Do files ripped from CD sound differet if they are FLAC vs MP3

[Mitchibo]

Yes in theory, however there is some controversy about whether or not you'll be able to hear the difference between 16bit 44.1kHz FLACs or CDs and 24bit 192kHz. I bought a few albums just to see if I could and I'm pretty sure that I can't. I'm fine with 256bit MP3 quality for casual listening/background music but for critical listening I want FLACs.

HDtracks has a Hi-Res store.
http://www.hdtracks.com/music/hires

I concur. HDtracks ain't cheap so you need to be selective. In the age of downloadable data why do we still need to buy CDs ( like we used to 30 years ago) to get the proper resolution?

 

[lovinthehd]

Well, CD quality doesn't throw out anything in the audio band. Perceptual coded recordings do that such as MP3, DD, DTS, etc.

Yes, but if it's actually recorded at a higher resolution than CD originally then....

I concur. HDtracks ain't cheap so you need to be selective. In the age of downloadable data why do we still need to buy CDs ( like we used to 30 years ago) to get the proper resolution?

Plus not everything at hdtracks has necessarily been from a higher resolution source in the first place....at least last time I paid any attention to that site....has it cleaned up and made transparent the sources?

 

[Mitchibo]

Yes, but if it's actually recorded at a higher resolution than CD originally then....


Plus not everything at hdtracks has necessarily been from a higher resolution source in the first place....at least last time I paid any attention to that site....has it cleaned up and made transparent the sources?

Not that I can see. A lot of music is recorded at a higher resolution (besides crappy rec studios), it looses stuff in the mix down/mastering.

 

[lovinthehd]

Not that I can see. A lot of music is recorded at a higher resolution (besides crappy rec studios), it looses stuff in the mix down/mastering.

Then there are cd mixes/masters that can be presented in the higher resolution....all depends on the chain and how transparent it is, hard to make assumptions.

 

[Mitchibo]

Then there are cd mixes/masters that can be presented in the higher resolution....all depends on the chain and how transparent it is, hard to make assumptions.

True. There is a whole food chain of events that happen from " guy with a guitar" to Walmart. Usually the artist has little say in the final product.

 

[Raye Humphries]

Alright. Thanks!

 

[Pogre]

Great thing about FLAC is you can extract them back to their original WAV file if that suites you.

I did not know that. It makes sense tho, since all the info is there. It's just compressed.

 

[jinjuku]

I did not know that. It makes sense tho, since all the info is there. It's just compressed.

You can even use filecomp from the command line and if you've done the extraction correctly they'll match.

Don't want to use MS filecomp util? You can use an MD5 utility and it will come back with the same math hash.

 

[mtrycrafts]

Yes, but if it's actually recorded at a higher resolution than CD originally then....
...

Then it would depend how it is cut to the CD, full resolution or just the CD 16/44.1. In either case the 20-20k is not perceptually coded unless it is one of those files.

 

[yepimonfire]

Yes in theory, however there is some controversy about whether or not you'll be able to hear the difference between 16bit 44.1kHz FLACs or CDs and 24bit 192kHz. I bought a few albums just to see if I could and I'm pretty sure that I can't. I'm fine with 256bit MP3 quality for casual listening/background music but for critical listening I want FLACs.

HDtracks has a Hi-Res store.
http://www.hdtracks.com/music/hires

I can hear a minor difference in the transient attack, especially with percussion. All things considered, 16/44.1 still provides very high quality audio, but if I could buy an album at 25/192, I would.

I do feel 24bit is unnecessary, especially with music, where there is a limited range in dynamics that rarely span more than +- 60dB, plus, a higher sampling rate increases the dynamic range as well. It makes sense to use 20bit or 24bit for film, since the full dynamic range of movies is 105dB, while most remastered“nearfield” mixes do for dvd/bluray release avoid sounds being too quiet, theater releases utilize the entire range, the noise floor in modern acoustically treated cinemas measures between 15-20dBA. Dialogue is mixed at -27dBfs average, which is 85dBC. This gives a dynamic range of 105dB, and 115dB for the life channel.

The only reason to use 24 or 32bit is recording, where it gives digital headroom to avoid clipping or capture the quietest sounds so they can later be amplified without noise. I have also done abx tests with 24 vs 16 bit and can’t successfully tell the difference, but I can between 192khz and 44.1khz

As far as lossless goes, making a backup in flac is reasonable, as it allows transcoding without degradation, I’m mostly referring to streaming or purchasing music digitally, 99% of my music consumption is through Spotify premium, which is 320kbps vorbis, and I can rest assured I am not missing anything due to the compression, same with streaming movies on VUDU, I hear no difference between their higher bitrate DD+ and lossless. Both audio and video quality via VUDU is nearly identical to bluray in my experience. Netflix and amazon streaming is a different story, some of their encodes, especially TV shows, have obvious compression artifacts during certain scenes. I believe they use 224kbps DD+, which seems to give similar quality to 96-128kbps AAC 2ch.


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[MrBoat]

So if I'm understanding you correctly, CDs don't lose any audio that can be heard by humans. They just throw out stuff that our brains can't interpret as sound.

Sorry for my lack of knowledge.

They also throw away bits we can hear like scratches, dust pops and other mechanical/electrical noise.

 

[yepimonfire]

They also throw away bits we can hear like scratches, dust pops and other mechanical/electrical noise.

Yup. Even if vinyl could offer the transient response of hi rez (I have no idea if it can or not), it’s still inferior to digital.


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[Bucknekked]

What an extraordinary thread. I can read the entire thread and did not find any incorrect info. Add to that, everyone was civil and agreeable. The information presented here was well done and even though the topic has been covered dozens of times, the thread positive throughout. We should clone this thread for future discussions around audio formats. I enjoyed it.

 

[shadyJ]

What an extraordinary thread. I can read the entire thread and did not find any incorrect info. Add to that, everyone was civil and agreeable. The information presented here was well done and even though the topic has been covered dozens of times, the thread positive throughout. We should clone this thread for future discussions around audio formats. I enjoyed it.

Any content recorded below a 384 kHz sampling rate with 32 bit depth is unlistenably bad! Anyone who disagrees hates good music recordings and is an inferior person in every respect!

 

[Bucknekked]

Any content recorded below a 384 kHz sampling rate with 32 bit depth is unlistenably bad! Anyone who disagrees hates good music recordings and is an inferior person in every respect!

that's more like it !
it would also be nice to throw in some more absolutes: never, always, impossible.
I think it also needs a dash of "of course you can't hear the difference with those ears on that system".

 

[mtrycrafts]

... It makes sense to use 20bit or 24bit for film, since the full dynamic range of movies is 105dB, while most remastered“nearfield” mixes do for dvd/bluray release avoid sounds being too quiet, theater releases utilize the entire range, the noise floor in modern acoustically treated cinemas measures between 15-20dBA. Dialogue is mixed at -27dBfs average, which is 85dBC. This gives a dynamic range of 105dB, and 115dB for the life channel.
...

I don't think the dynamic range of movies is 105 dB. It is the peak for the 5/7 channels and the .1 is 10 more. Cds also have a peak at 105 dB, 0dB FS.

 

[everettT]

I'll just concur that hard drive space is uber cheap, so the higher the better

 

[yepimonfire]

I don't think the dynamic range of movies is 105 dB. It is the peak for the 5/7 channels and the .1 is 10 more. Cds also have a peak at 105 dB, 0dB FS.

-30dBfs pink noise calibrated to 75dB leaves 30dB of headroom per channel, which is 105dB per channel, not combined. I generally watch movies at -15dB, which equates to 90dB per channel. During loud peaks with all channels blaring, I have recorded peak spl measurements of 110dB with the lfe going heavy in movies mixed hot. Each additional sound source adds 3dB, so all five channels at max equates to 102dB, add 10dB for the sub, and you get 112dB.

There is no real peak spl for music, since there’s no mixing standards. Classical music is about -30-20dBfs at average levels, while modern rock recordings are only about 6-12dB down.


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[yepimonfire]

Joking aside, you gain no benefit from sampling rates higher than 176khz, since 176khz contains all frequencies audible (and more) and captures transient information slightly beyond the limits of human perception.

32bit integer offer a dynamic range of 192dB, which is only useful for digital headroom for dsp processing or mixing, many filters used in dsp processing are 32 bit operations, and thus require a 32 bit word length to work with. Microsoft Windows audio engine processes all audio at 32bit floating point, which gives a dynamic range of of 1068dB, this gives plenty of headroom to accommodate multiple sounds all at once without digital clipping, but is entirely useless for playback.

I’d say 95% of the time 24bit is excessive, especially for music. Hell, most rock and pop recordings that use heavy dynamic range compression could probably be stored in 8 bit. As previously stated, an increase in sampling rate increases dynamic range as well, since quantization noise is more “spread out” over the large frequency range. This is why DSD manages a 120dB dynamic range with a single bit.


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[killdozzer]

I still don't get the relations between digital information and reproduced sound. I do for some part, but then I get a strange feeling that certain measures are being used both to describe the workings in the digital domain and then later to describe the sound.

Like the other day, I saw a video where someone said something about a sampling frequency and then added how it is unnecessary as humans don't hear above 20kHz. I wanted to say; but you're not listening to the sampling rate, that's just the speed of "reading" a digital file, it seems as if you can't really have high audible frequency without a fast sampling rate (?).

EDIT: later confirmed by @yepimonfire

Then there's dynamics which imply both frequency span and dB and I hope in this case dB refers to those SPL dB's, otherwise I'm committing myself. This means that you need sufficient bit depth for music to be loud (or is it just in case it has both loud and silent parts?) and for music to go from low fq to high fq?


EDIT: later confirmed by @yepimonfire

Because everyone keeps saying we don't really need hi-res files and then comes Mark Walter in that lecture linked by @Auditor55 and says; sure, we don't need it until a certain instrument comes and hit a certain note (he was referring to a high pitch of some instrument). But, couldn't you then simply cut out the bottom part and still make it fit to a CD (which is not hi-res for him)

And then there's vinyl, which is said to have the equivalent of 8 bits, so it couldn't take a hi-res recording and yet someone raised this doubt just a couple of posts before. If it's known that vinyl is equivalent to 8 bits, and you need 16 for hi-res (or 24 for Walter), why raise this question? But you could cut digital info into record grooves, right? Like having a bump in the record groove for 1 and silence for 0, is it theoretically possible to record hi-res music onto vinyl this way? No matter how short the song might be, but could it be hi-res? Just make the "1 bump" more pronounced than record "clicks" to make it clear.

Sorry for trying your patience, I'm injured lying in bed, hence the intensified activity.

EDIT: I'm sorry, it's Waldrep. I never heard this surname and couldn't make it out from the video.