I think what I gather from it, is that ABX tests are useful, but they are not a guarantee we are listening to what we might arbitrarily call ‘the best’ version of a track. I think I will continue to rely on ABX tests to make decisions about what I put on my DAP, but I won’t reject the idea of their possible inferiority. Basically an unsatisfying sense of ‘I’m using the best track to the best of my knowledge… but my knowledge isn’t infallible.’

Thanks for this though, I think it will help me to be more open minded. Could have done without the car analogy though, which was what almost scared me away :)

I suggest you do a blind test yourself. Instead of asking yourself “is A=X”, ask yourself “which of the two samples is more enjoyable?”. You can see for yourself whether you find CDs more enjoyable because you know they are CDs (placebo effect), or because they are truly different to your brain. My experience is that artifacts seem obvious when you KNOW that you are listening to an MP3 track, but they mysteriously disappear once this information is withheld. It could be an interesting experience for you.

And in my personal case, the compression question is far from moot. I have a 80 GB iPod 50% full of MP3 music and podcasts. It simply wouldn’t fit if it were encoded with FLAC.

After listening to a LOT of MP3 files, it struck me that I simply wasn’t enjoying them as much as the original CDs. I started comparing and listening for the compression losses, and immediately found them quite significant and easy to identify. But they were not sufficient to explain the overall loss of ‘presence’ that I had experienced.

Yes, the difference between MP3 and WAV or CD is subtle… but so is the difference between a *great* performance and an average one, or a great recording and a mediocre one. (Or even the most fabulous coffee-table reproduction and an original painting.) Art is all ABOUT subtlety.

My suspicion is that we’re asking the wrong questions. If we took a large audience and asked them which recording they *enjoyed* more (on good equipment, naturally), they’d pick the lossless version more often. (In any case, I know I would – or did – which is what matters to me.)

Even if you’re unconvinced, the question should be moot. Considering today’s infinitesimal costs of both storage and bandwidth, I can’t see any reason for entrusting great music to a brutally lossy format such as MP3.

“The fact that you can tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD in an ABX test does not mean that the MP3 is worse than a CD.”

By “worse”, I mean “less enjoyable”, since enjoyment is the ultimate goal of music and it is what people (should) really care about. Of course, if by “worse” you simply mean “different” (as shown in an ABX test), then my statement becomes tautologically false.

There has been a lot of misunderstanding in the Hydrogenaudio thread concerning my post. I’ll try to avoid it by presenting a list of possible situations in order of my personal preference:

1. (best) Recordings are published in several versions for people with different tastes/equipment.
2. (second best) Codecs have optional filters that allow the user to customize the sound.
3. Codecs always filter the input signal so that 90% of the population finds it better. (Let’s assume this is possible.)
4. Codecs simply preserve the original sound. (This is worse than 3 because [by assumption] 90% of the population finds the “transparent” sound worse than the improved sound. You could argue that people could remix tracks or use postprocessing to get the same effect without reducing choice, but this is not a realistic alternative for most people.)

Sure someone might find the smearing or pre-echo artifacts enjoyable, but why should the majority have to suffer because of them. And if they /are/ the majority the problem should be addressed in the original recording.
If you find an altered signal more pleasant you can always remix it before encoding.

And, as with physic “laws”, you have to use the best alternatives available now when making these decisions. Sure someone might find in 5 years that the sonic equivalent of F=ma isn’t accurate in some specific cases but until then ABX is the best tool we’ve got.

I did not mean to suggest subconscious effects are an explanation for the audiophiles’ stated preferences. The most likely explanation (in a non-blinded situation) is that their perception is affected by the conscious information that they have (for example, the fact that they are listening to $1000 cables).

I don’t understand why you wrote that it is a “problem with my reasoning” that it does not align with the arguments made by the audiophile community. What I wrote was not supposed to support or explain the audiophiles’ claims. It was supposed to point out that ABX tests may be too crude a tool to measure the relevant differences between CDs and MP3s.

I agree that the source of any hidden effects must be scientifically accounted for. In the case of headphones and cables, as you have pointed out, no such source has been identified. But CDs and MP3s produce different waveforms, so the underlying difference is there.

The burning house example may be a bit confusing in that the subconscious differences were successfully detected in the ABX test that the subject was given, while my article is about the possibility of subconscious differences that do not manifest themselves in an ABX test.

There are a couple of points i take issue with however. Firstly, pertaining to the car body analogy. An equivalent property in high end audio gear to the resiliance of the original car body, would be some sort of comparable indirect/pragmatic benefit, like robustness or longevity. In other words, high end audio gear might be “better” in a way which abx testing cannot reveal – in some fasion other than SQ. That’s all well and good, and perfectly plausible, but the truth is that hardcore audiophiles do not claim to buy a £1000 cable over a £30 cable because the former will last longer. Instead, they claim it’s because the more expensive of the two demonstrates a discernable difference in SQ. ABX testing would reveal this if it were true.

To my mind, the burning house example is a bit of a red herring. Firstly, the woman’s inability to percieve a difference between the two houses would only impinge on her quality of life were she to actually choose to enter one of the hypothetical houses. In other words, her other senses would alert her to a difference her vision (or her visual cortex) was incapable of detecting.

That said, i realise this misses the underlying point you were trying to get at. That is: differences which aren’t audible, of which we aren’t consciously aware, can have some indirect effect on our state of mind more broadly. I think the first problem with this reasoning, is that we’re often not aware of the influence effects like subliminal messages are having on us, much less of their original source. In other words, it is highly unlikely that this is the explanation for why audiophiles seem to prefer gear which they can’t discern from cheaper kit in ABX testing, because the hypothetical “effect” is completely disconnected from the “cause”. Moreover, this misrepresents the actual position of the audiophile community, which is that they CAN hear differences between different gear (and they can, when they know they’re listening to it). They do not, conversly, claim some intengible benefit to their quality of life. Their claims are often spurious, and ABX testing demonstrates this.

Finally, if indeed these effects exist, their source should be scientifically measurable. Quite the opposite is true. In RMAA tests, “burned in” vs non-burned in headphones and speakers produce identical response/distortion/noise curves, as do cheap vs expensive cables. I imagine things like individual DACS and amps vary slightly depending on their design and sound colouration, though the truth is they’re all striving for the same thing – low noise, low distortion, flat frequency response. These things are all easily achievable in modern electrical engineering. It’s possible such minor differences could account for slightly different “subconscious” effects, but they certainly cannot explain nonsense like “really opened up the soundstage and made the upper-midrange come alive” as you so eloquently put it ;)

These sorts of comments are borne out of the subjectivity of human hearing. Like our other senses, it is vastly coloured by our expectations, our mood, how tired we are, what we had for breakfast etc etc etc.

Brief summary: In a blind test, their test subjects described music with (inaudible) high-frequency sounds as more comfortable to the ears and more nuanced than music stripped of those frequencies. At the same time, they could not reliably tell A from B if they were asked which one they like more. So the ability to tell A from B depended on the exact question that was asked.

The experiment also found differences in EEG and PET scans between the two samples.

This might be an interesting addendum to the conversation:

Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity: Hypersonic Effect
http://jn.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/83/6/3548