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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

>He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now.

It's really not fair to compare FLAC vs MP3 to "hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC

There's legitimately some instruments that do not compress well. The harpsichord is a particular example that you should be able to hear the difference on on any sort of decent equipment.

Bur hi-rez vs regular flac is something that I don't think can be really detected by humans. I've gone through and done the Philips golden ears challenge to completion, and have very high end equipment, blind ABX FLAC vs MP3 on a lot of songs I am familiar with, but have never once been able to successfully ABX between a 24/192 flac and a regular one.

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What the heck is "hi-rez" FLAC? My understanding is that FLAC is lossless. How would you have varying degrees of lossless?

Greater than 44.1khz sampling rate and/or 16bit depth.

24/192 flac as opposed to 16 bit flac. flac/mp3 is about compression, bits and khz are about sampling/representation.

By '"hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC"' the parent post means something like 24/192 vs 16/44.1, not the amount of compression. It has a higher resolution than the other example.

Wasn't a cello (I keep remembering hearing "cello attack") supposed to be problematic on mp3?

MP3 has specific algorithmic weaknesses above 16khz[0] which even the highest legal bitrate can't cover up… sometimes. It's actually easiest to hear it with cymbals, or the old LAME sample "fatboy".

You can just not use MP3 though. It's 2014! Use AAC!

[0] http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=LAME_Y_switch

I don't understand why everyone doesn't use Opus for anything. Damn thing is free, beats AAC for psychoacoustics, beats Speex for latency...

The early encoder releases were tuned for voice chat, not music, so the best rate control mode is CBR and it hasn't seriously been tested otherwise. It is pretty amazing considering it's only so good by accident!

Also, everyone is satisfied with AAC already, so there's no good reason to throw out your music collection or your HW accelerated decoding platform.

> There's legitimately some instruments that do not compress well.

Are you sure? I thought that was just a problem particular to early encoders for the Vorbis codec, which were alleviated by altering the tuning parameters of the encoder.

I'm basing it purely on modern (Within the past couple of years) encoded 320kbps/V0 MP3s.

I have not done any personal blind ABX tests on AAC or modern ogg vorbis, so I can't really speak to them.

I'm going to keep 'archival' quality stuff in FLAC anyway, just so I'm covered for any advances in compression tech or whatever, and I stream to my mobile stuff, so size concerns aren't a huge deal for me. My ABX testing has just been for the sake of the mp3 vs FLAC argument.

So, AAC and Vorbis might have very well solved the problem of compressing some of these instruments.

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