Do you hear a difference?

[David A]

I have had my lumin mini now for a few months and while I do admit to better SQ now vs when I was doing AirPlay thru my AppleTV, I don’t know that I can say that I hear any difference in SQ of the “cd” vs “his res” streaming sources. I currently have a Quboz hi res subscription and I am currently trying out a trial of Tidal to co pare the two services,  it I can honestly say, I’m not hearing any difference between CD, MQA, or his res FLAC.

It’s highly likely that as I approach 50, my hearing is not what it used to be and I can’t differentiate the higher kHz, or I’m just not “trained” to hear the difference. based on my trials, I guess I can save myself a few $$$ and go with the basic cd quality subscription.

Curious if you guys do hear differences then what are you actually listening for or hearing that is different in the cd vs hi res feed?

Approaching 50? What's your problem? I'm 71, approaching 72, and last time I tried I couldn't hear a 12 kHz test tone.  :-)

Seriously, my high frequency hearing has declined and I'm starting to get a little tinnitus but I can still discern differences between high res music streamed from my server and CD quality music streamed from the server. I don't stream much high res music from Tidal and what they have is MQA which I'm not convinced by. I don't think CD quality 44.1/16 streamed from Tidal sounds quite as good as the same disc streamed from my server and I don't thing 96/24 MQA streamed from Tidal sounds as good as a 96/24 non-MQA high res file of the same disc streamed from my server. Tidal is good but in my experience it doesn't deliver quite the same quality as you will hear from the same music at the same resolution if you're streaming the file from your own server.

OK, to your hearing and listening. We all progressively lose high frequency hearing as we get older and that's a slow, gradual process so we don't notice it as it happens. It only becomes apparent when you do something like listening to test tones. It's like your eyes and ageing. You only tend to notice you need new glasses when your arms get too short. You don't notice it while you can adjust your distance for reading and close work.

We tend to think of 20 kHz as the upper limit of our hearing but 20 kHz is often gone or going for us in our early 20s and our upper limit keeps dropping from there. At 50 most people probably haven't been able to hear 20 kHz for more than 2 decades, possibly even 3 decades. On the other hand the highest fundamental produced by a musical instrument is a bit over 7 kHz and all we have above that are harmonics. It's the harmonics which give instruments and voices their characteristic tone and whatever your current hearing upper limit is, you're still going to be hearing a lot of overtones given that all voices and most notes played by instruments are in the range below 4 kHz and a lot below 1 kHz. The bottom 5 octaves are below 1024 Hz. The top octave above 10 kHz definitely adds something but it adds less than you might think given the amount of stress that tends to get placed on statements that the upper limit of our hearing is 20 kHz. 

If you want to hear differences then listen to things that are familiar to you and don't focus on any one thing like the highs. I tend to listen to how voices sound because we're probably more used to voices than anything else and you can listen to someone you don't know speaking on a phone or TV or some  low quality reproducer and easily pick things like whether or not they have a cold, even when you don't know their voice, simply because we're used to picking unusual colourations in voices. Another thing about listening to the sound generally without focussing an any particular is that it's easy to get fooled by particulars. Hear a specific difference and we immediately start thinking that's better or that's worse but often a judgement that it's worse simply means that it's not what we expected so it disturbs us and if we keep listening and get used to the new way it sounds we can end up thinking that it's actually better, not worse. Unfamiliarity makes it harder to make reliable judgements. I find that just listening to the music for a while, and I mean a whole disc or even for a day or two, and then swapping back to the alternative gives me a better idea. If I find myself relaxing and thinking "this is what it should sound like" after I swap back then I know that there's something I don't like in what I've been listening to and if, instead, I immediately want to swap back to what I was listening to previously then I know that there's something I prefer there, even though I may be hard pressed to identify clearly just what the difference is. Quick A/B testing by swapping between one thing and another is good for picking up some differences but not for picking up every difference.

Another thing to listen for is detail in terms of how distinct different instruments are from each other, how tonally different they sound, and how natural a particular instrument sounds if you're really familiar with the sound of that instrument which probably means it's an instrument you play or hear played live very very frequently. There can be large variations in the character of the sound from one piano to another or one acoustic guitar or bass to another depending on the make and model of the instrument and who's playing it but there are common characteristics to the sound from a given sort of instrument. The more different instruments of the same sort that you've heard live, especially relatively close up in normal sized rooms rather than concert halls, and the more different players you've heard playing them, the easier it becomes to know what to expect from a given instrument generally rather than what to expect from a particular instrument played by a particular person. Voices are a lot easier to judge than instruments in my experience.

And definitely don't worry too much about the highest frequencies. You aren't going to notice much difference there if your hearing is down there. Where you're going to notice differences is in the range you can hear and there's a lot more differences you can notice there than most people think.

So my advice if you want to hear differences is to do some normal A/B testing with quick swaps between alternatives but also to stop listening for differences, just relax and settle into the music while listening to the new alternative and once you're really relaxed and feeling familiar with the sound of that, swap back to the previous option and just see what your gut response is. I can assure you that you certainly are capable of noticing differences but quite often the subtler the difference is, the harder it is to pick if you focus on differences and do quick comparisons. Sometimes  you need to give yourself time to get used to the new then swap back and see how you feel about the original option after you've been away from it for quite a while, and don't be surprised if you find yourself noticing a difference then but not being able to clearly and specifically state just what that difference is. It can end up just boiling down to having a preference for one over the other and not really knowing why.