[goostavos]

"Placebo" describes the audio scene people pretty well in my experience.

I did that MP3/FLAC A/B/X test back in my audio engineer days after catching a ton of condescending comments due to my listening of 'terrible sounding' MP3s.

Either my ears are garbage, or the difference is so subtle that even with solid headphones in a dead quiet room, the absolute best you could hope to be able to detect is that one is "different." getting all the way to "shitty" sounds near impossible to me.

Also, to my surprise, if you burned someone a cd from an MP3 source, but told the person it was Flac, it'd still "sound really smooth". Hm.

[pasabagi]

I was of the same opinion - but I've recently noticed (because youtube-dl, I think, automatically downloads music at a fairly high quality) that I enjoy some music substantially more when it's not compressed to hell. Classical music especially seems much juicier with a high quality recording.

[Arbalest]

What do you mean by compressed? Classical music is usually cited with regards to "compression" in the context of dynamic range compression, not data compression.

[haywirez]

Similar experience. I did the blind tests as well, and surprisingly often chose 320 kbps mp3s that I thought were FLACs because they sounded "crisper" (I mostly listen to electronic club tunes). I did and also witnessed other DJs play out tracks I know for sure were 192kbps mp3s on huge sound systems (sadly no other version ever exported), the place went 100% wild because it's all about the music in the end...that said, would be great to ditch mp3s for OPUS in streaming and have catalogues in FLAC/AIFF.

Edit: a LOT if not most of new music at this point contains samples ripped from Youtube. Something to consider also.

[ndarwincorn]

> "Placebo" describes the audio scene people pretty well in my experience.

Agreed. See also: relative cable quality (for electric instrumentalists).

[mrob]

Cable quality can make a difference for instruments with passive pickups, especially with long cable runs. A guitar pickup can have >10Kohm output impedance, so it doesn't take much cable capacitance to get audible high frequency loss. You can solve this problem with a buffer amplifier close to the instrument, but that's one more device that can break or run out of battery charge.

[mveety]

It's not just passive pickups, it's all analog signals. Analog signals can degrade quite a lot of a run of shitty cable.