How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? Blind Listening Test

4/6. The 2 I got wrong were Jay Z and Suzanne @ 320. I used headphones but have tinnitus and a very slight loss of hearing in my right ear.

I only got 1/6, but for everyone I picked the wrong one I picked the 320 one. I could hear that difference, but no real difference between the uncompressed and 320. Guess I was just unlucky on all of them save for the Coldplay one.
Since I can't really hear a difference between them I don't care that much. Never have to be honest. Not an audiophile, so I only got a pair of G930 wireless headphones.
So I don't know. I learned I don't need uncompressed audio to be happy with the quality, and that I still fucking hate rap.

Lossless auido is not supported by my ears sadly

5/6 with Sony MDR-1A headphones. When I was younger I never cared much about audio quality, but as time goes on I seem to notice it more and more. Somehow I chose the lowest quality on Katy Perry.

I got 2/6, which is exactly what you would expect of someone choosing randomly. I'm listening through an AudioQuest Dragonfly 1.2 DAC, and a pair of PSB M4U 1 headphones.

To be honest, I could hear differences between the flac and 128, but it was difficult for me to say whether those differences were compression artifacts or details being revealed by the uncompressed audio, which led to me guessing incorrectly a few times. Like on the Neil Young song, I chose the 128 version because his voice seemed to have more texture and the xylophone(?) near the end was a little brighter, but those must have just been compression artifacts. For all of them, the differences were really subtle, though.

Perhaps ironically, the one where I was most confident of my choice was the Katy Perry song, and I got that one right.

edit: Oh wav, not flac, but you know what I mean.

3/6

I can't say that I have the best hearing - it also doesn't help that I have crappy headphones that are on the brink of dying.

Got 4/6. I thought that the 320 and uncompressed version of the Coldplay had some crackling going on. Then I got the Mozart one wrong, those all sounded the same to me.

2/6, I picked 128 for the other 4. Katy Perry was the only one where I knew it sounded better...

Eh, if you let me listen to a bunch of different tracks I might have some trouble, but if you compare 128 and 320 for the same track I can definitely tell the difference. Lossless I've never been able to pick up the difference.

1/6, couldn't tell any differences. I still love you, Monoprice headphones.

4/6 - I thought Suzanne Vega was easiest with Katy Perry a close second. I thought Jay Z was the hardest, although I got that right too. The two I got wrong were Neil Young @320 and Coldplay @320. I'm using Adam P22 speakers on a Propellerhead Balance DAC.

Female vocals and acoustic instruments are a fairly good way of gauging audio quality, whereas heavily produced and artificial sounds make those differences harder to hear. The Neil Young song didn't seem very well recorded at any quality and there were probably remastering issues with the 1972 recording.

0/6. Every single one of those tracks sounded 1) the same, and 2) perfectly acceptable. I listened through regular old desktop speakers, and I didn't crank the volume or anything, so maybe these results are to be expected? Even with headphones however, I guess I've just never cared about audio quality. Why would I, when I can't hear the difference? :)

The Susan Vega track actually gave me the most trouble.

The problem with higher audio quality is that some of the recording noise, crackle, mistakes, etc. are easier to hear so you're inclined to say they sound worse in a listening test like this one.

3/6 Honestly, the Coldplay song was the only one I could notice much difference for just the lowest-quality recording. Any right answer I would chalk up to lucky guessing. My hearing's not so great compared to others my age after so many years in very loud concert bands.

4/6 with the Coldplay song and the Neil Young song throwing me.

I got 3/6. I found question 4 and 5 really difficult to hear any differences since there wasn't much bass, but with all the others I could definitely hear a difference in how rich and deep the sound was. I recognised the 128kbps track almost every time though, and almost got 4/6 but was torn between 2 tracks.

Don't feel so bad if you've got a low score - it's not your headphones or gear. There are tons of audiophiles on Reddit with better amps/DACs/headphones combinations who can't distinguish the differences on this test either (320 vs WAV is very hard unless you know what to look for).

Tests like these just how how much of the audiophile community is really based on perceived audio fidelity stemming from placebo.

That being said... I do think that WAV can sound better by allowing a bigger soundstage. But this really depends on how the artist recorded and mastered their tracks.

The first thing I did when I got Tidal was try a bunch of my music on lossless quality. There was no distinguishable difference in most of my music except for ONE artist, Chrome Sparks.

3/6 with cheap headphones that only have one side working. Guessing is fun. :P

3/6 but it was pretty much 50/50 between the 320 or uncompressed options.

Thing about audioquality is that even though the bitrate does matter what is even more important is shit in shit out. If you have bad recordings the uncompressed file aint gonna help you and 128kbps fine for 9/10 recordings and situations. Only if you got some awesome material, a good stereo and some quality time to spend on enjoying music you might consider 320 and higher than that.

The songs in that test don't really need to be +320 kbps or even +192 kbps.

In my non-expert opinion, high bitrate only matters when effort has been made to create a textured rich sound. For example the second half of Side B by Old Apparatus.

Jan 2011 : 720p Audio 128 kbps

All about the feel and texture :)

I can't tell the difference between this and my 320 copy with the headphones I'm using now. But when I listen at home through my brother's speakers the differences are immediate. Also the difference between the 320 kbps and the vinyl version are immediate too.

But with other songs it doesn't really matter. For example Move Your Feet by Junior Senior sounds great at any quality. Even from my Phone! :D

Yeah, a list of carefully selected songs without much high frequency components will propably almost all sound the same. Throw in there any rock song with hi-hats and snares and there will be now doubt which one is the mp3 one.

It's so easy to do a test to get the conclusions you want.

And yes, sometimes you really can't tell, it very much depends on what kind of music you listen to and the equipment.

Didn't take the test, but I can totally hear the quality difference between 128Kbps through 160Kbps and 256Kbps and higher when listening to death metal. I can't say the same for other genres, though, especially rap. I'm pretty sure that I'm not a true audiophile by any means and in turn most likely can't tell the difference between 44.1Khz 256Kbps mp3's and uncompressed formats.

Despite having a good pair of headphones and somewhat fancy Amp and DAC combo, I could barely tell any difference in those clips. And the ones I did get right were just a guess.

Ah well. I bought all that decent audio gear to make things sound better to me, not for picking out compression. Not going to stop me from archiving my albums to FLAC, though!

4/6. Got the first two wrong and picked 128 both times.

Started to go for the ones that sounded more like the two I got wrong and got the others right. In other words: For some reason the best quality one always sounded like the worst one for me and vice versa. A bit weird, but oh well.

I got 6/6 probably down to decent headphones and a bit of luck. The 128kbps versions were fairly easy do distinguish though, due to them sounding loud and tinny.

4/6, but I'm pretty sure that was luck. I was listening with crappy earbuds. Definitely not an audiophile. I listen to AM radio in my car sometimes and it sounds fine.

I gotta go listen to that Susanne Vega song though or it'll be stuck in my head.

5/6 - with crappy $10 earbuds....but I'm also a musician and have mixed and mastered my own songs plenty of times. The one I missed on I just answered too quickly as well. If I played these through my car stereo I would find the differences much more obvious for sure.

3/6 and honestly I felt like I was just guessing even on the ones I got right

I had never heard any of those songs before (I don't listen to much music), and I'm using Beats headphones which I've been told are decent quality (I haven't a clue):

I got 1/6 songs. The Mozart one.

Guess I can't tell shit! which I assumed would be the case.

I got all of them wrong, but more than that I honestly couldn't tell any difference between any of them. Not a single one. That's good in a way, because I know how much video quality makes me fussy and I can tell framerates apart. Gives me one less thing to complain about.

3/6, but all the ones I got right were complete guesswork, and on two I picked 128. I'm not exagerating to say that I couldn't tell the difference on any of them. I took the test with (what I thought were pretty decent quality) headphones - and I'm young enough that I hope my ears aren't to blame. I guess I don't really know what compression artifacts you would be looking out for - and, for my continued enjoyment of low-quality audio files, perhaps it's best I keep it that way.

4/6 it was very hard to tell 320kbps MP3 vs lossless WAV on a couple of them, and I was moving too quickly on the first couple before settling into my groove. The 192kbps was pretty noticeable when I was listening intently on the differences but in a real-world scenario I would not have cared one bit about the slight loss of fidelity.

All this did was cement in my mind that in today's world of digital music and listening to most of my music on computer speakers or headphones into a computer or phone, lossless does not mean a single thing to me. I'd rather stick with having smaller files, honestly.

6/6 right, could only identify 3 using my ears using PC speakers off the built-in sound card. If I hooked a decent set of cans up to my external soundcard I would probably be able to do more.

But identifying the lossless track is incredibly easy when they don't do anything to mask the loading times.

4/6 Wrong answers being Suzanne and Mozart at 320. I did it on my phone with appple's earbuds.

I stopped after 3 because I was just guessing. Some of the low quality ones sounded nicer than the high quality ones to me, so I guess the recording being cleaner doesn't necessarily equate to better "quality" for me.

I've just noticed that if you revisit the page the tracks get shuffled around, so:

Murray P - 320, Suzanne V - lossless, Cold P - 320, Katy P - lossless, Jay Z - lossless, Neil Y (c'mon man you're letting the side down, get a hard consonant for your surname initial) - 320 - so 3 out of 6

Used a pair of on ear headphones that are usually £30-something but were half price on Amazon's Black Friday deal, so I guess I did okay. Jay Z was the only one where I listened to each sample twice, because the backing chiptune track made me wonder how that sample was supposed to sound like in the first place. I think I genuinely recognised the difference in Suzanne Vega, but overall there was a fair amount of guesswork, especially with Neil Young where the sound wasn't clearest in any format.

4/6. On a pair of entry-level gaming headphones with an on-board sound card I can make out the difference between 128 and 320 kbps mp3, but found it difficult to assess the differences between 320 kbps and uncompressed wav for some of the tracks. Almost all of my music collection is in 320 kbps with some uncompressed files, so it doesn't surprise me that I can still tell the difference between 128 and 320 kbps.

3/6, with a pair of Sennheiser HD 380's using the (admittedly terrible) audio out on a mid-2010 Macbook Pro. I probably could have done better with a DAC & amplifier, but that really does defeat the purpose behind the test. For what I'm using to listen to music, 320 is totally fine (and what I already use).

I got 4/6 using a pair of Sennheiser 598s through an external soundcard and decent amp. I unsurprisingly got the Suzanne Vega song wrong. Unsurprisingly because we actually used that song as an example of poor production in a music technology class I took long ago. It's boring, overly compressed mono shit regardless of compression. I couldn't hear the difference in it and the Coldplay song because both of them were mostly mid-range frequencies and compression tends to handle those better anyway.

I should mention I've got a degree in music tech and have been writing, recording and producing music for close to 20 years now though not "professionally." These results don't surprise me at all. No, actually I'm surprised I got so many correct. High bitrate MP3 compression is every bit as good as lossless for 99% of music listeners out there. At least one of my correct answers was due to loading times. Except for JayZ which was really quite clear due to heavy bass compression artifacts, I wasn't 100% sure of any of the others.

I managed to get two right purely by guessing. I got Katy Perry and the Mozart Concerto. For all of them all the samples sounded the same to me. My setup is some old Astro A40 headphones directly out of the headphone port of my Macbook Air. I'll try it again later when I'm at home on my desktop where I've got a better setup but maybe it's all just going to waste on me.

UPDATE: I tried it again on my desktop setup. I got 3/6 this time but again it just felt like random guessing. Setup here is Philips Fidelio X1's connected to a Schiit Magni and Modi.

1/6.
All 3 options for each song sounded the same.

6/6 - the non-compressed starts a fraction of a second faster than the other two.

1/6, but that's probably on me because I've had a severe loss of hearing on my right ear since I was about 2 years old.

My audio setup isn't good enough to make much of a difference between 320 and uncompressed. But anything less than 320 is blatantly obvious. It doesn't take a lot of searching around the web to hear varying levels of audio quality, I can most definitely tell in most scenarios. Likely the biggest reasons most people say they can't is just because their speakers/soundcard/drivers arent good enough.

4/6 on external speakers. Funny enough, the two i got wrong i actually chose the lowest quality option.

4/6 using the built in speakers in my tv. I must have better hearing than I thought since I could tell that it sounded slightly better other than Jay Z. When I second guessed myself with Speed of Sound I picked the wrong one instead of going with my first choice.

1/6, picking 128 for everything except Suzanne Vega. What was with the high quality version of the Coldplay song having static? Was it a trick? I have some Audio Technica ATH-M50's that have needed a replacement plug for awhile but I've been slacking and using a pair of Plantronic Gamecom 780? "7.1" headphones instead. I've decided to repair them tomorrow. lol

X&Y is a terrible thing to sample, the master of that album is horrible.

6/6 with my $20 earbuds plugged to my phone. To be honest, I got them all right based on how long they took to load. I could barely tell the difference.