Distortion confusion

[Atryx10]

Are high-end gear more revealing of source distortion? I've noticed audio distortion a whole lot more when using my EM10 than when I'm using 7Hz Zero 2 or CX 400-II while I'm watching youtube at 1.3x speed. I'm not sure if the issue is the drivers or the audio compression that happens when the playback is faster than 1x, as the distortion disappears when either the speed is lowered to 1x or when I decrease the volume such that I can barely hear the video. Would going to end-game gear ensure that I won't hear this distortion, or am I SOL in this regard so long as youtube doesn't use lossless audio?

 

[nerdstrike]

Better-than-bad playback does "reveal" audible artifacts, presumably because of a lower noise/distortion/better FR. However there are some artifacts that your brain learns to identify (mp3 jingles on cymbals for example) and then you hear those everywhere they appear.

Apparently YouTube speeds up audio by dropping slices of the original audio and fade or interpolate between the samples it kept[citation needed]. I think it's done client side, because there's no break in the stream. Chances are that process can create artifacts in the audio when interpolation doesn't get it right and that's what you're picking up on.

Personally I would expect decent gear to make this perceptually worse, but I guess it would be "fun" to lift the audio stream from some sped up footage and double-blind test it on different headphones. The only true fix here is to get YouTube to do something more expensive with the audio stream.