How well can you hear audio quality?

[abaxas]

Since almost everyone will be listing on awful equipment. The test is next to useless.

[kalniel]

Also a 4/6 result, with rest 320kbps (and many were guesses between 2 candidates), but there needed to be more classical!

Since almost everyone will be listing on awful equipment. The test is next to useless.

How so? Surely you'll be listening on what you normally listen on, so the question is relevant. (albeit it should include the qualifier.)

[neonplanet40]

2-6 :O

But to be fair, If I had this connected to my amp and Monitor Audio Silver speakers - the result may have been different!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Meh,if I was casually listening I would just use a lower bitrate stream. For the subset of music I would actually store on my computer I rip it to FLAC and be done with it.Compared to games,video and images music takes up relatively little space in comparison and as compressed standards go,CD is good enough for me and no need to fret over what might sound better or worse.

Also,TBH its sometimes nice to actually play an actual CD or record - just the physical process of doing it.

[watercooled]

I got 4/6 and chose 320kb for the other two. Same as on that Philips Golden Ears thing, it seems I can fairly reliably tell 128kb/s apart from uncompressed but IIRC I struggled at 192.

But like others I can't tell 320 and wav apart.

[Stringent]

4/6

The ones I got wrong were the lowest audio quality funnily enough. Must be the type of music.

[DanceswithUnix]

2/6, of the others 3/6 were the 320kb rate.

I was sort of right about making me feel old, though in the end it came down to being my daughters job to do that...

Coldplay was down to guesswork, I really couldn't tell them apart. I guessed, I got 128kb. My daughter who had been hovering nearby said "Why did the middle one sound better dad?", and sure enough that was the uncompressed one

I was done, so I got her to have a go. She got 4/6, at 10 years old with no knowledge of compression and really not that interested in music. The Neil Young track which again I struggled to tell which was 128kb and guessed wrong of the other two which was uncompressed, she just said "that one sounds mumbled (320), that one is just wrong (128) and clicked the uncompressed one.

As an upside, I now have that Katy Perry song in my head, which is a big step up from the YouTube "Mine Turtle" song yesterday

Edit to add: Audio was analogue from my Asus motherboard, and through some cheapish Creative 2.1 T3100 speaker setup. I had left the Sennheisers at work, but I doubt they would have helped tbh.

[evs]

4 out of 6, sennheiser PC360's plugged into an Asus STX card. The two I got wrong were the 320kbps, but only on a couple of the uncompressed .wavs were they a real give away (you could here the extra levels of sound) the rest were as close as dammit. The 128kb was easier to hear due to the more garbled sound. I only listened each time for the first couple of seconds and you could tell.

[TooNice]

5/6. I've done similar test years ago using Foobar's ABX tool with my own music collection and managed to get 10/10 before the first mistake (my best run out of several other). But it takes a very long time (lots of repeat), is exhausting, and definitely not how to enjoy music. Still, my collection of hundreds of CDs won't put much of a dent on modern storage in lossless format, and it means I can get the best transcode for my mobile devices where storage capacity is growing but still relatively limited.

[DanceswithUnix]

The same test would be interesting with choices from classic rock, hard rock, etc

I rather liked the little story boxes that popped up saying why they included that bit of music. I think the choice was as good as you can get, most wasn't to my taste but it was varied.

Doesn't matter what you include, to someone it is going to be just like the Blues Brothers quote: "We have both sorts of music; Country *and* Western!"

Anyone worked out what sort of compression they are using here, is it really the old mp3 standard? I am sort of assuming they are using mp3 as a generic term.

[Biscuit]

As others, I could tell the 128 easily, but I picked 320 through pure guesswork for all of them so got a score of zero haha!

I was listening with my DT770Pro plugged straight into my macbook pro.

Does it shuffle the results at all, would be interested in trying it again with my various other speakers and headphones I have?

[DanceswithUnix]

Does it shuffle the results at all, would be interested in trying it again with my various other speakers and headphones I have?

As well as not needing to spend as much on headphones/speakers, the other advantage of getting older is I will have completely forgotten the order I clicked by tomorrow

I think it does scramble them though, the tracks were a different order for my daughter so I expect the compressions were as well. There is a "retry" button at the end, so I would hope they scramble every time.

[sammyc]

4/6, & no 128's (didn't help that there wasn't much there you'd get me to listen to without force being involved.)