Is mp3 bad for (death) metal?

[vintologi]

I remember over 10 years ago where i asked a student to listen and see if he could hear the difference between flac and mp3 (i think i said compressed vs uncompressed).

I used my htc desire HD and a cheap pair of speakers (maybe 10$). I had an mp3 320 Kbps and flac version of a kalmah song (i had transcoded it myself obviously).

He did correctly identify which version had the better audio but of course that could have been just him being lucky or due to it not being double blind.

But the few times i tried testing it with heavy metal myself it did not seem hard at all to tell the difference.

Does mp3 struggle with electric guitar due to it being so detailed? (too much for the algorithm).

 

[MaxwellsEq]

It depends on the chosen final bitrate. Beyond about 300kbit/s most people can not tell the difference between WAV and MP3.

 

[kemmler3D]

320kbps MP3 is supposedly transparent almost all of the time, but it's not 100% indistinguishable from lossless in all cases. It's also possible you used an older encoder that didn't do the best job, who knows?

As for death metal in particular - it can present a challenge for MP3 as you have a lot of inharmonic and harmonic content going on at high amplitude, for a lot of the song. I think that If you end up with too many harmonic components at once you can start to miss some... death metal of any genre is probably one that will stress the codec the most.

A real level matched DBT is the only way to be totally sure, but I find it plausible that you could hear a genuine difference.

 

[vintologi]

320kbps MP3 is supposedly transparent almost all of the time, but it's not 100% indistinguishable from lossless in all cases. It's also possible you used an older encoder that didn't do the best job, who knows?

I think i checked that. Pretty much everything uses the lame encoder.

From what i have read you can train yourself to notice artifacts even in music where mp3 does relatively well but untrained listeners may struggle to hear a difference.

As for death metal in particular - it can present a challenge for MP3 as you have a lot of inharmonic and harmonic content going on at high amplitude, for a lot of the song. I think that If you end up with too many harmonic components at once you can start to miss some... death metal of any genre is probably one that will stress the codec the most.

A real level matched DBT is the only way to be totally sure, but I find it plausible that you could hear a genuine difference.

Might be worth to do some more tests on this preferably with people who do not have any experience doing blind listening so we can see if it makes a difference for the typical listener.

 

[Mnyb]

What was the decoding device ? even if you encode with latest lame , the playback system can have problems ?

I mange to get audible artifacts on some infected mushroom tracks with the old Squuezebox 3 player who disappeared when using my computer for decoding it to wav on the fly ? (SB3 could not handle the obvious clipping gracefully due to lack of floating point math ).

 

[vintologi]

Oh i just looked at a blindtest folder. It's 5 flac files someone sent me over 10 years ago and i was able to successfully identify one of them as flac just from listening to them.

File folder on MEGA

mega.nz

I don't think that particular music clip is ideal in terms of making it easy to hear a difference but i tried anyway (i listened to the tracks multiple times).

I guess this one was the only lossless one: (not 100% sure)

Spoiler: my guess

1: lossless 3:320 4:128

DAC: asus xonar STX

linux, pulseaudio (this time).