Can we hear the differences between MP3 and FLAC?

should I be able to hear the differences between mp3 and flack this question comes from Thomas in Wroclaw Poland a Paul most of the time it's very hard for me to hear the audible differences between mp3 and flak is there something wrong with my equipment or is it me I mostly listen to music through fostex studio monitors but it's equally hard to hear the difference when I'm using headphones is it worth it to pay extra money for the flack files will flak sound significantly better when I eventually buy a good audio system I don't know how much more you're paying for flak and by the way flak is free lossless audio codec and that's a way of losslessly compressing high well standard resolution audio can also be high resolution it's not it's not specific in general I think what he's talking about is when he buys a flak encoded file it's the full CD worth of audio on the flat file or an mp3 which is what we call a lossy file it's called lossy because you're losing information now I'll answer the first the last part of the question first yeah I think it's worth it for you depending on the difference in cost and hopefully it's not too much but I would always buy my stuff in flak or WAV some some form that is uncompressed or not lossy okay and I would do that because you don't know about circumstances let's say if you take mp3 files on my system you're going to be very disappointed you're going to hear the and if you compare the two it's this is just not going to sound great and now you're stuck with it if you have a whole library full of mp3s and and you elevate your result your resolution of your system and and the ability of that system to really show off all qualities of the music being played whether it's headphones or your studio monitors then you're gonna be disappointed now you have a library full of something you don't really want that's less than what you need so yeah stick with stick with flack to the question at hand though why you can't hear the difference well first off there are varying levels of mp3 some mp3 which if you have a very low amount of lossy information in the mp3 they can sound pretty good they're certainly not as good as no mp3 or lossless but they can sound pretty darn good so I don't know what level of mp3 you're getting it depends on the kind of music you're listening to as well some music pretty badly recording it doesn't really matter I shouldn't say that but I don't I really don't know how to answer the question adequately because I don't know your circumstance and I don't know these fostex I can tell you that on my system at home Terry's little system and I just have a pair of CAF LS 50s a sprout integrated amplifier and a turntable we can eat even though obviously nothing on a turntable is mp3 because that's that would have to do with CD and digital I can easily hear the differences when compression and in recording quality and I can tell you that most of the album's that we listen to are hardly as good as some of the older stuff that we have around like Sergio Mendes Brasil 66 surprisingly enough out of all the albums we have and we've got some great remastered beautiful heavy heavy vinyl products from from companies that do such things they don't sound anywhere near as good as even the old Brazil 66 because back in the day when people really cared about how things sounded even the the lowest quality of tape recorder had had an engineer behind it that really cared about compression and making instruments sound like instruments and voices sound like voices today not so much something we're gonna try and correct over time with our recording studio and we're gonna show the world that it can be done that you can you can play grunge okay here I'll I'll diverge somebody was saying you know you talk about your recording studio because it's gonna be perfect and pure and all that stuff well not every musician once perfect in pure right some of us want this this crunchy crunchy sound to our guitars and our voices that's cool I get it that's okay but let's record that crunchy grunge well right there is a difference and a big difference between taking something that is distorted by the musician whether it be in his amplifier or in his voice in the recording and capturing that perfectly as opposed to getting that same crunch and grunge through distorting the recording process itself big difference and we will attempt to demonstrate that difference to you over time and show you how the sounds funny but well recorded grunge sounds very different than poorly recorded grunge there is a difference it makes a difference and you can hear it even on the lowliest of systems and we will show that so I don't know why you're not hearing the differences maybe it's because you have better mp3s I don't know but if you can here's my advice go to a friend's house go to someone that you know and trust that can hear those differences it's got to be people around even people on the internet that you meet and listen to it on their system and then you'll find out is it system specific or is it just a matter of training for me hope that helps Thanks by [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Paul McGowan, PS Audio

Views: 305,284

Keywords: Ask Paul 1, Ask Paul 17

Id: aY9MYWeELEo

Length: 6min 52sec (412 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 14 2018