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MP3 Blind Test *POLL* *CLOSED* *SONG HOSTED*

yhelothar

yhelothar

Lifer
I ripped a small sample out of the Dave Grusin CD from Sheffield lab - really high quality recordings.
I encoded one to 320kbps, then I encoded it again to 128kbps and back to 320kbps to make it a blind test.

So can you tell which one is the higher quality one?

I'll host the full song in the highest quality people are able to distinguish after this poll 🙂

UPDATE
B = 320
A = 128

My server is really dead now.. so you guys will have to wait till tommorrow for it to come back up.
Anyone wanna host the song for me? 🙂

UPDATE
OK engenzero hosted the song.. thanks!
here it is in the 320kbps glory!
 
This'll have to wait until I get home. Speakers at work don't even need a power plug, they power from the speaker output.
 
i say B is the better one... it has a richer sound

btw im listening on a pair of koss ksc35 so that shouldn't be too accurate
 
I'm going to say A is the straight 320kbps file and B is the recompressed file. B just doesn't have as much "presence" as A. At least for me.
 
I say B but then it's hard to tell. It really depends on the song. That isn't a good song to compare.
 
I'm pretty sure B is the straight 320kbps, the cymbal crashes sound a little brighter.

They might as well be the same though, there's not enough going on to really show the difference between the encoding rates.
 
I would have to say "A" is the 320k/bps. "B" sounds flat from the beginning. At about 7.5 seconds, "A" sounds more spacious, less compressed.

I'll be embarrassed if I'm wrong. 😛
 
Can I ask what codec and what codec settings you used for each file? And what did you use to rip the files? I am pretty sure i know what one is the real 320, but knowing what encoder you used would make me 99.99999999999999% sure.
 
Originally posted by: KingNothing
I'm pretty sure B is the straight 320kbps, the cymbal crashes sound a little brighter.

They might as well be the same though, there's not enough going on to really show the difference between the encoding rates.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Now when you have a loud rock song with lots of bass and treble as well as lyrics for example you can distinguish the difference. The more that's going on in the song the duller it will sound at a lower bitrate.
 
After listening to both quite a few times I agree with Choralone that A appears to have more depth to the sound. Notes seem to sound cleared and more fluent. This is with a set of Sennheiser HD-580s (though they're driven by a laptop at the moment, rather than my usual Audigy 2).

I should mention that music like this is much more difficult to distinguish, almost negligible. If you compared 2 songs with heavy electric guitar, incubus or linkin park for example, the difference is much clearer.
 
128kbps will be fine for some tracks and awful for others. With lossy compression for audio, stills, or video there will always be simpler samples that compress well (and don't need as many bits) and more complex samples that compress poorly (so flaws at a low bitrate are more obvious).

I'm just going to stick with my lossless FLAC ripping and not worry about finding the perfect lossy bitrate 🙂
 
Originally posted by: apac
After listening to both quite a few times I agree with Choralone that A appears to have more depth to the sound. Notes seem to sound cleared and more fluent. This is with a set of Sennheiser HD-580s (though they're driven by a laptop at the moment, rather than my usual Audigy 2).

I should mention that music like this is much more difficult to distinguish, almost negligible. If you compared 2 songs with heavy electric guitar, incubus or linkin park for example, the difference is much clearer.
Click to expand...

Or Smashing Pumpkins. :thumbsup:
 
Originally posted by: KingNothing
Originally posted by: apac
After listening to both quite a few times I agree with Choralone that A appears to have more depth to the sound. Notes seem to sound cleared and more fluent. This is with a set of Sennheiser HD-580s (though they're driven by a laptop at the moment, rather than my usual Audigy 2).

I should mention that music like this is much more difficult to distinguish, almost negligible. If you compared 2 songs with heavy electric guitar, incubus or linkin park for example, the difference is much clearer.
Click to expand...

Or Smashing Pumpkins. :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Yup, that too. I've actually had all of the above in 128 and 320 at one time or another and the difference is astounding on my klipsch reference series setup. Also, maybe it's just me but I notice 128kb/s audio to usually have more background static.
 
They sound exactly the same to me, but then I played them with the built-in speakers on my Thinkpad. These things have the to be the WORST speakers I've ever seen on a PC, and your MP3 probably would have sounded the same to me even if you encoded it at 56kbps. :disgust:
 
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