- A simple test can see how well you can recognize lossy formats using your own music choices
- Beyond a certain point, most people cannot tell the difference easily
- High-quality lossless is still the most future-proof format
How good is good enough with music? When you listen to digital music, what you hear depends on the original master, the file format, and most of all, whether it’s lossy – reducing sound quality to reduce file sizes – or lossless, which is perfect and perfect. If you’re serious about audio, lossless will beat lossless every time.
Right?
Maybe not.
On the r/audiophile subreddit, a user named vlad1m1r has shared a tool that tests how well you can differentiate between different quality levels and formats. Can you tell the difference between a lossless FLAC or WAV and a 320kbps MP3, even if it’s music you listen to all the time and you know inside and out?
According to Apple Music chief Oliver Schusser, most people can’t. Speaking to Billboard, he said that “frankly, if we did an anonymous blind test on just an iPhone with headphones… I can tell you that most fans wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
Is he right? It turns out there’s an easy way to find out. Vlad1m1r’s Flactest runs in your browser and allows you to drag a FLAC, WAV or AIFF file into the app, which will transcode it to different MP3 bitrates and play them back for you without revealing which is which.
And at the risk of sounding clickbaity, the results may surprise you. They certainly surprised vlad1m1r, who struggled to tell the difference between uncompressed FLAC and high-bitrate MP3.
Redditors have been having fun with this and I thought I’d join in. I have a very nice Hi-Res Audio friendly setup. Are my headphones, speakers and ears good enough to see what are often very subtle differences?
The trouble of testing
One of the problems with listening tests is that you can’t always be sure you’re listening to the same version when comparing different formats and bitrates. Some releases, especially by older artists, have been reissued multiple times and in some cases remastered, and this is likely to change the sound more than a minor difference in encoding speed.
Of course, source quality isn’t the only factor that will affect what you hear. The speakers you use, their placement and the acoustic qualities of your room make a difference, as do the kind of headphones you listen to, the DAC you have and the volume you play the music at. They will also shape the sound.
Flactest solves a lot of that for testing purposes because all these things remain constant. You supply a single original and it then transcodes it into multiple MP3 resolutions via the same LAME codec, as well as playing your pristine original. This means you get consistency: you’re listening to the same song from the same source on the same hardware and software while switching between the five mysterious formats it serves up.
It’s worth noting that there’s another factor at play here, and it will apply to anyone who’s no longer a teenager: age. From early adulthood we start to lose the upper end of our hearing, and that means a 50-year-old like me won’t hear the same highs that I could easily distinguish as a 15-year-old. So if encoding changes make a difference at the very best frequencies, which is where a lot of digital artifacts tend to live in compressed MP3s, I might not hear much difference.
Pure FLAC attack
I listened to several songs two ways: on my large Adam studio monitors through an SSL 2 audio interface, and on BeyerDynamic DT990 Pro open-back headphones via an iFi desktop DAC.
My source files were 44.1kHz WAV and 16-bit/44.1 and 24-bit/96kHz FLAC, with songs I’ve been listening to for years – Radiohead, U2, Talk Talk and so on – as well as music I made myself on my Mac.
The low bitrate MP3s were easy to spot because they sound atrocious, like they’re being played in the next room by someone with a really bad hi-fi system. At 16kbps or 64kbps the MP3 compression is really obvious and there’s a noticeable step up in quality when you move to 320kbps on busier tracks where there’s a lot going on. The telltales are fizzy distorted guitars and acoustic instruments, especially cymbals and hi-hats, that become noticeably “splashy” when you reduce the bitrate.
But after 128 kbps it became difficult for me. Time and time again, I often couldn’t tell the difference between the 320 kbps MP3s and the lossless originals.
Perhaps the trick to distinguishing the differences is to listen to the same music over and over again. When I ran the tests using my own music – songs I’m currently mixing – I got perfect results. It makes sense, because I’ve been obsessing over little details in those tracks, like the rush of a drum machine hi-hat and the thump of a bass guitar, and I’ve been listening to those things over and over trying to perfect them. But it’s a different kind of listening than when I listen for pleasure.
At least for me the answer is clear: I can’t tell the difference between the highest quality MP3 and the same song as a FLAC on my headphones or speaker setup. But that doesn’t mean I won’t do it in the future.
No loss
It is well known that, with some exceptions, most of us cannot hear the difference between a very high bitrate lossy file and a lossless file on ordinary audio equipment. Once you hit 192 kbps or higher, it’s much more about the quality of your components: your hi-fi, your amplifier, your speakers, your headphones.
But if you run the tests and find you can’t tell the difference between lossless and slightly lossy, that doesn’t mean you should stick to encoding or buying everything as 320kbps MP3 or equivalent AAC. Lossy high-bitrate compression is still lossy, and once music information is removed, you can’t get it back.
Upsampling can make a best guess with impressive results, but it’s still just a guess rather than the discarded data. So for long-term storage, it’s worth saving your digital music in the highest quality lossless format available to you, even if owning a high-end system isn’t in your immediate future – because if you get a better set later, you may regret not having better quality files.
I know from reviewing high-end headphones and from experiencing proper audiophile systems that cost a lot more than my car that with the right gear you’ll hear details that lesser sets keep buried in the mix.
And that’s why I think it’s wise to future-proof your digital library. You simply don’t know what you’ll be listening to in the years to come. I thought I was pretty smart about ripping CDs to 160kbps MP3 back in the iPod days because I didn’t have good enough hardware to need anything better – a choice I now regret as I’ve long since saved the original CDs. Today I’m on eBay buying many of them again.
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