Mega Lossy v Lossless Test

Downloaded Cocker & Nimrod

I can hear a lot more going on in the M1 especially via headphones which is interesting to hear ... but tonally they are not the same & at the moment I prefer the M2
things may change I want to test playing with bass boost from the amp & headphone

 

Who's conducting the Elgar?

 

Steve Jobs

 

That wouldn't surprise me.

 

Track came from an old compilation but I'll see what info I can unearth.


So over 700 views and still only 14 votes (inc PFM)....... chickens.......cluck cluck cluck

 

I'm a bit confused & thick here as to what the whole exercise is intended to prove
not using MP3 myself or computers to download music

In this test you can choose from two menus - Menu 1 & Menu 2.
Each menu contains music using the same encoding - so the entire menu will be either MPEG-4 AAC 256 converted to WAV or pure WAV from CD.

Do I take it that the WAV file was recorded at high res if so what ?

I can hear a difference between them - that's not the problem

 

hi uk paid - people have been saying for ages that lossy formats sound worse. A poll is to ask in a very reasonable way, do they really?

We should see people by and large prefering a lossless file if this is indeed the case.
lf.

Lets simply say - which do people prefer the sound of (without knowing which is which?

A good question, and I hope we get lots of cross-forum participance. I will do so at some time in Aug, it's just some work.

 

They are both the same sample rate and bit depth, the AAC has undergone an additional lossy compression process where some allegedly "unimportant" information is sacrificed in order to enable a smaller file size for iPod users etc (Rob has concealed this file size difference by restoring the AAC files to wav format, though the information lost in AAC compression is not restored in the process). Your task here is to identify which group of files are missing information.

Tony.

 

Adding the ZG and PFM votes we are now well into double figures.

Result revealed once we pass 100 votes!

 

Some of us may not live that long!

Any word on the Elgar conductor yet?

 

Says Andrew Litton on the CD sleeve:

http://www.andrewlitton.com/

 

Thanks Rob.

 

OK, so you wouldn't believe me when I said it was Steve Jobs!

 

Thank you Rob to give us this possibility of test.

I voted; my comments if needed will be posted later (I downloaded only Elgar).

Regards

titian

 

It wasn't shiny enough to have been conducted by him!

 

Well, I've cast my vote. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole menu selection and listened to each menu twice through, once in menu order and once mixed up. To my cloth ears the difference is relatively small, not black and white but black and very dark grey, and I enjoyed listening to both formats.

 

I know what you voted for.
For me the difference was quite huge. Enough for me not to listen to music in that format but just go to concerts.
In case I didn't vote right, I'll convert all my CDs to AAC and expect to enjoy music from my digital system much more.

 

Or keep upgrading (or maybe downgrade?) your hifi until CD sounds better than AAC.

 

I think menu 1 is the lossy one but I voted 3 because it is too close to be sure for me.

 

We've now had over 30 responses if you add the votes from here and PFM.
100 is probably a little ambitious so perhaps declare at 50?

Can run longer if that is the general view.