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Audiophiles Can't Differentiate Audio Signals Sent Through Copper, Banana, and Mud in Blind Test
(www.headphonesty.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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Audiophiles when they can’t tell the difference between lossless and 320kbps mp3:
If you are using a digital signal out that is being converted to analog at the receiver with decent speakers you can tell the difference between FLAC and 256kbps. I can't tell the difference at 320kbps.
me listening to music I encoded at ~90 kbps opus
When I was younger I would listen to music recorded on my phone from the radio. They were 128 kb/s, which sounds OK until you see they're .wav files so they don't use the bitrate effectively: just mono, 32kHz sample rate, 4 bits per sample. They sound worse than 24 kb/s MP3s, which is something you'd stream over a 28k modem in 1999!
(The SoC can and does do AMR compression when recording MPEG-4 (more specifically 3GP4, which uses MPEG-4 part 2, not the well-known AVC, which is MPEG-4 part 10) video but the manufacturer just didn't take advantage of it, maybe the library for video recording was proprietary and the AMR codec not well documented.)
Things are better now, mostly.
I used to record songs from the TV and TELETEXT "radio"... to tape.
Do you realize that 4 bits per sample has a theoretical maximum S/N ratio of some 24 dB? That's 10x the noise amplitude of the worst tapes. Not even Audacity wil let you create files that crappy. Not to mention I often recorded in a bus, resulting in extra noise and dropouts.
I used to use teletext but what is teletext radio? The bitrate of VBI is way more enough than audio but I couldn't find any information about it being used that way...
Sometimes there was music in the background, some sort of radio. Don't stress over it, that was not a technical endeavor.
I mean, when browsing teletext with your decoder you'd get the TV channel's audio unless you muted it. Did you mean "teletext demo" programs that didn't require decoders and were often broadcast just before signoff? In Czechoslovakia before 24-hour TV, we'd get classical music, signoff, the anthem (pre-1989), and then a test pattern with a radio station. Video of this
I'd imagine some teletext demo programs did have radio playing.
That's my coworkers face when I said I find mp3 rips sound muddy to me, so I have been using flac and wav.
I had to prove it to him with two back to back rips.
But for many people, like my darling wife, she can't discern the difference and a clippy phone speaker is the same for her as my DAC on a 5.1 system