Do 320kbps mp3 files really sound better? Take the test

Do you have any links?

The entire exercise is predicated on the notion that if a person consciously listens to an audio recording for a while they will be able to provide a completely accurate estimation of the quality of the recording. To some degree that is true, but I dispute the idea that it is completely true.

Yes, there are crazy audiophiles who will tell you that special crystal bullshit gives them a better sound, nevertheless there is an element of truth in a degree of audio fidelity than is immediately and consciously apparent upon a single casual listen. Sometimes it can take listening to a given recording a few times before you start to appreciate all of the nuances. Maybe you don't notice the little things like the squeak of the bass drum pedal the first few times you hear it, or the richness of the intonation of the clarinet. Or maybe you don't immediately notice that the cymbal crashes are all fuzzed out to hell and back by compression artifacts because you weren't paying close enough attention the first time you listened, but on the 10th listen it starts to become a real annoyance and you start to think seriously about acquire a better recording or encoding.

Here's a perfect example. Pink has a very popular song called Raise Your Glass, you can listen to it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjVNlG5cZyQ. In that song there are many prominent and annoying high-pitched beeps (right in the middle of the chorus even), but I find that most people do not even know they are there, they do not consciously hear them, their brain just filters it out. But once you pick up on it, they become obvious, you can't help but hear them. And the same is true of things like encoding distortion. If you draw the bar at exactly the boundary where people will be able to consciously perceive a difference in quality based on a single listen then you will have placed the bar too low. People will have a slightly lower appreciation for the recordings due to factors they may not even consciously be aware of.

Agreed. This is why a lot of audiophiles will swear by vinyl. It's not that they reproduce the sound more accurately, it's that they introduce an artifact that they lovingly refer to as "warmth".

> Asking which file sounds "better" is meaningless

Indeed the phrasing of the question poses problem. The real question should rather be something like "what is the most faithful"? ANd without the source to compare to, that would be reducing comparisons to what a tester has experienced previously.

Yet I answered both confidently and correctly, without very much special audio equipment (Dell XPS 8300 stock sound card, and a cheap Sennheiser HD212 Pro).

What made me confident is I know what to look for†. If I did not I would have had to make a "what sounds best" judgement.

(spoiler alert if you want to take the test yourself)

† MP3 has a hard time encoding some corner-case specific stuff. Here the rattling at 0:06 produces an artifact that is a dead giveaway. Cymbals at 0:11 are more subtle but noticeable.

So if you end up listening to the music with your medium-quality headphones, it doesn't matter whether it's 128kbps or 320kbps.

Again, not an ABX test. No wonder the first file did best - it sounded most like the first file. You can't do listening tests without a labelled original to compare to.

It's fairly easy to tell between 192kbps CBR LAME and an original CD. 192kbps VBR is a bit hit or miss. High end gear can absolutely make the imperfections more noticeable.

Personally I just got fed up of the goalposts being moved around (LAME codec constantly being updated, mp3 scene switching from 3.97 -V2 to 3.98 -V0, etc.) and now I just have all my music collection in lossless.

~300MB a CD? No problem.

Basic DSP knowledge tells us that a digital audio copy is exactly the same quality as the original.

Also, testing the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3s over and over again is like drinking warm beer all the time to make sure it's really worse than the cold one.

I suppose if you use really crappy media and an even worse CD recorder you will have significant signal degradation because of all the bits missing so error correction is kicking in

But it's really a stretch

128kbit sounds so poor that I get a headache from listening to it. There is a tinnyness and high pitched squeal that is like a drill through my head. Maybe it's like using a 14" monitor - if you're so used to hearing low bitrate, it may be hard to notice better quality when you hear it occasionally.

I would say that 192kbit (2 pass, VBR) is the minimum bitrate that one should encode music. I can pick lower than this without trying. I do struggle to hear more than 192kbit, except occasionally at the high end. In reality, disk is so cheap that I encode in flac. I'd rather keep myself future proof. Let's just say that my entire cd collection is smaller than 2 bluray rips at 1080p.

I think the difference was noticeable even on laptop speakers.

> Personally I like lossless for practical reasons (e.g. conversions without quality loss).

That was the clincher for me. At first my music collection was a mish-mash of different bitrates. I converted the whole lot to the LAME V2 preset (~192kbps VBR) a la the mp3 scene standard, then no sooner had I done that than the standard changed to V0 (~245kbps).

Screw it, I figured. Storage is cheap. Might as well go lossless.

It might be my bad quality headphones, but the song for me was so distorted on the 128kbps that I heard the difference in less than a second.

No, this is wrong. CDs are sampled at 44.1khz with 16-bit samples, making for (calculates) 706kbps. And that's ignoring stereo.

You're right. That's what I ended up focusing on after a few listens and chose the correct answer, which could probably be attributed to being an ex pro drummer. Most people were probably focusing on the vocals, not at all attuned to what quality percussion sounds like, which is why more people chose the wrong answer. One might even go far as to say that more people think vocals sound better at 128 than 320.