this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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Is being an audiophile anything close to the same as having ear or musical training though? Any random schmuck can say they like flac files but I wouldn't expect anyone other than a well trained musician, sound engineer, or musicologist to actually be able to discern the difference between them and a 256 kbps mp3, and even then how significant would that actually be to them?
Ear training is more about hearing pitch, and here I think it's probably a difference in timbre, and I think a major difference with the more standard flac vs mp3 version of this test is dynamic range. Music training would probably help a bit more with dynamics than this specific type of timbre distinction.
But the reason it's salient is that "audiophiles" pretend that they can tell a difference and use fucking spectrographic analysis or whatever to point out "imperfections" in a sound file, but it's all made up and the vast majority of them can't really tell by listening. So it's about contesting their claim, I guess.
Basically nobody can hear the difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac. Or 256kbps and 320kbps mp3.
I prefer flac because it works as an archive you can easily render from or use as a wav if needed. In theory repeated re-encodings could introduce artifacts down the line, I don't have to think about that with flac. Plus the people releasing flacs tend to be nerds, they do good rips. It's more likely that an audio quality issue will be something like ripping from a CD with scratches or a hole or ripping from dusty vinyl, only doing one pass, etc.
They call me Dr music because i can hear the difference between a wav and a crunchy 144p music video on youtube from 20 years ago
https://youtu.be/bQt_5rnzziI