alt Hacker NewsI once did a blind test on myself. A FLAC audio file and a 128Kbit Ogg vorbis file of the same track that I could switch between as I pleased but without knowing which was playing. Yeah, I cannot tell the difference.
I am absolutely sure others can, but not me. I also think credit goes to far better encoders today than what we had 25 years ago.
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I did this with a japanese punk band and when I finally got on a private tracker, I redownloaded them and the quality difference was night and day. I have a huge backlog of mid-grade MP3s from TPB back in the day and I'll occasionally download a second flac version of the albums just to get the dynamic range.
Opus - perhaps, but claiming that 128kbps Vorbis is transparent would be rather stretching it (unless it's a mono stream); though how easily it will be detectable depends on the kind of music used to test it. However, if you added, say, Bluetooth A2DP to the mix and made it go through a lossy encoder again the difference should be pretty obvious to anyone with good ears.
I can't tell the difference with most headphones, but with monitors or a good system in a good listening environment there are some details that get lost in compression, but there's essentially 0 difference from losslezd if I rip a CD to opus or mp3 rather than from a stream.
Yeah, but people aren’t uploading high quality music to begin with. It’s probably like two or three levels of compressed by the time you yt-dlp it.
crappy speakers?
Hearing also degrades over time. In my 20s I was a lot more fussy about audio formats and hi-fi gear.
Approaching 50, with less sensitive ears and a bit of tinnitus, I’m happy with the convenience of Bluetooth headphones and whatever format Spotify uses.