High Bitrate ~320kbps MP3 vs. Lossless audio, Spoiler: mp3s were TRANSCODED from Lame free-format. Options

[Archimago]

Happy New Year and greetings everyone! I know the folks here at Hydrogen audio have been around and back with regards to these tests... Nonetheless, I've been collecting data from around the audio forums since early Dec 2012.

Since early December 2012, I've opened up a survey to see if music lovers & "audiophiles" around the world can tell the difference between high bitrate ~320kbps MP3 against the original un-lossy-compressed CD audio. I'm only planning to collect data until the end of January 2013.

So far, I have >70 responses from around the world with 5 continents represented. Folks have been using everything from inexpensive (but good) headphones to megabuck separates >$50K for this. There's 2 weeks left so if you've ever been curious about participating in a blind test or just want to add to the dataset, here's your chance :-).

The "test" is relatively simple and consists of 3 musical passages encoded as "Set A" vs. the same songs "Set B"; one of which was MP3 encoded.

Come to my blog to download the music and fill out the survey:
Archimago's Musings

Thanks and have a wonderful 2013!

OOps - the title should have read 'ends Jan 31'... [fixed]

This post has been edited by db1989: Jan 15 2013, 21:16

[greynol]

Wow, I can't believe I once had this topic in validated news.

Two words for you, Archimago: temporal smearing

You should have studied up on the block-size limitations of mp3 and how that makes it particularly vulnerable to the pitfalls of lossy-lossy transcoding before making such a bone-headed mistake.

Any sort of statistical results are going to determine the audibility of transcoded mp3 against lossless long before they can even begin to apply to high-bitrate mp3 against lossless.

This post has been edited by greynol: Feb 5 2013, 02:22