How well can you hear audio quality? NPR recently posted a quiz asking exactly that, sparking a debate across the internet about the digital quality of the songs we listen to.
The test is simple – you can do it right here. In it, you listen to six songs, each posted at three different audio qualities (128kbps mp3, 320kbps mp3 and uncompressed WAV), and you have to decide which one is the highest quality. I plugged my $80 headphones into my laptop, prepared to show the world I have some of the finest ears in the game, and I scored three out of six.
There are a few different factors coming into play here. The quality of the equipment you’re using is no doubt going to have an effect (those $5 headphones from Coles won’t help), as well as how much experience you have listening to uncompressed music. But also, users on Reddit were quick to point out that the songs chosen for the quiz were songs that compress well, making them even harder to guess.
Right, a quick science lesson. Basically, all sound is made up of waves, and when audio engineers need to digitise those waves, they have to take samples of it. They take samples at different intervals (128 per second or 320 per second) to see where the waves are. The higher the sample rate, the better the quality, but it can never be a mirror image of the analogue wave form. How Stuff Works have a pretty simple article explaining all this.
The less samples an audio file has, the worse it’s going to sound. You’ve probably heard that mate of yours talk about how they rip everything at 320kbps. It’s probably because they haven’t experienced the magic of Lorde at 8kbps…
The original article blew up on Reddit, with lots of users (and a fair few audio engineers) chipping in to give their two cents on the matter. Most of them agreed that while the average person can tell the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps, most good compressing software is able to make the difference between 320kbps and uncompressed audio pretty much undetectable to the average listener.
So if it’s more or less the same to the human ear, what is the big deal with compression?
There have been plenty of artists who have been quick to trash the quality of mp3s. Neil Young went on a rampage when he brought out his own device, the Pono Player. Young said that it was “capable of creating the best sounds that people can create in the digital realm in the recording studios” but it failed in a blind audio test against the iPhone.
More recently we have the Tidal saga; the new music streaming service being spearheaded by Jay Z, where you can subscribe to the high-def audio streaming for only $19.99 per month, and experience songs at 1411kbps.
Spotify, meanwhile, works on a few different quality rates. It does have the option for high-quality streaming if you’re a premium subscriber (160kbps on mobile, 320kbps on desktop) which might have been where Tidal failed to get off the ground. If the average listener (or even most listeners) is unable to tell the difference between 320kbps and uncompressed files, why would they pay extra?
There are people who can still tell the difference, though, and those are often the people who have sound systems worth the same price as a small island in the Bahamas.
If you took the test and scored zero, don’t sweat it. It doesn’t mean that you’re not enjoying music at the same level as someone else. If listening to your favourite album through Apple headphones on the bus is what works, do it – you don’t need to spend hours a day training your ears to hear minute bits of compression in your favourite track.
Of course if you live in Australia, there’s one other surefire way to identify an uncompressed WAV file.
Photo: courtesy Garry Knight
