Audiophiles

I will start by saying that I can tell the difference between 192Kbps mp3 and say 2CH DSD from SACD. Typically what gives it away for me are things like cymbals and intimate acoustic guitar recordings, and also subtlety that is missing from the lower bitrate conversions; there is a reason they are referred to as "lossy" formats, you are losing information that is not reproduced the same as the original. I can cite very specific examples that brought me to this realization after hearing a comparison, one that comes to mind off the top of my head is the DVDA version of Santana/Everlast - "Put Your Lights On". After having heard only the 192kbps mp3 version of the song since it was released, I obtained a 24/96 FLAC rip of the same song, and the first time I played it I noticed a distinct difference at the beginning - I could hear a slight "clicking" during one of the quieter acoustic parts. From what I can tell, it is a bracelet or other piece of jewelry one of them is wearing clicking against the soundboard or pick guard. It actually became a bit annoying because it stuck out so much to me, but this is an accurate conveyance of what it actually sounded like.

There are many variables at play that can make this not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, mastering and dynamic range. Typically your standard 192kbps mp3 is sourced from the CD version of an album, which these days you can bet is highly compressed or "brickwalled" in order to sound more energetic on crappy audio equipment. While listening to a DSD SACD recording the other day I noticed the peaks on the spectrum graph rarely went above half volume, leaving plenty of headroom for when the song actually needed to get loud. Often times the Vinyl/SACD/DVDA versions of albums are mastered differently than their CD counterparts, and have superior dynamic range because of this.

I have what I like to consider a decent stereo setup. I have by no means spent tens of thousands of dollars on the typical "snake oil" diminishing return items like $1K cables and the like, but it was a sizable investment in high quality vintage equipment. This consists of a Kenwood "L07" set - L07C preamp which uses a "dual mono" board layout, and pair of L07M solid-state monoblocks which are "lab grade" DC-stable amps. These feed a pair of original Acoustic Research AR9 speakers - and I don't mean to start a war against headphones here, but headphones are incapable of reproducing the range that a pair of speakers like these can at proper levels, particularly at the low end. Oh, and the source for digital playback is an HT Omega Claro card.

In summary, YES there is a real and noticeable difference between 192kbps mp3 and high resolution digital formats, it just depends on if you care about the difference...
 
I wouldn't count on the DVD-A and vinyl versions being mastered any different than the CDs, unless you're listening to music that will never be a household name. Even so, those CDs should be mastered just fine. I've never seen any loud SACDs, though. Cymbals matter to me a lot. I can't even stand that most music quiets down drums totally to the point where you can barely hear them. That's why I mainly listen to Led Zeppelin, over and over and over. Bonham beat the shit out of those drums and cymbals, and they are mixed into the songs at very nice, loud, but not fatiguing volumes. Lossy stuff totally ruins cymbals. As talent diminishes, both musically and audio-engineering-wise, so does the need to reproduce the noise.

Headphones can produce a full hearing range just fine. They are right near your ear canal. They don't need to move a room's worth of air. On the low end, I will tend to agree that they are a tad weak, but it's still nothing an open design with an actual sub in the room can't take care of. If sound could be pipe right from a speaker to your ear, then maybe I would even begin to consider that they are valid, but there is no real physical separation in channels, and you have to consider that sound loses quality the farther it travels.
 
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I dont hear a difference on my PX5's, but maybe they just arent good enough.
 
MacLeod said:
Yeah theyve got tests like this all over the internet. 128K bit vs 320K bit and you can switch back and forth between them. There is no audible difference.
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it is pretty easy to tell the difference from 128k and 320k at least with my audio setup
 
grimster said:
Yeah, I've heard good speakers...they're for movies. I don't need them ruining music. You don't need a sub, a woofer, a midrange, and a tweeter for headphones. They're right on your ear. Speakers need all those components because they need to fill a room with that sound. I'll keep headphones for everything.

How laughable that someone compared a 3dB volume difference for an ABX test versus hearing tiny little artifacts. You don't even need to pay attention to hear that. Until they invent a test to call out liars who just give random results on purpose, I won't buy into the BS. It's admitted over and over that all this stuff with hearing is psychological, so our ears are capable beyond our brain. Everyone perceives differently. They really should do experiments with these tests comparing sober people to people who like to high every day or do stuff like LSD or shrooms when listening to music.
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3db difference is easily audible, artifacts can be as well. Speakers aren't just for movies, which is why most audiophiles have a 2.0 system in a treated room.
 
I guess I'm just a cheap ass who doesn't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have sound that's still not as good as headphones. It's just like the vinyl crowd. They spend and spend and spend for diminishing returns, for a format that is pretty low-fi, while they could have more accurate sound reproduction and a format that doesn't wear out for cheap if they would just go digital. I use speakers when I want to lay down in bed and not really pay attention to what's going on with what I'm watching. Just because a room shakes doesn't mean you're getting accurate sound.
 
@grimster: I beg to differ, and I believe at this point what you are arguing is personal preference, not technical absolutes... I imagine you have been in the presence of a live band or a symphony orchestra, the experience is physically palpable, to more than just your eardrums. Recreating that is the side of this debate of preference that I fall on. Headphones can't recreate the rumble that you feel in your organs from a kettle or bass drum, and implementing an external subwoofer with a set of headphones runs you into trying to attain a flat response vs. a pair of speakers that are engineered to provide that flat response across the spectrum. Again, I am not trying to disparage headphones completely - I have heard nice sets of cans and they can be sublime, but that is a matter of preference...
 
Yeah, whatever. I don't need to feel bass and shake a house to hear it. Speakers are far from flat across a spectrum. You have points where their individual responses intersect. I don't like live music of any sort, whether it is in person or recorded, so now, I'm not using that as my basis.
 
grimster said:
Yeah, whatever. I don't need to feel bass and shake a house to hear it. Speakers are far from flat across a spectrum. You have points where their individual responses intersect. I don't like live music of any sort, whether it is in person or recorded, so now, I'm not using that as my basis.
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The larger problem of headphones is soundstage. When you play a normal recording through them, they sound like everything is trapped in your head. Now that can be solved via a binaural recording, though those are rather rare. However it leaves another soundstage problem that the soundstage rotates with your head, which sound unnatural. That is solvable too, but only with head tracking technology and HRTF calculation, which is rather expensive.

Now that doesn't mean you can't listen on headphones and enjoy the hell out of it. I love headphones for many things. However those are reasons why people like speakers, and are things headphones are hard pressed to give.
 
I don't think music is mastered in mind that if you listen with two speakers in front of you that instruments are magically going to be positioned at other places within the room. This kind of thinking, thinking that you can get 3D sound from stereo speakers is just bonkers. Not claiming a head phone can do it, either, but stereo speakers do not give some magical binaural effect. Try again.
 
No stereo speakers give a good stereo soundstage, as one would expect. Surround speakers give a good surround soundstage. Most music is mastered to give a good sound with two stereo speakers, for better or worse. That doesn't mean it sounds "like it is live" but the soundstage is generally more convincing than headphones.

Again if you like headphones better that's fine, I'm just explaining to you why many like speakers. I have nice headphones, and nice speakers. I prefer the speakers for the soundstage reason.
 
People like speakers because it's something to brag about. Not too many people are going to make someone sit down and listen to some headphones while they listen to nothing and creepily stare at them.
 
grimster said:
People like speakers because it's something to brag about. Not too many people are going to make someone sit down and listen to some headphones while they listen to nothing and creepily stare at them.
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Oh good lord. You should stop with the nonsense and the headphone crusade.
 
1st: Why the hell does "mp3ornot" compare a lower quality mp3 to a higher quality mp3? That contradicts the name of the site...the name of the site implies lossless vs mp3.

Well, I tried again using my same shitty equipment (onboard sound + KSC75 headphones). I did 2 runs of 5 tests and got this:

http://mp3ornot.com/badge/11525.png = 5/5
http://mp3ornot.com/badge/11517.png = 4/5

This surprised me (overall result = 9/10) because I certainly wasn't 90% confident.

[I found this screenshot: http://mp3ornot.com/badge/166700.png - 23/23 = 100% - the guy who posted it claims, "ESI Juli@ sound card, audio-technica ATH-A700 headphones." - it's a legitimate link, but perhaps he just found the address eh?]

To be honest, I wouldn't even assume that I could consistently beat that test using good equipment.

I'd have to choose the songs, compare to lossless, and run my own A/B/X test. That's how I did it in the past, and the music selection certainly makes some difference.

I don't believe the differences are "drastic." - The test is a nuisance regardless...

I actually do have a prolific background in audio (the hobby has been put on the back-burner since about 2006), but from my experiences:

Speakers vs Headphones: Obviously headphones are the easy route to high fidelity. You'd really have to know what you're doing to achieve similar fidelity using speakers, and the cost would be considerably higher, but the subjective advantages can be huge. I prefer the speakers for many reasons, but in terms of the measurements I've seen:

In-Ear-Monitors (the larger varieties using balanced armatures (they generally use the Knowles acoustics BK series armatures) and NOT moving coils) can achieve nearly perfect impulse response when sealed into the ear. They can still extend down to 10-20Hz (so despite the lack of visceral, "real" bass - the sound is there). They can have impulse responses with a very small degree of delayed signals or resonances owed to their extremely small size which renders the resonances and parasitic effects much higher in frequency than the monitor's useful bandwidth. This seems to remain true for multi-armature IEMs. As we go larger and further away from the ear, to perhaps the 50mm driver headphones, we lose some of this linear-distortion fidelity. The non-linear distortion numbers may actually be somewhat similar across the board (speakers vs headphones vs IEMs of the highest class).

There is some debate about the actual response variations at the inner-ear, but I believe this can generally be approximated using a Zwislocki coupler, which is a sort of mechanical EQ of the ear's effect to equalize the response to yield the free field equivalent. A slight rise at about 3 kHz is common in this endeavor... Many manufacturers use the old work of "Killian" to correct for the response changes at the ear, but that data appears to be old, not very scientific, and flawed...

I think it'd be nice if recording engineers experimented with binaural music more often. This may provide that huge STAGE that seems to be missing in headphones. Perhaps they could give us more for our money...with a few different recordings for the same music.

Blah... to summarize: I think your best shot at beating these tests is to use a good, well-sealed, balanced armature IEM, but perhaps a speaker setup will be able to resolve some imaging cues as better clues.

I think sound is most enjoyable coming out of a good set of speakers in a treated room. I haven't figured out what I like best in that regard, but I've come close...I won't revisit this hobby for a long time...
 
That mp3ornot clip hardly represents what I consider critical listening material with a wide sonic range. It's exactly the type of shitty music I avoid listening to, and both clips sound like ass to me.
 
It's hard to tell artifacts of lossy compression from artifacts of clipping and dynamic compression. Cymbals sound like explosions anymore. Snares sound electronic. Bass is cranked way up, and all the higher frequency detail that rides on the low frequency waves get clipped, so when bass hits, actual details of the music simply get erased. I think this is why people push for tweeters in cars when they get subs, and just end up with a boom and basically a high frequency hiss/noise with no real detail (basing this off the type of music those types of people listen to.)
 
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