[AndyKelley]

I can... easily. And it matters to me. My hearing is average, and I have HD280Pro Seinheisers which are pretty standard headphones. Maybe it has something to do with the music genre that I like - techno, trance, dubstep, elecronic, etc. This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio and I can tell when the sound isn't reconstructed well upon playback.

I'd love to do a blind hearing test if you can set one up - but you have to do it with a song that I enjoy. I suppose I could even set one up myself as a study. It would be pretty interesting.

[sjwright]

> This stuff is delicately mastered in the studio

And football is the sport of delicately manoeuvring your opponent onto the grass.

And heroin is a drug that delicately shifts your brain chemistry.

And a chainsaw delicately tickles tree trunks.

[tripzilch]

Ok so you don't like electronic dance/club music. We get it.

I gotta say, I disagree with the guy below me being downvoted, because when I read this "troll" was the first thing that sprang to my mind as well.

I don't disagree with you on the matter that you can't tell the difference between quality lossy and lossless recordings, btw. As long as they're the end-product and not being used for further processing.

Which is one of the rare scenarios in which is actually does make sense to prefer a vinyl copy over a high quality lossy compressed file, if you can't find the lossless digital version.

No you won't be able to hear the difference in the version you bought, but it will make a difference if you intend to work with the data and transform it into something else, because then it is possible that sounds that were thrown away by the lossy codec because no human "golden ear" could hear them, contexts shift and they come into hearing ranges again. But the data is lost, so there's something missing instead.

With a digital lossless copy, or with vinyl, you know you're also getting the inaudible bits, even if you can't hear them.

And if you're just going to listen to the track, sure, get the quality lossy codec.

But if you're doing remixes, you're going to want the inaudible bits too, because you don't know if you'll need them or not.

Lossy compression is for end products, not half products.

[Samuel_Michon]

"Ok so you don't like electronic dance/club music. We get it."

I think what he meant was that the act of mastering popular music often isn't exactly a subtle process. During mastering they try to make the music as loud as possible, reducing dynamic range in the process.

"With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. Extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce clipping and other audible distortion. Modern albums that use such extreme dynamic range compression therefore sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war"."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[sjwright]

> Ok so you don't like electronic dance/club music

On the contrary, I really love it.

I also love the cognitive dissonance which suggests that even a slight loss of fidelity in the 'inaudible bits' is far worse than a distinct loss of fidelity that occurs with an astonishingly imprecise trip through a multitude of lossy analogue processes.

Or that the addition of audible hiss, wow and surface noise doesn't matter.

You seem to suggest that algorithms like MP3 and AAC work primarily by throwing out the inaudible bits. A bit of that does happen, but most of the compression occurs by removing redundant data. After all, over 50% of the data can be removed before even a single bit has to change -- you can remove a shitload more if you're willing for it to be a very very very very very very close approximation instead. Psychoacoustic modelling is used to ensure that priority is given to sound that matters more over sound that matters less.