http://www.geocities.com/ctrlaltdel12321/stereo

That's the guy's stereo. He says he can ear the difference between uncompressed and compressed audio. In the MP3 realm, is there a way to prove this wrong? I know --alt preset standard would sound bad PROBABLY on that sound system, but would --alt preset extreme do? Or would I have to jack it up to --alt preset insane?

If you know the guy you could do a blind test ala soundexpert style.

While his system certainly seems impressive, a lot of people well versed in detecting compression artifacts have tested the --alt-presets. They're mighty good. I doubt he could reliably pick the mp3 in a blind test using --alt-preset standard, or just go with --alt-preset insane to make it as hard as possible.

Suggest you check out this thread for an enlightening discussion of how these things usually go:
HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Long story short: whether he could hear the difference between a compressed format and pure CD would depend heavily on how good his hearing is, how well the test is set up, how experienced he is at hearing compression artifacts, how good the equipment is. Compression is not perfect so there is always a chance someone can hear the difference. Even if you can hear it - so what? The point of compression is to save bandwidth/storage space with minimal quality loss which allows you to do things with the music you couldn't do otherwise.

I doubt alt preset standard would sound "bad" in general. I would expect it to sound quite good, especially on a decent system, although there is always music that can trip it up.

As far as the equipment goes, it looks like an okay system, but not completely high-end, and it doens't look like the room is treated for good acoustic performance, so this system may not be especially more revealing than many other good ones.

This topic has been beaten into the ground (read the whole thread above), so its not worth any more bits.

I just want to add that the importance of expensive speakers and playing hardware is far overestimated. Any 100€ headphone with a not-low-end soundcard will be better for detecting audio compression artefacts than this combo (due to the headphones).

There is practically no difference between the high bitrate alt-presets. On nearly all samples where aps fails, ap-e will do so as well. Insane might reduce the problem sometimes, but hardly will remove it.

As I was the man heavily involved in this http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....,and,audiophile thread, if I may advise you, use -insane, if it must be MP3... maybe you should consider lowpass at 21 or even 21.5 kHz

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....1&t=5939&hl=&s=

My post in the above thread holds the same here regarding the suggestion of a 21khz or 21.5khz lowpass, and perhaps even --alt-preset insane.

Again, I'd be surprised if this person could hear the difference between --alt-preset standard on a setup like this, especially when not using a pathological test case, and probably not being familiar with common psychoacoustic coder artifacts.

If you must use --alt-preset insane, I'd suggest also putting a few --alt-preset standard samples in there too. I think it would be more interesting to test a more "average" and possibly more of a real world setting (it's more impressive if it works) than to use the absolute maximum setting possible.

I don't think so. Repeating this over and over won't change the fact that this is useless or even the wrong thing to do.

About the tests, the key is: make them blind and see the guy suffer!!

Kike G:

Why it is useless or even WRONG?

budgie: I think there has been already a lot of discussion over this.

Useless, because there's no reliable evidence of people being able to hear past 20 KHz with real music, even more, there's no evicence that there's music with such high level content over 18 or 19 KHz that could be heard, due to the masking mechanisms of the ear.

It could be wrong, because there's a possibility that you could be wasting bits encoding such high frequencies, leaving less bits to encode other things, if we are talking about MP3.

Okay, I give up... MP3 is for me dead duck, anyway...

Man do I feel deaf looking at this ... 128k CBR LAME mp3s that cut off at 14000 KHz is the same as the CD to me, Xing is the only thing I can see a difference in(even on laptop speakers, it really sucks, even at 256k, it just sounds like crap) . I REALLY need some damn decongestants for this crap in my ears...

Anyway, thanks people for the suggestions