Asking which file sounds "better" is meaningless; some distortions sound good. The proper way to do this is an ABX test, where you compare both to a known original, and ask which sounds more like the original.
Agreed. This is why a lot of audiophiles will swear by vinyl. It's not that they reproduce the sound more accurately, it's that they introduce an artifact that they lovingly refer to as "warmth".
The entire exercise is predicated on the notion that if a person consciously listens to an audio recording for a while they will be able to provide a completely accurate estimation of the quality of the recording. To some degree that is true, but I dispute the idea that it is completely true.
Yes, there are crazy audiophiles who will tell you that special crystal bullshit gives them a better sound, nevertheless there is an element of truth in a degree of audio fidelity than is immediately and consciously apparent upon a single casual listen. Sometimes it can take listening to a given recording a few times before you start to appreciate all of the nuances. Maybe you don't notice the little things like the squeak of the bass drum pedal the first few times you hear it, or the richness of the intonation of the clarinet. Or maybe you don't immediately notice that the cymbal crashes are all fuzzed out to hell and back by compression artifacts because you weren't paying close enough attention the first time you listened, but on the 10th listen it starts to become a real annoyance and you start to think seriously about acquire a better recording or encoding.
Here's a perfect example. Pink has a very popular song called Raise Your Glass, you can listen to it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjVNlG5cZyQ. In that song there are many prominent and annoying high-pitched beeps (right in the middle of the chorus even), but I find that most people do not even know they are there, they do not consciously hear them, their brain just filters it out. But once you pick up on it, they become obvious, you can't help but hear them. And the same is true of things like encoding distortion. If you draw the bar at exactly the boundary where people will be able to consciously perceive a difference in quality based on a single listen then you will have placed the bar too low. People will have a slightly lower appreciation for the recordings due to factors they may not even consciously be aware of.
I'm with you on this. But I think that in pop music the vocals have such a high prominence that you kinda miss the song if try to be aware of the "whole song". Especially if English is not you native language. So the brain keeps filtering while you sing along.
In the case of Raise Your Glass, are you referring to the synth sound that "bleeds" through from the background during the chorus?
> Asking which file sounds "better" is meaningless
Indeed the phrasing of the question poses problem. The real question should rather be something like "what is the most faithful"? ANd without the source to compare to, that would be reducing comparisons to what a tester has experienced previously.
Yet I answered both confidently and correctly, without very much special audio equipment (Dell XPS 8300 stock sound card, and a cheap Sennheiser HD212 Pro).
What made me confident is I know what to look for†. If I did not I would have had to make a "what sounds best" judgement.
(spoiler alert if you want to take the test yourself)
† MP3 has a hard time encoding some corner-case specific stuff. Here the rattling at 0:06 produces an artifact that is a dead giveaway. Cymbals at 0:11 are more subtle but noticeable.
Sound was generally just more rich. But yeah the background noise was incredibly noticable. I use SE530's with an audioengine D1 at work since using an integrated soundcard always bleeds motherboard sounds in the audio :/
I read a study a few years back though about how the MP3 encoding artifacts and background noise were so ingrained in culture today that people actually prefer the MP3 encoding artifacts over not having them- Which seems to be supported by this poll. The incorrect choice has a non-trivial lead.
I may not disclose full details, but one of the engineers that made particular widely used audio decoder said that they've left the bug whose symptoms were slight high frequency noise.
It was widely reported to sound "better" than other "by the book" implementations.
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=ABX - sadly, of all the links on that page only the Gnome ABX one is still live. But you can find/ask for more recent material in their forums: many of the people who work on lossy audio codecs hang out there.
