Should I get over my prejudice/ignorance/snobbery for WAV and change to mp3?

[MaxOne]

The listening devices need to remain constant for it to be accurate.

So we all need to listen on the same device. Not so?

If you can tell, you can tell. If you can't you cant.

This isn't going to prove anything once and for all.

There are people who are saying they can 100% hear the difference. I personally think i can but have never tested myself. It'll be a bit of fun

[SirReal]

We'd have to settle on what encoder to use to make the MP3's. Has anyone done a test between say, itunes MP3 encoder and WMP encoder? I wonder if there's a difference there? Does anybody know if the MP3 encoder is a single program licensed by many players or does each player write it's own code for MP3 encoding? Can of worms? Kettle of Fish?

[MaxOne]

We'd have to settle on what encoder to use to make the MP3's. Has anyone done a test between say, itunes MP3 encoder and WMP encoder? I wonder if there's a difference there? Does anybody know if the MP3 encoder is a single program licensed by many players or does each player write it's own code for MP3 encoding? Can of worms? Kettle of Fish?

I was thinking I was gonna buy songs direct from beatport. The same song as AIFF and mp3

We gonna quibble WAV vs AIFF btw? Surely lossless is lossless

I was gonna use new tracks too...

[SirReal]

I was thinking I was gonna buy songs direct from beatport. The same song as AIFF and mp3

We gonna quibble WAV vs AIFF btw? Surely lossless is lossless

I was gonna use new tracks too...

Personally, I'd use a cross section of music types. Also older tracks that you KNOW were recorded and mixed in a professional studio and mastered properly. Think Pink Floyd, Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac along with select house and EDM tracks. The reason I say this is many of today's newer dance tracks use suspect samples as source and sometimes mastering on them is non-existant. I'd also include at least one Classical track and maybe a Jazz track.

[SirReal]

I was thinking I was gonna buy songs direct from beatport. The same song as AIFF and mp3

We gonna quibble WAV vs AIFF btw? Surely lossless is lossless

I was gonna use new tracks too...

Whie I won't quibble about AIFF vs WAV, I will say that WAV is the industry standard and AIFF is a legacy file format from Protools of years ago and not widely seen or used anymore. Take that for what it's worth.

[mostapha]

As long as you can structure the test correctly, go for it. I know I can, so that's why I volunteered to do it. And I could do it in a way that was double-blind…it'd just require making a script that looked at song1wav.wav and song1mp3.wav and randomly renamed them 1A.wav and 1B.wav, didn't tell me which it was doing, and wrote what it did to a log file that I could look at later.

As for buying tracks…unless they're the same tracks, the test is pointless…you're comparing the tracks and how they were mixed/mastered as much as the format. And there's no reason to buy things more than once. I'd suggest buying the lossless file, converting to mp3 on your system, then converting back to a lossless format on the same system. That's how I'd do it.

Make sure to have enough trials and decide whether you want it to be an ABX test (as in…here's the wav twice, here's the mp3 twice, now here's 10 that are randomly mp3 or wav…which format is each one?) or a preference test (here's version 1, here's verison 2, which one was the wav?) with several trials for each song.

Also, I'd avoid older stuff. All the classics were recorded pretty badly by today's standards and have a lot of specific noise and distortion as well as a much higher noise floor. I've never done a test like that (because I've never bothered with wavs for that music…only listened on iTunes AAC or vinyl) but something tells me the ridiculously loud noise floor would skew the results.

Also, I found an sm58 sitting around. And I have some free time. Plus, I actually know how to analyze the results and get an answer with statistics instead of arbitrarily deciding 70% is lower than 100% so it's not good enough or whatever. I might go ahead and do it.

Whie I won't quibble about AIFF vs WAV, I will say that WAV is the industry standard and AIFF is a legacy file format from Protools of years ago and not widely seen or used anymore. Take that for what it's worth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiff

[MaxOne]

Whie I won't quibble about AIFF vs WAV, I will say that WAV is the industry standard and AIFF is a legacy file format from Protools of years ago and not widely seen or used anymore. Take that for what it's worth.

Well it's what Beatport sell ... either AIFF or mp3

I could do a couple of CD rips from classic stuff and have to convert to MP3 in itunes.

[Xonetacular]

this should be interesting

Also if you are converting to .mp3 be sure to do it with LAME and encode to extreme settings 320 CBR which is pretty standard for mp3 encoding. If you are on windows you can use LAME frontend. http://www.pazera-software.com/products/lame-front-end/

[djproben]

There's software that already exists that takes a lot of the work out of this; I use ABXTester on the Mac. And by "use" I mean "downloaded and tried once." You give it two files and it gives you five random choices and then tells you how well you scored; it's really basic and simple. I did a wav and mp3 of a tech house song and scored 80%.

[SirReal]

@ mostapha, not sure what the point of your wiki link is. I work in the audio industry and we use 95% wav/bwf, I rarely see AIFF anymore and it's never used as the final mastering file format. Besides the name of this thread was "wav vs MP3" not Aiff vs MP3"