Audiophile or Audio-Fooled? How Good Are Your Ears?

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I got 6 out of 6 cus I figured that if you cycle very fast between the songs, the one that takes the longest to load is the uncompressed song :D.

As a speaker builder I can say that the audible difference between various SPEAKERS is MUCH greater than the audible difference between lossy and lossless audio files.

I loved Steve Guttenerg’s definition of an audiophile...”An audiophile is someone who listens to music without multitasking”. Just listen!

I like vinyl because the art is bigger.

I like vinyl because of the expense and the inconvenience.

I can’t remember who said "Musicians use their stereo to listen to music. Audiophiles use music to listen to their stereo."

I guess I can hear 20k (I can say that 18k I hear 100%), but in music, I can’t hear difference between 320 and flac. 128 and 320 - yes, sometimes music lost “air” and “freshness” in high and punch on bass and kicks. Main question is - it’s worth it? If you really hear difference in blind test and you ready to spend money for this - it’s for you. Once my friend can’t hear difference between Gibson Custom Shop and Chinese copy, but still want to have original. When I asked him:”maybe, you just want to know, that you guitar is expensive and see the Gibson logo on a headstock?” He said:”yes, it’s just warm my soul”. Be honest for yourself.

As a 52 year old drummer/live sound tech I know my hearing has been compromised. As much as I love hi rez audio I'd happily trade all the hi rez in the world for music that has dynamics again.

I have tinnitus. Everything sounds like crap

I'm an about to retire audio/video engineer who worked worked for Philips mastering the first CDs in the early 80s, and took great pride in making the best possible sound we could produce. I recently met a wealthy gentleman in California that bought amplifiers for his home theater for $900,000 (I'm not joking) to listen to MP3 quality music. I could almost cry when I think about the care we used to take to make such high quality recordings when I see what has become "good enough" today. In my opinion audio quality improved from Emil Berliner in the late1800s until the 1990s when it peaked, and has gone downhill since then.

I remember making that same "mistake" with the Coldplay song / files first when I took this test. The lossy files (or was it only the 128 kbps one...) had actually removed some burned in (clipping) distortion (mostly in the high frequencies) that were present in the WAV file. So judging it better was kind of obvious the first time around.

I'm not an audio file.

I can spot differences between 128kbps and 320kbps most of time. But 320kbps and .wav sounds the same for me..

I love the conclusion. Ultimately music pleasure comes fro feeling it rather than being a purely physical matter. Let’s not forget that Beethoven composed most of his best music when virtually deaf. I bet he enjoyed listening to it

An audio engineer once gave me the best advice you can get about enjoying music: The technical specifications of your setup don't matter. What matters is how close they are to the gear the audio producer was using when he decided that the song was ready.

I got all of them, My secret: very bad internet speed

I still play CDs. When CDs are outlawed, only outlaws will have CDs!

Sound quality isn't only about frequencies. To me, the easiest way to distinguish uncompressed audio is to listen to clarity in stereo image, and listen to dynamics. This made the NPR test somewhat easy to me. Only challenge was Suzanne Vega's acapella singing, because that clip didn't really have much stereo image nor dynamics.

I don't think if there is any single channel that has taught me as much about music than this amazing channel. Thanks RB