[em500]

> Important to keep in mind the "size" of the experiment. Two interesting quotes from the article in c't magazine:

>> twelve participants would be asked to come to Hanover.

It's a mistake to apply vanilla statistical thinking here. The 12 participants were not randomly drawn from the German population, they were extremely skewed towards enthusiasts/professionals: audio engineers, an owner of an actual Nautilus 801, someone who worked on MP3/AAC at Fraunhofer IIS, someone who works preparing masters for Deutsche Gramophon. If these are the people who have enormous difficulty distinguishing 256kbps MP3 from the CD original, I'm certainly not going to worry that I am going to miss out on anything with 256kbps MP3.

If 12 Grand Slam participants tell me they can't tell the difference between a standard $100 and a $1000 high end tennis racket, I'm not going to delude myself into thinking that it's going to make any difference for me.

[vatican_banker]

> It's a mistake to apply vanilla statistical thinking here. The 12 participants [...] were extremely skewed towards enthusiasts/professionals

It is still undetermined if having 12 highly-skilled professionals in the experiment is enough to have a conclusive experiment.

Also, this subject is so difficult to get right that the authors of the article themselves hedged by saying that experiment "does not support watertight conclusions".

[newdude116]

This magazine did a test with mp3 https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html

The only one who was significantly able to tell if something was mp3 encoded or not, was a guy with a hearing damage who loved punk music. In fact, mp3 was developed for persons with normal hearing. So it is well possible that he was able to tell differences where other people were unable to.

[Applejinx]

Maybe the punk music had more to do with it. Sounds like the guy was keying off of subtleties of sonority and emotive quality which are a lot more fragile to digital processing.

It's quite easy to overprocess a digital audio file and wind up with something that is pristine as far as frequency response, but flat and 'pod people' like as far as emotive cues and intensity. Aliasing and cumulative losses to word length issues have a lot to do with it.

It's VERY easy to make digital stuff accurately represent frequencies like 2 Hz or 35kHz that our ears don't hear. It's a lot harder to make the digital stuff perform in the midrange when our perception can go, inconsistently and irregularly, waaaay beyond what we're used to thinking of as the limits.

[oriolid]

I did some personal experiments back in the day when hard disks were expensive and found that the compression artefacts show up first in distorted guitars and cymbals, then brass instruments and everything else survives much lower bit rates. So that could explain why the punk rock fan hears the compression problems first.

By the way, the lossy compression algorithms don't try to produce exact frequency response but to leave out stuff that humans wouldn't hear anyway and compress the rest.

[em500]

That's the original German version of the article which was translated in my hydrogenaudio link.