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bityard11/08/20242 repliesview on HN

Ability to tell MP3 from the original source was always dependent on encoder quality, bitrate, and the source material. In the mid 2000's, I tried to encode all of my music as MP3. Most of it sounded just fine because pop/rock/alt/etc are busy and "noisy" by design. But some songs (particularly with few instruments, high dynamic range, and female vocals) were just awful no matter how high I cranked the bitrate. And I'm not even an "audiophile," whatever that means these days.

No doubt encoders and the codecs themselves have improved vastly since then. It would be interesting to see if I could tell the difference in a double-blind test today.


Replies

unshavedyak11/08/2024

iirc there's "easy" (though i don't know them) tests to validate if the signal is lossless or not. When played over speakers for humans, at least.

I always intend to figure out how that works, because i don't feel a lot of audiophiles are actually speaking truth in many cases lol. Still, i don't know - i can't remember my sources to figure it out for myself :/