Music / Video for comparing speakers?

I'm later to the party but Fleetwood Mac the album Rumours, Michael Jackson Thriller, Pink Floyd Pulse , Ledisi Vaya con Dios, Diana Krall etc are cds I pop in to see what a stereo can do. Blues works as well and of course Metallica though not all albums. I recently got a stereo set up and have been trying to expand my musical tastes. Also hugely matters what kind of room you are listening to music in.

 

Test with any music but use quality FLAC, WAV, etc...

Some simple recomendations to test.
for vocals:
the_treblemakers-trebles_finals
the_barden_bellas-bellas_finals
(pitch perfect soundtrack)

rock: Enter Sandman (Metalica)

more music:
Simple Minds - Don't You (Forget About Me)
Coldplay - Viva La Vida
Eric Clapton - Tears In Heaven
Bossa-n-Roses - Banda Do Soul - Sweet Child Of Mine (Feat. Natascha)

Has your headphones neodymium magnets?
Good test

 

Boredoms often use whole range nicely

 

@pascal: this one?



Interesting choice of cover-a... music.

 

If you can find them (Amazon!), Telarc Digital produced a number of fantastically mastered CD's full of classical tracks, a number of them are Sci-Fi themed and are thoroughly enjoyable for anyone who loves classic sci fi movies and TV shows.

There's a SoundCloud version of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathrustra, which is bitchin for extremely wide dynamic range classical presentation. One of my Telarc Digital discs has this track too, the venerable "Star Tracks" album. Example (not to be considered high quality):


Also, the "Imperial March" theme from Star Wars is fantastic for audio system abuse.

 

Yes, this one.
But try a higher quality Flac or wav
It improves a lot with better sound.

 

There are no 'hich quality' wav or flac. All lossless formats such as flac sound identical to the source (pcm, cd..). The only difference between a 800kps and 600kps flac is the file size (assuming the encoder can of course produce both such versions).

 

How come I can't tell the difference between MP3 160Kbps and FLAC? The difference in file size is massive but it all sounds the same to me and my hearing is good.

As for good music to test speakers with, I like the album Ágætis byrjun by Sigur Ros. Actually pretty much all of their albums are good for this.

 

Because, as has been conclusively shown in multiple, properly conducted double-blind or ABX tests, the psycho-acoustic modelling of modern high quality MP3 encoders will typically result in an audio presentation where the difference between "lossless" and "compressed" is not humanly discernible.

The most famous, and likely first of these tests, was done by the German magazine c't back in 2000; a link to the original along with a translated version of the article can be found here: http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=27324

A more recent one from McGill University, finding (with MP3's encoded at 256k-320kbps rates) the audio samples could not be reliably detected as different from the source CD media: http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~hockman/documents/Pras_presentation2009.pdf

There are others, if you dig, but they all end up with the same conclusion: in a properly conducted test, you aren't going to tell the difference. The only caveat to this general result pattern is related to people with abnormalities in their hearing. The c't test actually has a good example of this - one of the "more successful" folks in picking out compressed audio (who wasn't very successful, but at least was moreso than others) had lost all hearing above 8KHz in one ear. This allowed him to discern certain flare to specific types of musical tracks when compressed, which is normally not something that a properly functioning set of ears would pick up on.

 

That confirms something I've suspected for a long time then. Thanks!

 

I remember when there were different MP3 encoders to choose from and people were skeptical about LAME's VBR modes.

LAME's strides from early not-so-good to the 3.9x beta versions of psycho-acoustic modelling was really why it "won" the encoder war IHMO.

Blasts from the past:
http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread.php?119713-MP3-s-Blade-vs-Lame

http://archive.arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/1q00/mp3/mp3-2.html

 

AFAIK as well, you need very good equipment AND a very well chosen audio material to be able to tell the difference between an >= 160 kbps mp3 and a loseless version of it.

OTOH, loseless formats are still very much suited for storing an audio collection. As a baseline for converting to various lossy formats on various (portable) devices

 

Did you read the article from 2000 that Albuquerque linked to? They did what you said and they couldn't distinguish the high-bitrate MP3 from the CD-audio.

 

I've read quite a few of such articles over time, so couldn't be bothered this once.

Sorry if what I said could be misunderstood - I actually agree to the conclusions you mentioned. Additionally, I think I remember there were a few specially concieved audio tracks in which you could tell the difference. Nothing you can ever buy at a record store though.

 

This was actually the context of the 2013 McGill research; they used multiple encoding bitrates to see where the rolloff point really hits home. They selected a wide range of source audio samples (to your point, some sounds are more likely to exhibit problems than others) and also used a properly controlled studio environment / studio-level equipment to conduct the test. Arguably, an even better place to detect the subtle changes when compared to the original c't article.

The 2013 research showed that, below 256kbps, several participants could detect the compressed version in a statistically meaningful way. Once the encoding rate hit 256kbps it was a wash, and strangely enough at 320kbps, the compressed version was actually the preferred one -- although not in a statistically meaningful way either.

 

you need good listening equipment, i.e. not beats headphones

You might wanna reread the conclusion

I havent tested but are 99% sure I couldnt tell and if I could the difference will be extremely minor, I might have a listen later

 

I have Logitech G930 headset, but even on much better setups I've never been able to reliably tell a good MP3 from a CD. I am not worthy

 

That result isn't quite what you make it out to be...

They could tell a difference, the problem is that they started choosing the compressed sample. Go ahead, read the result, very specifically the bar graphs where they show which groups (professional vs "amateur") and which selections they chose. Page 17 to be precise, notice that the CD/320 bargraphs for sound engineers actually dips below 50% for both lines -- this means they were choosing the compressed file playback, not the "true" file playback.

Not what you might naively expect, but it makes logical sense: the psycho-acoustic model is specifically tuned to sound good to human hearing. It makes sense that the compressed version actually ends up being more pleasant to the ear, even if doing so is "untrue" to the source.

 

(both fall in the non significant range i.e. chance) And notice on the same graph the musicians prefered the CD over the 320kps by quite a bit more. i.e. in significant range.
I was just saying the conclusion disagree's with you

I'll look into this some more later busy ATM organzing a holiday, see if theres further studies
found this though from google
http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-128-320/
bang <1 sec I made my choice (it was night and day to day) & my hearings pretty bad I thought, though I do record music

 

And yet the same group got the 256kbps utterly wrong (more than they got the 320kbps right.)

The difference is discernable under very specific circumstances, but not in the way you insinuate.

And choosing between 128kbps and 320kbps really isn't the same conversation.