While doing research for an article today, I stumbled across a listening test on MP3orNot.com.
MP3orNot.com is a website that allows you to quiz yourself with a blind ABX test which compares fairly high-resolution 320kbps MP3 files against the older, 128kbps standard.
I hope it doesn’t come across as bragging when I say that I scored 100% on my first pass through all the sound samples.
I promise that I don’t mention this just to dazzle you with my bat-like hearing. (Trust me, I have the bat-like eyesight to match.) I bring it up to make two specific points:
1) There are people out there who can reliably tell certain file-types apart by ear, even when the general population isn’t able to do so, and
2) Even to many of us, the differences aren’t always that big of a deal.
As someone who does routinely does better than the average on these kinds of tests, I’ll be the first to admit that there are a lot of things that are much more important. As long as the song and the production are great, I would probably be happy with either one of the file-types from “MP3 or Not” test if it was my only option.
(For what it’s worth, the 128bps MP3 files they used sounded much better than the 128kbps codecs that were available in the days of Napster and 1st Gen iPods.)
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad that file-resolution standards are continuing to go up, and I think it would be pretty neat if 24-bit audio files eventually become the norm for all listeners in the future. But in the meantime, I’m happy to keep on listening to great music anyway I can.
For my own portable listening, I tend to encode records as 256 or 320kbps variable-bit AAC files. These files take up about 1/5th of the space of CD-quality AIFF files, and although I’ve never been in a double-blind test with these, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was unable to tell them apart from CDs consistently.
The truth is, that for all the bashing that “lossy” audio codecs get in some corners, I can tell you that files like these are infinitely more faithful to the original masters than my first stereo ever was. The same may be true for many of today’s listeners.
I could never afford a fancy system growing up, so as a teenager my first stereo was a beaten-up, hand-me-down cassette boombox. It played tapes just slowly enough that every record came out almost a quarter-tone flat. It wasn’t so bad that most people would notice, but enough that I’d have to slacken my guitar strings ever-so-slightly to teach myself songs.
When I was 13 years old, I went through a period that lasted months where I listened to Nirvana’s Bleach on it everyday everyday after school. A little while later I did the same thing with Daydream Nation, Paranoid, Rain Dogs and Mellow Gold. I loved every minute of it, and those records, being great, still sounded great on it.
Eventually, I saved up enough money from a summer job scooping ice cream to buy a better stereo. It played CDs as well as my gathering backlog of cassettes, and although imperfect, sounded significantly bigger and more immersive than my old boombox.
That was nice too. But what was best, was always the music.
(Go ahead and try it out: Quiz yourself at MP3orNot.com. Then, write in and let me know: How’d you do? Do you think the differences were a big deal? Will this change the way you listen to music or reinforce what you already do?)