The "average" listener
Reply #24 – 2005-09-19 04:41:19
I think what is really needed isn't a "casual listening test", but instead V4/preset medium getting a more prominent presentation and attention. I suspect that the high attention which V2 and V0 (standard and extreme) get here is the reason why "casual listeners" feel that their needs aren't covered enough. So, IMHO it is not a lack of knowledge/data which is the problem but instead the "marginalized" presentation and popularity of V4/medium. [a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=327969"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a] I'm with Lyx here. I can recognize artifacts pretty well by now, but on the vast majority of stuff I can't tell -V4 apart, and I encode most stuff at -V4 or -V3, going with -V2 on something that I'm more likely to be archiving (e.g., when I rip a friend's cd). Dibrom, I can understand that you've seen this sort of thing before, and I agree that relaxing the ABX standard wouldn't make any sense, but I think that an "untrained listener" isn't so much of a definitional problem.... Overall, I think the best thing is to give more attention to -V4 and -V5. On a semi-related note, I had a friend over on Wednesday night, a physicist who's an audiophile and really into classical music and obscure metal, and apparently has really good hearing. He thinks he can tell -V4 encodes apart pretty eaily because he's familir with the music and can sense that it's lacking some high-frequency. Then it turns out he can't ABX a typical metal sample (opening of Metallica's sad but true) on -V5. Boy, was he squirming, and not because I was pressuring or making fun of him, but just because he realized that he had no idea and was failing a double-blind test on relatively lower-quality encoded music.