Vinyl snobs rejoice as study shows MP3s make music less pleasurable | Hacker News Reader

Vinyl snobs rejoice as study shows MP3s make music less pleasurable

avclub.com

12 pointslnguyen11 comments

Bullshit from the audiophile gossip forums / strawman to justify irrational no true purist audiophile religious dogma. MP3's can be encoded crappily as that article gleefully compares apples and oranges, or over-encoded resulting in huge file sizes given an original source encoding. Nyquist bandwidth is an incontrovertible fact of physics: depending on the audio stream rate of frequency changes, humans simply can't distinguish rapid changes following each other. Proper lossy encoding is a balance of file size vs. psychoacoustic artifacts. It's also likely compounded by an "expensive wine" / "sunk costs" placebo effect where people experience less pleasure due to perceived "cheapness" of not spending millions of dollars on scratchy, finnicky gear and not having to contend with dust.

A blind test of an original playback from a record compared to a 320 kHz MP3 encoding human-indistinguishable from a raw PCM 48 kHz 16 bit recording of said analog playback is such that a $10 million bounty for anyone able to distinguish the two that would be safe from ever being collected.

Physics wins, in-group zealotry fails. Can't wait for the Thunderf00t debunks vinyl Patreon video.

Am I allowed to play the record through a surround matrix decoder? Because I'd claim your $10 million in a flash. This is true of basically any lossy audio encoding because phase information, which is used to reconstruct a surround field, is usually lost. Your statement would be correct for a lossless digital recording (which "audiophiles" often claim is still inferior to vinyl) but I think it's overstating the case for such a crime against fidelity as mp3.

>Nyquist bandwidth is an incontrovertible fact of physics: depending on the audio stream rate of frequency changes, humans simply can't distinguish rapid changes following each other

Can't make sense of this but it sounds super muddled. What humans can distinguish has nothing to do with Nyquist. Not sure what a "audio stream rate of frequency changes" is either.

320 kbps (not "kHz") mp3 is a waste of time if you ask me - no added value over lower-bitrate mp3. If you're willing to throw that kind of bandwidth at your audio, just spend a little extra and use FLAC.

I grew up with music vinyl, when the only alternative was cassette tapes. Both of those were terrible choices. They are both fragile, and degrade with each listening. CDs were a fantastic invention. I understand that MP3s are a step backward in quality, although they are more convenient. Actually, I don't understand why we don't go back to far less compressed music, now that bandwidth and storage are so cheap.

Going back to vinyl is incomprehensible to me. It would be akin to giving up my nice keyboard and 4k monitor for a keypunch, (which I would type on when I wasn't listening to vinyl).

Actually, come to think of it, those IBM 026 keypunches had amazing keyboards. They make my DAS keyboard seem like I'm typing on jello.

We are going back to far less compressed music.

Every vinyl purchase I've made in recent memory has come with a download code. More often than not, these are 320kbps MP3s, which are indistinguishable from CDs, although stores like Bleep.com offer flac and wav formats, too.

BTW, the study tested against three levels of LAME compression -- 112 Kbps, 56 Kbps, and 32 Kbps.

Buying vinyl these days is the smart choice for music lovers. You get all the convenience of MP3s and sound quality of CDs (via the download code), the superior artwork of the LP, and the aesthetic joy of using a turntable when you want to.

The "study" is based on 20 test subjects.

Doesn't seem right to publish a paper based on such low numbers, especially when, as here, the experiment seems to be pretty cheap.

Direct link to study:

http://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20161206/18523.pdf

The bitrates they chose were also a joke. I haven't seen an mp3 lower than 128kbps in over a decade unless it was a podcast.

It all seems obvious when you skim the study. Of course introducting artifacts will affect the emotional impact of media. It's distracting.

No different than poor jpg quality images or bad movie rips.

Yeah what a load of garbage, only 20 subjects and bitrates 112kbps and lower.

Clickbait title and garbage content.

I don't read them much, but I had the impression avclub was better than publishing such claptrap? What happened?

Slightly OT, the famous coat hangers experiment:

http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/threads/speakers-when-i...

Vinyl is great. I'll never forget that moment in childhood when my parents stopped me from dancing in front of the stereo system because it might make the cartridge jump out of the groove.

I don't get it.

Are you being sarcastic, or are you alluding that the music from vinyl sounded so good you were dancing too aggressively?

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