this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024

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Confidently Incorrect

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When people are way too smug about their wrong answer.

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They must be using $30.000 SATA cables if they can hear that... (pawb.social)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

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!

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[–] [email protected] 102 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago

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/

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Einbildung ist auch eine Bildung!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Hahahaha, that's a good one. I'll be using that

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What's the L stand for again..?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Lossy, of course!

[–] [email protected] 130 points 1 week ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Flac is literally lossless in the mathematical sense.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (10 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not a FLAC, but I tried it on this video by reencoding to an mp3 at 320 kbps, then subtracting the original, amplified it a bit, and got this. The song is definitely recognizable, but heavily distorted.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

HDTracks.com sells DRM free albums in FLAC format

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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...

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is like trying to explain to a SovCit, why they need to have a license.

You're wasting your time.

[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Certainly do. I learned something neat, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.