How do you "see" which is better?

[Coldblackice]

How can you visualize the quality difference between two files (to whatever extent possible)?

Over the years, I've read of audiophiles using audio programs and spectrograms to determine actual quality, and in particular, to determine if a file has been upconverted (uselessly) from a lower bitrate to a higher one.

From what I've dug up thus far in Google's fields yonder, is to look at the spectrograms of the two files and look for hard frequency cutoffs, which typically signal a low-pass filter having been applied somewhere in the process -- thus, typically the result of an upconverted mp3 (particularly when the cutoff is around 15-16Khz).

What other things/patterns/traits can I look for? And not necessarily just to determine if something's been upconverted, either -- any kind of visual representation of quality, artifacts, etc.

 

[reaper12]

IS there any reason why you want to do this?

I mean just listen to both files if you can't hear the difference then what's the problem?

 

[SirMaster]

What you said is pretty much all you need to do. If the music was compressed lossy at some point there will have been a low-pass filter applied which will be clearly evident. Might even be as high as 18-20KHz depending on the codec used and the bitrate (think like 500kbit AAC). But music that has alway been lossless will not be flat on top, it will go past 20KHz often.

 

[HammerSandwich]

Try Audacity's "show clipping" feature also.