Audiophiles are just a victim of their own smugness. Human ears are pitiful to start with, but then the neural processing that goes on is even worse. We can’t hear shit and what we hear we can’t even all remember or recognize. And that’s at a young age, at age 30 the hearing is already deteriorating. Hearing has never been a strong point for humans, when our fight or flight response kicks in, the processing of audio is the first thing to go. If we didn’t use it for communication as much, we might have lost it even further. Even our sense of smell is better and compared to other animals our sense of smell is very weak. Audiophiles consider themselves special because they “honed” their skills and can hear stuff others can’t. But you can’t hone what isn’t there, there’s no fixing crappy hardware. In a double blind experiment almost all of them would fail even identifying a regular old Apple Music AAC file all the normies listen to compared to a lossless version. And when they buy expensive shit, that distorts the music in a way they like, they convince themselves that is the true version and all other versions must be wrong.
But hey, on the spectrum of all the bad and or dumb shit humans do, being someone with too much money who enjoys music isn’t half bad.
You can quite famously (and easily) fool any “audiophile” into thinking a given system sounds better than another – or after some mysterious modification – by doing nothing but turning the volume up one notch.
This is easily demonstrable, and repeatable. And a tactic often exploited in oldschool hi-fi shops, back in the days when you were expected to walk into a high street store and be greeted by a salesperson rather than just order whateverthehell off of the internet.
Out of all shops that got nicked in the last 20 years by internet shopping, high-end audio stores with concierge salespeople are still doing great.
Yup, 100% all of this. It turns out that audiophiles can’t tell the difference between a “best-in-class” cable and a coat hanger: https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathanger-test-23553/
lol. They can’t hear the difference even with the most expensive equipment. The resultant signal from decompressing a FLAC phase cancels with the original signal if you invert it. Meaning they are indeed 100% identical. Lossless, dare I say.
Literally all it does as a file format is merge data that is identical in the left and right channel, so as not to store that information twice. You can see this for yourself by trying to compress tracks that have totally different/identical L and R channels, and seeing how much they compress if at all
This is like trying to explain to a SovCit, why they need to have a license.
You’re wasting your time.
No, it’s like explaining FLAC to anyone who happens to be curious about it after seeing this screen shot and wondering how something can be both compressed and lossless at the same time. Many people appreciate this type of information being accessible easily in the comments
Certainly do. I learned something neat, thank you!
how something can be both compressed and lossless at the same time
I assume most people who’ve used a computer are familiar with lossless compression formats like ZIP files.
Of course, though, it doesn’t matter how familiar an audiophile is with digital formats. They’ll still believe that more expensive cables sound better, and they’ll keep on believing that even if you show to them that they can’t tell an expensive cable from a bargain bin one in a blind test.
Flac is literally lossless in the mathematical sense.
FLAC still cuts out part of the signal. It’s limited to 20khz.
Bhat’s typically well above the limit of an adults hearing, especially someone old enough with enough money and equipment to be considered an audiophile.
You can encode at higher bit depths and sample rates. I have music I’ve bought at 24bit 48Khz. (I know I won’t ever be able to hear the difference between that and the more common 16bit 44.1Khz.) I think you can go up to 96Khz, although I’m not sure I’ve actually seen it before.
I’ve seen, and I have 24bit 96khz files.
They’re less common than your average 16bit 42khz, but they do exist.
Isn’t 44.1 KHz more common?
Yeah I fixed it idk why I thought 42
FLAC is totally lossless. You can rip a CD to 44kHz WAV, compress it to FLAC, and then decompress it and get a bit-perfect copy of the original WAV.
Lossless converting a CD to FLAC. But that CD was recorded at 44hkz sampling rate, which gives you a maximum frequency of 22khz. You have lost audio above 22khz. Children can theoretically hear frequencies higher than this, but typically adults cannot.
FLAC doesn’t cut anything out though. Whatever input you use, FLAC compresses losslessly. You can use 96kHz 24bit recordings and the resulting FLAC file can be decompressed back into a bit-perfect copy of the original.
In the OP, the messages in red are correct. FLAC is like a ZIP file designed to be more effective at compressing audio files. And just like a ZIP file, you can reconstitute the original file exactly. There’s no data lost in compression.
Yes if you’re transcoding a CD to FLAC it’s lossless. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the process of digitally recording the audio in the first place.
Nevermind the fact that nobody seems to have paid any attention to the original joke which is that the boomers who can afford high end stuff can’t even hear the difference.
No its not lol
Even uncompressed audio cuts out frequencies. With digital audio capture it is impossible to capture everything. There will always be a floor and a ceiling. In the case of flac it’s typically 20-24hkz.
Audiophiles have moved onto “high res lossless” because regular lossless wasn’t good enough for them.
And this is because audiophiles don’t understand why the audio master is 96 kHz or more often 192 kHz. You can actually easily hear the difference between 48, 96 and 192 kHz signals, but not in the way people usually think, and not after the audio has been recorded – because the main difference is latency when recording and editing. Digital sound processing works in terms of samples, and a certain amount of them have to be buffered to be able to transform the signal between time and frequency. The higher the sample rate, the shorter the buffer, and if there’s one thing humans are good at hearing (relatively speaking) it’s latency.
Digital instruments start being usable after 96 kHz as the latency with 256 samples buffered gets short enough that there’s no distracting delay from key press to sound. 192 gives you more room to add effects and such to make the pipeline longer. Higher sample rate also makes changing frequencies, like bringing the pitch down, simpler as there’s more to work with.
But after the editing is done, there’s absolutely no reason to not cut the published recording to 48 or 44.1 kHz. Human ears can’t hear the difference, and whatever equipment you’re using will probably refuse to play anything higher than 25 kHz anyways, as e.g. the speaker coils aren’t designed to let higher frequency signals through. It’s not like visual information where equipment still can’t match the dynamic range of the eye, and we’re just starting to get to a pixel density where we can no longer see a difference between DPIs.
If that’s happening you need to fix your transcoder settings.
do you know if anyone has tried this with a flac and an mp3 file? Theoretically all that should be left is the “loss” right? what would that sound like?
eta: I’d try myself but I’m not an audiophile and wouldn’t even know where to get a flac file (legally) and doubt my crappy $20 in ears would be capable of playing it back if I did
The end result sounds awesome. I would totally listen to that on its own.
you wouldn’t need a flac file, you can use any wav file, the audio of both is identical.
regadring your question, you can think mp3 as the jpeg of music. both mp3 and jpeg use fourier transforms*. so, to image what mp3 is doing to the audio, you can see what jpeg does to images (spoiler alert, unless you are aggressively compressing it, it is not noticable)
(*jpeg actually use discrete cosine transform instead of fft, but it is similiar enough)
Theoretically all that should be left is the “loss” right? what would that sound like?
Like noise, more or less, but at frequencies that are hard to hear.
wouldn’t even know where to get a flac file (legally)
BandCamp offers FLAC downloads. There are some other sites that do too, like Quobuz and I think some Japanese ones. Soundtracks I’ve bought via Steam sometimes come in FLAC too.
You can also rip a CD.
Another place is bandcamp. When you buy music from there you can choose the encoding.
I generally download FLACs when I can; after building an mp3 library, then adding oggs, and most recently opus, I value having a source that I can transcode into whatever new, improved codec takes the lead every few years. However, you have to be prepared for the size requirements. FLACs are still pretty big: I recently bought Heilung’s “Drif”, and the FLAC archive was nearly 650MB. Granted, it’s bigger than usual; the average album comes in around 400MB, but still… you have to commit to find sizeable long-term storage if you keep those sources, and off-site, cloud backup can get pricey. Or, you can trust that where you buy it from will provide downloads of your purchases indefinitely.
If you want free, legal FLAC files just to play with, this Zelda fan music album is free and legal to download in FLAC format (you do need to torrent the FLAC version, yes legal torrents exist).
It also has some good tracks in it IMO.
HDTracks.com sells DRM free albums in FLAC format
Bandcamp too sometimes
I’ve tried myself, and the “loss” is really not that much. You can see it if you zoom, but if you listen to it you can’t make out the track it comes from. It sounds more like noise. That was at least on the track I tried this with, maybe in a less compressable track there is more of a difference.
Did you mess around with compressing it yourself at all? Like, if you “deep fried” it, would the difference be recognizable?
If any youtube/peertube creators are reading, I’d click that video…
The easiest free way I know to get a FLAC file legally is to go to your local library, borrow a CD, and rip it to your home PC direct to FLAC. You’ll have to deal with the fact that your ODD might introduce some noise, but it’ll be the same noise as playing it from that same drive. Then rip the same disc to MP3.
Yes, WAV is in the middle both times, but that’s how you can get a FLAC file to compare legally.
The noise of the optical disc drive? I, erm, that’s not how digital data works.
More to the point, the easiest way to get a FLAC file would be to record some audio in Audacity (or equivalent) and then output it as FLAC.
Fair, but the recording method comes down to microphone quality; I’m trying to go from a known good recording with something that can/will be lost in the MP3 transition.
The problem with your noise point is, I’ve used ODDs with less-than-impeccable lasers (either laser itself or the housing). I’ve had discs ripped with minor audio corruptions - I’ve always called that ‘noise’ because it’s not the desired signal (and it can create literal random noise in the recording). Maybe there’s a better term for it, but simply put, not all drives are perfect, not all lasers are perfect, and there is a possibility of imperfect copying. It’s just a fact of life. Just like sometimes you might burn a frisbee, there’s times you don’t get a 100% clean rip.
lol, I don’t even own an optical drive anymore. I’m 100% streaming these days. It looks like from other comments there are places to buy FLAC files directly (which I’d hope would be decent quality)
It’s all academic though, I’m not really interested in becoming an audiophile. Streaming quality is fine for my needs.
Fair enough! But at least you know there’s a method in case it comes up. Also, I suggest you get a CD/DVD-RW drive, and BD-RW drive, just on principle - and use your local library for media! Your tax dollars pay for it, so you ought to get that value back!
Actually, you see, it is not the original bits, yeah? They get compressed, and that removes bits, and then they are uncompressed, and bits are added. Those are RE-CONS-TI-TUTED bits. It’s like reconstituted tomato juice, the taste of the original water is gone forever! And you can hear that. With music, I mean, not with the tomato juice. Like, who says it’s even the same kind of bits, the same quality? You can so hear the difference. You want a double blind study? Well that’s just silly, if it’s double blind, it means its not blind, because the two blinds cancel each others out. Basic science, duh!
As an audio connoisseur, I will not settle for anything less than a private, live showing by the band without any digital assistance like microphones.
You see, when the audio goes into a wav file, it gets converted into BITS. That’s not audio, that’s food! And those bits aren’t even used immediately–they’re saved for later! They go STALE in the hard drive only to be used later to create synthetic bits, losing both quality and purity during the process. To make matters worse, those synthetic bits are used to make synthetic audio waves, which get turned into electrons and sent down a wire to make synthetic pressure waves. Nothing is REAL with digital audio. It’s fake music made from fake sounds made from fake waves made from fake bits made from a fake copy of real, honest-to-goodness music.
It may come at a premium multi-million cost for a single album, but gosh dang-it, I’m listening to music as it was made to be!
/s
And it’s all bits now! The 12" reel-to-reel tape that can’t be played in any device made since 1980 had KIBBLES to go with the bits!
Saving music to a external memory thing also losses quality because it has to be copied twice
To keep the highest quality of the music, you need to listen to it on the device it was created
IVE HAD THIS GIF SAVED FOR OVER A YEAR AND I FINALLY GET TO USE IT
That’s why I’ve always said using Optical/Toslink etc. is a mistake. Sending music with light just means you’ll hear shade in your music.
Toslink is a bad example for your point. It is the same S/PDIF digital signal that is sent over fiber and it isn’t even using laser but a standard diode, so won’t even work long distance (shorter than if you would use the normal RCA cable with S/PDIF).
The most ridiculous thing I saw was the gold plated toslink cable.
DIY Perks just did a video where he modded a toslink TX to use a laser so he can do surround speakers wirelessly using line of sight.
Saw this one yesterday. Pretty neat!!
Gold plated TOSLINK cables crack me up.
What’s the L stand for again…?
Lossy, of course!
TBH FLAC can’t do 32bit floating point encoding, neither more than 8 channels per stream, so he’s not technically incorrect that it’s not zipping a wave file.
The first one concerns recorded source material (there are 32bit fp recorders for the last few years really helped loudest and quietest recordings) and not a single end product.
The second one limits FLAC to 7.1, so as a container it’s not suitable for theatrical purposes, neither for Dolby Atmos/DTS, nor for higher order ambisonics (used in vr).
But neither of these limits concerns end users, and if we’re talking about music, they can get fucked with whatever exorbitancy they prefer.
Einbildung ist auch eine Bildung!
