Can anyone actually hear the difference between FLAC 41.1kHz/16-bit and MP3 320kbps?

Can anyone actually hear the difference between FLAC 41.1kHz/16-bit and MP3 320kbps?

I did an ABX once and got 11/16 correct, if any difference can be detected it's extremely minor and doesn't take away any enjoyment of listening.

Storage is cheap, if FLAC is theoretically better (even if we can't hear that it's better?) then why not use it over mp3?

i can, but only barely. the difference is most likely not worth 5x the size in my opinion. i still download .flac files when i can find them, since storage is so cheap these days.

>lol I don't even know if there's a difference but I'm going to use 10x as much storage anyway

You're damn right :)

Yes, but it depends on my listening environment.

there is provable objective difference in quality
what we can hear is irrelevant to that fact

>On September 28, 2015, Coulson died of complications from cancer at her home in Ashland.

Not really.
You need to burn those files to a music cd and listen to it on a high fidelity stereophonic system. The quality difference becomes quite noticeable at that point.

Enjoy your mp3s sounding like shit in 5 years

For anyone who's unsure, this poster knows what they're doing. That's an ABX failure, which is to say have done a double-blind test and they cannot tell the difference (between whatever they're testing and the original).

I would expect that with any LAME stable -V2 (~192kbps-ish) encoded over the past few years, going back to the old rusty LAME 3.90.2 --alt-preset standard, would present the same ("transparent") result for any of you for any normal audio.

It's been a long, long time since people could hear the difference between MP3 encoders (ah, Xing and Blade...).

There are a very few "problem samples" which present specific qualities which exacerbate design flaws with lossy audio compressors, such as specific recordings of castanets (fast transients in a form which tends to emphasise pre-echo) and harpsichord (sharp transients combined with a harmonic instrument, presenting a time-dimension challenge for long blocks and a frequency-dimension challenge for short blocks). These have been used to tune and refine compressors further to detect such cases and work around them, but it is technically possible that with a few it may still be possible for some people to ABX them. You are overwhelmingly unlikely to run into this issue in any normal use. This is also an area where Opus scores extremely well over MP3, due to its ability to (for example) change block length per harmonic band.

FLAC may still make sense to you, if you're drowning in storage, or your use is primarily archival, rebroadcast, or you think you may want to use a different lossy conversion in the future. However, I can't see audio compression getting much better than Opus at any point in the foreseeable future if I'm being honest with you - the field has firmly reached the point of diminishing returns and now the Opus encoder will just get better.

That will be because of their ears, not because of any degradation (assuming no "rotational velocidensity" meme shit of course!).

Even though my musical library is 99% flac imma say "hardly".

I'm 99.9% shure no one can hear the difference. I shure as hell can't at least since I've took some ABX tests. However I still rhink MP3 is shit but that's more of a storage thing.

This is the reason I still always download flac files and encode them to 128kbit opus files. It gives me transparant music files at around 4mb per file on average.

I still like flac because if a new and better codec shows up you can always make fresh encodes to it to a new lossy codec. It's great for archiving.

yeah I can but only on decent speakers/headphones and 320kbps still sounds good by all means

I definitely can hear the difference, but it's very subtle and depends on the song. I have to completely focus on the music with my eyes closed to even notice, though.

Also depends on your speakers/headphones

And the DAC too, I guess

Just tiny diff from bad codec MP3 old songs over Wav -> FLAC

Post ABX results

no, i don't have to prove anything to some halfdeaf fucklord

Fascinating that so many in this thread make incredible claims that have never ever been shown feasible by any double blind testing. Sup Forums is truly the master race.

>i'm half deaf and/or have shitty audio equipment
it's ok user

>lol u poor

you really must have shitty equipment, because i can tell the difference on fucking sennheiser momentums

I can but I have to pay close attention, and no I didn't use an ancient encoder the mp3 was encoded at 320k using lame from the flac I was comparing. The trick is too listen to the more background parts of the music like the bass line or whatever, typically those back parts get cut out a little or compressed more by mp3. The difference is hardly noticeable though, I store my music in flac for archival purposes because I want to be able to reencode later for various mobile devices depending on their storage space and audio capabilities.

It would be very easy to show high probability of your claim being true with the results double blind test, but you won't ever stoop that low. So cool.

Yeah sure I've got nothing better to do, just like you, than to actually test this shit go fuck yourself do some testing yourself just first get a setup that's capable of more than one-dimensional imaging

I can.

>not 192kHz/24-bit
Holy shit kys pleb. Also yes, I very much hear the difference on a high end setup.

say you have 128G SSD and a random linux distro installed (this is irrelevant but still), in what format you store music on your laptop?
I have FLAC version of the albums I like and was wondering if it is worth it to store them on my laptop or just keep them on my desktop, convert them in AAC and copying them on my laptop

Perhaps. I would say however, the headphones/home setup you have would matter _a lot_ more. If you aren't a dedicated autistic audiophile, and are just a casual listener, you probably won't notice that much of a difference.

Download flac, convert to 128kbit opus, delete flac.
Around 4mb per song average and transparent to 99.9% of the people.

VBR, constrained VBR or CBR? Since I'm already saving space using OPUS I can just go placebo and use CBR right?

Just use VBR. It'll sound completely transparent either way. I've done a lot of ABX tests and have above average hearing. 96kbit already sounded transparent and I upped it to 128kbit just to be sure it was completely transparent to me. I really doubt anyone would here the the difference between 128kbit vbr and flac. There's still a lot of people around claiming to here the difference between 320kbit aac and flac because of a skewed Tidal test so don't trust a lot of people claiming they can here the difference.

opus does not carry flac metadata after conversion, is this intended?

>Storage is cheap
its not, and its expensive as shit. why would i sync 20G to my phone if i can just sync 5G?

It does for me. I use opusenc from opustools to encode the files. Also I would change the extention to ogg instead of opus since some devices (like Android) don't recognize .opus but do recognize .ogg.

since I was on windows I used foobar2000 to convert. guess I'll try your method and see what happens