which is significantly better than streaming in specific scenes. For example every scene that I have seen with confetti on any streaming service is an eldritch horror of artifacts, but fine on physical media, because the streaming compression just can’t handle that kind of fast changing detail.
It does depend on the music or video though, the vast majority are fine with compression.
Yeah the enshittification did this IMO, we can serve 196kbps but chose to serve 128 or 96 so you really hear how shitty it sounds. Or pay extra!
Uncompressrd FLAC and other unnecessarily good recordings are useful when mixing, if I have understood it right, as it degrades quality. Otherwise I bet nobody can tell the difference between a 320 mp3 and a wave file. Guess 256 is all okay but why bother when the difference is so small?
The thing is, dynamic range compression and audio file compression are two entirely separate things. People often conflate the two by thinking that going from wav or flac to a lossy file format like mp3 or m4a means the track becomes more compressed dynamically, but that’s not the case at all. Essentially, an mp3 and a flac version of the same track will have the same dynamic range.
And yes, while audible artifacts can be a thing with very low bitrate lossy compression, once you get to128kbps with a modern lossy codec it becomes pretty much impossible to hear in a blind test. Hell, even 96kbps opus is much audibly perfect for the vast majority of listeners.
In a distant past I liked to compare hires tracks with the normal ones. It turned out that they often used a different master with more dynamic range for the hires release, tricking the listener into thinking it sounded different because of the high bitrate and sampling frequency. The second step was to convert the high resolution track to standard 16 bit 44.1 kHz and do a/b testing to prove my point to friends.
My roommate always corrects me when I make this same point, so I’ll pass it along. Blu-Rays are compressed using H.264/H.265, just less than streaming services.
People don’t like hearing this, but streaming services tune their codecs to properly calibrated TVs. Very few people have properly calibrated TVs. In particular, people really like to up the brightness and contrast.
A lot of scenes that look like mud are that way because you really aren’t supposed to be able distinguish between those levels of blackness.
That said, streaming services should have seen the 1000 comments like the ones here and adjusted already. You don’t need bluray level of bits to make things look better in those dark scenes, you need to tune your encoder to allow it to throw more bits into the void.
Lmao, I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding, both in tuning and development. They have already poured through maximized quality vs cost. Tuning your encoder to allow for more bits in some scenes by definition ups the average bitrate of the file, unless you’re also taking bits away from other scenes. Streaming services have already found a balance of video quality vs storage/bandwith costs that they are willing to accept, which tends to be around 15mbps for 4k. That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
Calibrating your tv, while a great idea, can only do so much vs low-bitrate encodings and the fake HDR services build in solely to trigger the HDR popup on your tv and trick it into upping the brightness rather than to actuality improve the color accuracy/vibrancy.
They don’t really care about the quality, they care that subscribers will keep their subscriptions. They go as low quality as possible to cut costs while retaining subs.
Blu-rays don’t have this same issue because there are no storage or bandwith costs to the provider, and people buying blu-rays are typically more informed, have higher quality equipment, and care more about image quality than your typical streaming subscriber.
I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding
They don’t really care about the quality
It’s funny that you are trying to make both these points at the same time.
You don’t hire world class experts if you don’t care about quality.
I have a hobby of doing re-encoding blurays to lower bitrates. And one thing that’s pretty obvious is the world class experts who wrote the encoders in the first place have them overly tuned to omit data from dark areas of a scene to avoid wasting bits in that location. This is true of H265, VP9, and AV1. You have to specifically tune those encoders to push the encoder to spend more of it’s bits on the dark area or you have to up the bitrate to absurd levels.
Where these encoders spend the bitrate in dark scenes is on any areas of light within the scene. That works great if you are looking at something like a tree with a lot of dark patches, but it really messes with a single light person with darkness everywhere. It just so happens that it’s really easy to dump 2mbps on a torch in a hall and leave just 0.1mbps on the rest of the scene.
That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
I can tell you that this is simply false. And it’s the same psuedo-scientific logic that someone trying to sell gold plated cables and FLAC encodings pushes.
Look, beyond just the darkness tuning problem that streaming services have, the other problem they have is a QOS. The way content is encoded for streaming just isn’t ideal. When you say “they have to hit 14mpbs” the fact is that they are forcing themselves to do 14mbps throughout the entire video. The reason they do this is because they want to limit buffering as much as possible. It’s a lot better experience to lower your resolution because you are constantly buffering. But that action makes it really hard to do good video optimizations on the encoder. Ever second of the video they are burning 14mb whether they need those 14mb or not. The way that’d deliver less data would be if they only averaged 14mbps rather than forcing it throughout. Allowing for 40mbps bursts when needed but then pushing everything else out at 1mbps saves on bandwidth. However, the end user doesn’t know that the reason they just started buffering is because a high motion action scene is coming up (and netflix doesn’t want to buffer for more than a few minutes).
The other point I’d make is that streaming companies simply have a pipeline that they shove all video through. And, because it’s so generalized, these sorts of tradeoffs which make stuff look like a blocky mess happen. Sometimes that blocky mess is present in the source material (The streaming services aren’t ripping the blurays themselves, they get it from the content providers who aren’t necessarily sending in raws).
I say all this because you can absolutely get 4k and 1080p looking good at sub-bluray rates. I have a library filled with these re-encodes that look great because of my experience here. A decent amount of HD media can be encoded at 1 or 2mbps and look great. But you have to make tradeoffs that streaming companies won’t make.
For the record, the way I do my encoding is a scene by scene encode using VMAF to adjust the quality rate with some custom software I built to do just that. I target a 95% VMAF which ends up looking just fantastic across media.
I fail to see where TV calibration comes in here tbh. If I can see blocky artifacts from low bitrate it will show up on any screen unless you turn the brightness down so far that nothing is visible.
Blocky artifacts typically appear in low light situations. There will be situations where it might just be blocky due to not having enough bits (high motion scenes) but there are plenty of cases where low light tuning is where you’d end up noticing the blockyness.
🤓☝️ many older blu-rays also used VC1
Or worse. I think it was the original Ninja Turtles movie that I had owned on DVD and the quality of it kind of sucked. Years later I got it on blu ray and I swear they just ripped one of the DVD copies to make the blu ray disc.
Sadly, that basically feels like what happened with The Fellowship of the Ring’s theatrical cut blu ray, too. It just doesn’t look that great.
Then the extended edition has decent fidelity but some bizarro green-blue color grading.
Higher bitrate though init
Significantly, streaming is 8-16Mbps for 4K, whereas 4K discs are >100
I’m a person with sensitive hearing and mp3 always sounds muddy to me compared with a flac or wav rip. My coworker poo-pooed this notion, but I proved it to him. Mp3 does alter the sounds, most people won’t notice, but for somebody that does hear the differences its annoying. I would not spend 10k or anything. I paid $15 for an old 5.1 system, and max $80 for a pi2 with a DAC hat. LOL
For me its like if you stood outside a persons house and heard them talking vs their words coming over their TV. There is a noticable signature that let’s you hear its the TV or real people, and that’s what mp3 vs wav is like for me.
I can also hear my neighbours ceiling fan running in the connected town home. That almost inaudible drone of the motor running, drives me nuts
I like lossless compression. But not because I’d be a audio nut. I prefer it from a data retention and archival viewpoint. I could cut and join lossless data as often as i like, without losses accumulating.
Do you often cut and join audio that you did not record yourself?
I would not call it often, but it happens.
There’s a difference though, it’s just that gold plated cables doesn’t change anything.
I’d love testing a Sennheiser hd600 series, to see if I hear some difference, from my 598 headset. But they are so expensive so I’m all okay with my refurbished 40€ ones :-)
A DAC for the PC is a nice step up though IMO (there are crap ones too ofc). Not everything is audiofoolery.
No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys.
I remember in 2017 going into an audio store near where I worked, and the guy was emphasizing how clear the audio sounded on certain (expensive) setups, and how it was streaming in from “Norway” which was better than what you’d find on Spotify or YouTube. It took me a while to piece together what he was on about.
Dude was talking about Tidal. All he meant was they streamed lossless formats via Tidal. As if anyone could tell the difference between, say, stereo 192kbps AAC and flac.
Also, remember the supposed amazing quality of MQA? What a shitshow. It’s rather remarkable that a pair of Airpods Pro 2, when fit into your ears properly, are essentially perfectly tuned headphones for only $250 or less compared to some of what the competition sells. Not to say I don’t love my Sennheiser HD650.
I’ll agree that sound quality doesn’t seem to be consistent but I will say that Bose is a very nice quality sounding company. Never been disappointed by them.
Bose the bass enhancing company? Euw…
Must be why I like it.
Then don’t listen to me and enjoy your headphones 🫡!
Bose is famous for unnatural sound boosting. This appeals to the masses and fits to modern listening habits.
Well their A20s are still top of the list and the most common brand you’ll see during your travels… Must be a good reason.
I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.
60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.
Picked up a bose system test cassette once. It sounds amazing at first listen on anything because they overhype the high and low end, much like most bad modern music. And its actually fatiguing over time and stresses people out. Big reason I hate a lot of (popular) modern music is the over hyped non natural eq.
Friends will show me songs and they grind on my ears with that unnautural 3k boost to make everything “radio sounding”, gross. I don’t want modern radio polish (and the sampled kick drums, awful) I want good sound.
Commodores, night shift, 1985, one of the best sounding albums of all time because they knew what they were doing. And funnily enough one of the first digital tape recordings on a Mitsubishi! Also the nightfly.
Yeah and the loudness wars. It never ended eh.
Yeah sadly. Studies have shown modern music causes fatigue and I think some people at least realize that now. Radio rock is always going to be a sausage waveform. Gotta go underground for good stuff usually.
What’s a sausage waveform 😋??
Maybe that’s why I’m stuck on soma.fm “eighties underground” all day long (not very underground, just good eighties/early nineties music), when I listen to other radios it’s quite tiring in the long run, especially if they jump from say -92 to -98 or 2010 and back, the sound is completely different and saturated.
A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.
You can’t admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:
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You’d no longer be able to pretend that you’re better than the people who have $300 headphones.
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You’d have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.
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You’d have to realize that the tight-knit community you’ve formed with other $10k headphone people isn’t really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.
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Happy cake day
thanks!
I buy headphone cables based on how nice the cable feels, if it transmits noise when it rubs against stuff, and how well the connectors fit into the devices I am using.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.
I think the best thing to do is to assess your ability to hear difference. I can absolutely hear the difference between my Bluetooth earbuds and a decent wired IEM, so I use wired headphones for listening to music. I CANNOT hear a significant qualitative difference between the $25 Chinese IEMs that I use and more expensive options that I have tried, so I use the cheap ones.
To be sure, there ARE perceptible differences between wired headphones, but those are more a matter of EQ and personal preference. I can achieve my maximum perceivable level of quality with pretty inexpensive hardware. It doesn’t mean that other people cannot, that isn’t my problem.
For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.
Around the time when HDMI was released my friend bought some "super-high-end "cable that cost over 200$, since he wanted the "best possible performance " out of his system. I tried to explain that the cheapest cables would give the exact same results if they’re not faulty from the start. We had a loud argument about this, even though the guy is a goddamn tech PhD. He just could not admit he got scammed and tried to give me a lecture about “how the gold plated connectors make all the difference”.
Regarding digital, quality spdif cables absolutely matter. One tiny mistake and they crackle out and don’t work. I’ve gone through many pairs of cheap ones until I just spend the money to never have issues again.
Now will the 1 dollar one sound the same as the 80 dolalr one? Yes. It won’t last or hohld up to dust or abuse at all though.
I mean, electrically all of those things will just attenuate amplitude, not really effect signal oscillations, which is actually what sound is …
All they’re doing is effectively adding a small resistance to the signal which will just lower the volume in effect. Adding any amplifier will fix that
This is quite surprising, especially as we often don’t think of bananas, or even wet mud, as great conductors. However, the tester surmised that introducing the materials into the circuit is just like adding a resistor in series, and they’re unlikely to distort the audio too much, except by lowering the signal level.
I see you also read the article
it could distort the signal or add noise
It was never about sound quality. Sound quality was the justification for spending money and showing off. Just like so much of consumerism.
Yep. Just like the fuckers walking around with $2500 sunglasses.
Those sunglasses don’t do anything that a $20 pair can’t do. And they don’t even look all that different.
The important part is that they enable absolutely disgusting consumerist snobbery, allowing some very vapid people to think that they’re better than other people because they have the expensive sunglasses.
In just about any kind of product you can think of, there are brands catering to this kind of conspicuous consumption.
Or wet mud
Does dry mud exist? I’m pretty sure we just call that dirt xD
There is a certain crusted over and cracked look for dirt that is considered to be dry mud.
Holy shit english has so many specific terms for dirt! It’s just jargon to urban dwellers.
i personally find bananna audio the most appealing
Behold:
5.4 Electrical Conductivity Measurement This method includes electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and dielectric analysis (DEA). The physical state of a material is measured as a function of frequency in EIS and the frequency ranges from 100 Hz - 10 MHz. It is simple and easier technique used to estimate the physiological status of various biological tissues49-52. Experimental frequency response of impedance is characterised by electrical equivalent circuits of materials. The physical properties of materials can be quantified by monitoring the changes in parameters at the equivalent circuit, among various equivalent models proposed53-54. DEA measurement is used in high frequency areas, generally 100 MHz - 10 GHz. DEA is used in moisture estimation and bulk density determination
So a overripe banana is an interesting high-pass filter, though the big takeaway is the conductance vs ripeness.
So if you want to test if a banana is ready to eat, hook it up… preferably with several other bananas in series. If the music is too loud, they are ready. Too quiet, and it’s not time yet.
The moment you give me a link to a banana tree/MP3 player/ripeness tester/EQ:
I only listen to music with overripe bananas. It sounds best that way. Copper wire just doesn’t sound as good. Believe me: My ears are very sensitive and superior to yours.
You get much better conductivity with plaintains because the cross-sectional area is bigger.
But because my ears are so discerning, I only put my audio jacks in jackfruit.
Just ask an audiophile what they think about blind tests. If they argue against them you’ve found a snake oil salesman.
But what’s the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you’re blindfolded?
HEY! I got my $3000 wooden volume knob because it’s pretty and I can’t take a blind test if it’s worth it. I need my eyes to see it!
All I want to know is just how many veils has that soundstage got‽ Here I am, just having a soundstage like a sucker, and they’ve got veils they can lift!
3k is obviously an exaggeration but goddamn why is woodwork so expensive?! I needed wooden set of some things that are normally made of plastic for about $100, the wood was $465 and literally only one guy on earth makes it. Fuck me!
You’ve identified why. If you are able get some tools doing stuff yourself is in general fun
I mean yeah if you’re literally the only guy in the entire world making it (I’m not joking, literally the only one. Some others make the same class of thing that would physically fit, but in the wrong style and lord knows why but it was a deliberate, and bad, decision) then you can charge whatever you want. Dude doesn’t even have it patented or anything, the designs are public (since like the 60s) and if I had any woodworking XP I could sell the exact same thing legally. 'Course, I’ve never worked wood in my damn life, so…
Still, $465 is a lot for these items.
What exactly is this thing, I’m curious now
Eh, I really didn’t want to be specific because it’s unfortunately both exceedingly nerdy and somewhat controversial (not that it should be imo but it is), but, you a Fallout: New Vegas fan by chance?
Let’s just say I can now patrol the Mojave and not worry so much about the cazadores, (but I’d still almost wish for nuclear winter, of course.)
“You can’t trust blind tests for audio, that’s the wrong sense bro. You need double deaf studies, obvs.”
Now if they’re deaf tests on the other hand…
So, like the $5 Trader Joe’s wine tasting with wine enthusiasts.
What, price? There’s good wine and not so good wine (and battery acid), that’s it.
Freakonomics covered this back around their inception. The data shows wine tasters and critics generally rate expensive wine as better. In a blind trial where expensive was replaced with two buck chuck and a $5 option, researchers proved there’s not much difference in ratings when the price isn’t known. Tell them two buck chuck is the most expensive thing on the table and it’s then rated as such.
I believe this was part of their coverage on experts not being experts, iirc.
But did they use oxygen-free copper (OFC) wire? Because otherwise the results are skewed as regular copper sounds just as bad as a banana stuck in wet mud.
i’m into oxygen free listening lately
Nah, they used oxygen-free bananas though.
Audiophiles get a lot of friction, but this kind of person exists in almost any hobby. People fascinated by equipment and ascetics who loose the plot about what their hobby is all about.
