[LAU] How bad is mp3/ogg

[S. Massy]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 09:07:33PM +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:57:38PM +0200, Atte Andr? Jensen wrote:
> 
> > My question is: is this really a fair way to judge the artifacts  
> > introduced by encoding?
> 
> No, it's completely invalid.
> 
> The correct way would be a double blind A/B/X test between the
> original and the encoded versions.
With suitable hardware. What I mean is, I think a great way of
demonstrating the difference between lossy compression and uncompressed
audio is to do an A/B test through a consumer device and then do it in the
studio. The difference can be striking.

I like to think I have decent ears, and I can only very rarely tell the
difference once over 192kbps. Though I've also found that bitrate isn't
always everything (i.e some audio seems to respond better to a given
compression algorithm than other). I wonder what other people's
experience has been in that respect.

Cheers,
S.M.