[LAU] How bad is mp3/ogg

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from S. Massy's message of 2011-10-12 00:23:42 +0200:
> On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 05:35:09PM -0400, S. Massy wrote:
> > 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.
> Responding to myself here. Out of curiosity, I just did some AB'ing
> (hadn't in a very long time) and you can hear a difference even above
> 192 kbps. A lot of it seems to have to do with emphasised frequencies. I
> think Jostein had a very good point about these formats potentially
> actually being pleasing to people because they make things sound
> "bigger/punchier".
> 
> Very interesting...
> 
> Cheers,
> S.M.

Was this a double-blind test? Otherwise you don't really need to test at
all. The idea of a double-blind test is that you can't fool yourself.
With a simple A/B test you might not want to fool yourself but still do
it.