How Well Can You Hear Audio Quality? Blind Listening Test

It's somewhat renowned for being a terribly mixed album, alongside Suzanne Vega's "Solitude Standing". The compression ends up unintentionally cleaning up most of the crackling, so the 128kbps version sounds better than its higher-quality counterparts. Actually, as a couple of the other comments have said, it seems like they intentionally tried to pick things that are mixed poorly or recorded on older technology, given most of the song choices.

2/6, just kinda thumbing through, not spending much time on it. They all sounded fine to me. I can proudly say I am not one of those loony bins that has to listen to all music uncompressed with headphones that cost them a grand.

I got 2/6. Only got Katy Perry and Jay Z right. Chose the worst option 3 times. I didn't feel particularly confident for any answers except one, which I got wrong. I'm listening with 10 dollar earbuds though, so I guess that's to be expected, but if I had several hundred dollar headphones on I doubt I'd do much better.

4/6 on cheap earbuds. Katy Perry and jay-z were the easiest. I got Suzanne Vega and Neil Young wrong.

I can usually tell the difference between different bitrates of MP3s, but I can't really tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and lossless. Got 3/6, with all the wrong ones being 320s

Considering I'm hard of hearing in both ears (pretty much deaf in my right), I'm surprised that I managed to get 3/6 of them. To be fair though, I think that's more luck than anything, since none of them sounded very different to me.

Me too. I could always spot the bad 128 one but for some reason kept picking the 320 as the best. Maybe because thats the format I listen to the most?

@korwin said:

I got that one wrong mostly because I didn't want to listen to Coldplay, but you're right. The mastery is abysmal.

I got 3/6 on a pair of ATH-M50LEs hooked up to an Asus Xonar Essence STX. I got bored toward the end and that's when I made all of my mistakes. Wish the test's taste in music had been a bit better.

They all sounded exactly the same to me. I got 0 out of 6.

I got 2/6. I think the recordings themselves played a part in this because the ones I got right were extremely easy for me to determine. There was no doubt in my mind about those two. I'm listening on these. I haven't been thrilled about these speakers since I got them.

Tried again with my Koss PortaPros and got 2/6 again. Same two.

Living up to your user name.

If they really wanted to make this test hard, they should have swapped 128 for V0. There's really no perceptible difference between V0 and 320, but you get a 20% reduction in file size, which is nice.

Lossless audio will always sound as good as 320 or V0 (barring any weirdness like compression helping to clean up bad mixing), but will often sound no better for a huge jump in file size (2x or more). I keep everything in FLAC for two reasons: I have a 18TB NAS so space isn't an issue, and FLAC's the best thing to transcode from.

4 out of 6. I missed the Coldplay and Katy Perry samples. I picked the 128kb version for both after going back and forth between that and the uncompressed version. I'm listening though a decent quality headset through the front audio ports on my PC. I'm sure if I was using my Fiio E07 and Sennheiser HD558s I would have caught those two. I usually listen to music through my iPod line out with the amp and 558's and I can definitely hear a quality difference between songs that were ripped at 320kb MP3 or better and songs that aren't. Probably wouldn't be able to tell without an amp though.

TL;DR: Those audiophile people on hi-fi aren't crazy after all. Good high-impedance headphones and an amp make all the difference in the world.

3/6 first try not really trying. 4/6 second try actually listening to the samples multiple times. I did the thing a third time and I still got the Katy Perry song wrong. The piano song was easy, as was the female vocals. Jay-Z I got 320kb instead of lossless the first time and got right the second time. I got the coldplay one right every time. I got the Neil Young one on my third try.

Music I'm familiar with I can tell apart immediately, but for this stuff it was kinda tricky.

2/6 the only song I could actually hear the difference on was Vega's Tom's Dinner because its just her voice so its easier to hear the slight imperfections but it seriously is so hard to tell especially when there is instrumentation.

4/6 only after getting the first two wrong and realizing I could not tell the difference what so ever. I just looked at the bandwidth usage each one used to play and it became very clear which one was uncompressed. yay for cheating!

4/6. Could not differentiate the Mozart and Coldplay songs.

I gave up after the 2nd one. I'm using a good hyperx cloud 2 headset, but I already know that my hearing isn't great, so all of the 3 choices sounded the same to me.

5/6 but in my defence that Coldplay song was the first choice and mastered poorly. I thought I was hearing compression artifacts. If it was last I would have noticed that and picked correctly, I'm sure. I've also never listened to any of those songs before.

I have S/PDIF from my PC to a DAC then amplifier with Beyerdynamic DT880 (600 ohm).

I regularly seek out, and listen to, lossless quality music. To the people that don't hear it... you're not used to hearing it or you don't have the ears for it.

I just have basic gaming headset so I couldn't really hear the difference. My understanding is that to hear a lot of the extra detail you need high quality headphones. I know that I can immediately tell the difference between listening to a lossless file on some bose headphones and listening to an MP3 using my headset, but I just don't have the money to spend hundreds of dollars on headphones.

3/6, though I don't know how much of that was me actually being like "oh, this one is obviously the WAV uncompressed version"... I'm using a pair of Astro A40's plugged into my computer.

Also, to the guy saying the non-compressed versions are easy to distinguish because they start a little faster than the other 2, I re-took the test and got a 6/6 easily because the WAV versions started... slower than the other versions. Weird?

I got 4/6 with my Triton gaming headphones.

4/6 with my Sennheiser Momentum plugged straight in to my Macbook, To be honest i couldn't really tell the difference but hearing the lossless vs mp3 with a headphone amp or on my B&W loudspeakers you can tell the difference immediately and it is SO big.