You can find similar issues with loudspeaks (those overly enhancing basses sounds better, but perform worse) and TV displays (overly saturated colors).
They tend to be aesthetically unpleasant and high on the signal-to-noise ratio, yes. Hitting both would be nice, but if I had to choose one, it would be the second one.
+1. Even if they could be distinguished, it would be only in top HiFi setups. Most people (me included) listened with shitty car stereos, portable players with terrible DACs and cheap headphones.
I can never tell the difference between supposedly good audio and the equivalent of two cans connected with a string. Dunno, maybe I'm lacking the audiophile chromosome or something.
Firstly, on a personal note, I must say getting heavily downvoted on a factual statement and not an opinion is a new and confusing experience for me.
My comparisons were made several years ago using LAME 320 CBR, LAME VBR, OGG, lossless (WAV) 16bit 44.1kHz and lossless (WAV) 16bit 48kHz.
I believe at least most professional musicians and sound engineers would be able to identify the difference between all of these; while they might not always be "worse", their sonic character is certainly different.
t??, t??, ??? all sound so close to my poor ear that I'd struggle to articulate the difference. They sound like exactly the same thing at slightly different speeds.
That's precisely the issue I've got – yes, there’s a difference, but both sound like shitty speakers just with different EQ profiles applied to it. It's still compressed to hell and extremely tinny no matter what.
Not in that order though, unfortunately: Unless you are using really shitty speakers, room acoustics trumps everything else pretty quickly. For anyone who has never listened to music in a well treated environment I found https://youtu.be/dB8H0HFMylo?t=355 to be pretty eye opening.
Someone told a story about how he (or she, I can't remember) brought an audiophile friend to a classical music concert. The guy had never actually been at a concert, but had a huge classical collection at home.
He didn't like the concert. "The bass response was not good".
I can easily tell the difference using good headphones. You just need to know what to look for. Once you know, you can't help but notice. The difference is the transients, especially the cymbals and the snare. If it's muddy, you're listening to compressed audio.
While I can tell the difference (6/6 in this test), in practice, it doesn't actually matter to me personally. I'm usually listening to music while there are a cacophony of other noises going on (talking/cooking/driving), so the slight difference in the way cymbals are rendered or the loss of nuance in a large bass hit are far from the primary degradations to my listening experience...
Regardless of how the bass response is tuned, higher total harmonic distortion is objectively worse than less total harmonic distortion. Headphones are a tool to enjoy audio experiences, and a good tool should get out of the way of said experiences.
Very true. I've also had the opposite experience. Bad speakers/headphones can hide flaws. On good headphones, sibilant frequencies, compression artifacts, and muddy bass can all become really apparent and annoying.
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