[yanokwa]

I’m curious, have you done an ABX test recently? My wife swore up and down she could hear the difference too. An ABX test with expensive headphones in a quiet room across a few different genres and bitrates showed that she couldn’t.

[dotancohen]

I tested only with the headphones that I had at the time, with the types of music that I listen to. I'd actually be interested in trying again, but with my normal headphones (typical Sony over-ear), not something expensive.

For reference, I listen to mostly Pantera, Beethoven, Pink Floyd, early Nine Inch Nails, Led Zep. It's not too diverse, but there is a short period from about 1990 to 2005 where music recorded in that period does not transfer to MP3 well. Maybe because the digital artifacts that we cannot hear in the published recordings are amplified in the compressed MP3 - but after that period producers began to optimize their recordings to account for that.

[rsynnott]

How old were the MP3 files you were using? Early mp3 encoders were generally Not Very Good.

[dotancohen]

They were brand new, ripped myself and compared with the CD still in the drawer. Using different bitrates and other settings, whatever was documented for the CLI tools at the time. I was using some Red Hat variant, but this was before Fedora. In 2002 I believe.

Though I'm sure that the encoders got better, really, the quality of the common rip has not.

[rsynnott]

Yeah, the out-of-box encoders included with Linux distros in 2002 would likely not have been great. If you were lucky you might have gotten an early version of LAME. If you do the experiment again, it may be worth using either the likes of Spotify/Apple Music (okay, strictly speaking neither are mp3, but same general idea, and they'll put effort into encoding properly), or using a decent modern encoder (LAME, the Apple one, etc).

[dotancohen]

Yes, now that you mention it, it was in fact LAME. I'll try again sometime with abcde in its default settings.

By the way, I once made a GUI for abcde called abcdefg (A Better CD Encoder For Gnome) but never did anything with it - it was really just an exercise to learn the GTK libraries because Zim Wiki used them too. But I now regret not publishing it just because it had such a cool name.