In this post I am going to talk about what differentiates music from mp3 and flac. First, and before you begin, go ahead with the following:
The quality of a musical hearing depends (and a lot) on the audio card and the musical equipment (amplifier, headphones / speakers) used, and on the other hand it also depends on the sensitivity of one’s ear. A newborn with perfect hearing can hear from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. The normal thing for a young person is to hear nothing above 18 kHz, although some people with exceptional hearing can hear 20 kHz or even more. , and a person 25 years of age or older begins to lose hearing from 15,000 – 16,000 Hz. In addition to the frequency response (quantitative aspect), the qualitative aspect is equally or more important: that the waves at each frequency are produced in the most similar way to the original source.
Having said that, we fully enter the subject at hand.
Many people think that an mp3 sounds like the quality of a CD. This is not exact. Apart from the fact that a CD sounds with the quality that those who have recorded it have given it, mp3s are formats with loss, and that means that a good part of the original information is discarded to save space. The trick is that the information that is discarded is, as a rule, information that is “hidden” among the rest of the information. To give a simple example so that the idea is understood, if a person is speaking to me at a normal volume and suddenly a helicopter passes in front of us, the sound of the helicopter will eclipse in my ears the voice of that person; the wave of his voice will continue to reach my ears but I will not perceive the sound. Another example, so that I am also understood: if we could play two very similar pianos at exactly the same time in such a way that their vibrations coincided, the mp3 would “say” that “one of the pianos is left over”. This type of operation (but, of course, at a much more subtle level, of microscopic changes) is what is done so that the initial 40 or 50 MB that a song occupies on the CD are reduced, at most, to 9 MB or less, depending on the bitrate (128, 160, 192, 256, 320 kbps) of the mp3.
But all that information that the mp3 removes at a stroke is information that, from the original source, would reach us, and it is information that would affect us emotionally (an mp3 violin can hardly give us goosebumps), although consciously most of the time we do not know how to express the difference in words. The same happens, for example, when a person is recreated in virtual reality: sooner or later we will know that this person is not real, because virtual reality technology has not yet managed to recreate the microscopic details that we are capable of capturing and that make us identify a person as real and not virtual.
Other differences between an mp3 and a wav (Microsoft’s uncompressed wave file) or a flac (Free Lossless Audio Codec, free lossless audio codec) are noticeable after spending a long time listening to music. The mp3 ends up giving you a headache, while the original sound doesn’t. And to this we must add that there are certain songs that have the musical information arranged in such a way that the mp3 algorithm is not able to “guess” what it is that you are not going to be able to listen to, and the result is that there is a notable loss quality, especially in the treble. In fact, a 128 kbps mp3 cuts all frequencies starting at around 15 kHz, and this is something that most people with normal hearing can easily perceive.
So that you can hear the REAL differences that exist between the different audio formats, I have prepared several tracks in which I have done the following:
1) I have loaded the song from the original disc.
2) I have recorded it in different formats: flac, mp3 to 128, mp3 to 160, mp3 to 192, mp3 to 256 and mp3 to 320 kbps.
3) I have then loaded all the waves into the Sound Forge Pro 10.0 program.
4) I have synchronized all the waves bit by bit. This is necessary because the mp3 introduces a certain lag of milliseconds with respect to the original.
5) I have copied each mp3 wave (lossy quality) and mixed it on the flac wave (original quality, without loss) with the reverse polarity. If both waves were identical, the result would be silence. But instead, as the mp3 has less information (the wave has fewer resolution points, so that it is understood) there is a residual noise that corresponds, neither more nor less, to what the mp3 has less than the flac added to what the mp3 has more than the flac (the mp3 not only loses information; it also introduces noise that was not in the original recording).
6) I have recorded everything on flac. Contrary to what most people think, the fact of converting an mp3 to a higher quality format does not add quality, since the additional information “cannot be invented” by the mp3, and it is still absent. An mp3 transferred to CD continues to sound like an mp3.
Important note: In order to listen to the files, your player must be able to play flac. First of all, associate the files with the .flac extension to your player so that it opens them when you click on them. If they still don’t sound, then install the necessary codec or plugin.
As a player I recommend the AIMP2 or the Foobar2000; both are free and give exceptional audio quality (they reproduce the sound as it is recorded, without any attachments of any kind). For my taste, the best of the two is the Foobar2000, because it is also more stable and lightweight. The Winamp and the Windows Media Player color the sound (or in other words, they equalize it), which can be interesting if you have low-quality audio equipment and play mp3s at low bitrate (128 kbps), but, If the equipment is hi-fi and the music is encoded in a lossless format or played directly from the original CD, then the difference between Winamp or WMP and AIMP2 or Foobar2000 is quite noticeable.
