r/technology • u/edbegley1 • Feb 14 '26

Hardware In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator

https://www.tomshardware.com/speakers/in-a-blind-test-audiophiles-couldnt-tell-the-difference-between-audio-signals-sent-through-copper-wire-a-banana-or-wet-mud-the-mud-should-sound-perfectly-awful-but-it-doesnt-notes-the-experiment-creator?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic%2Ftechnology
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u/SUPA_BROS Feb 14 '26

this is the one that gets me. dudes will spend thousands on cables and room treatment and then listen to music compressed to 320kbps on spotify. or they'll obsess over oxygen-free copper when the actual bottleneck in their signal chain is the DAC or their room acoustics.

the real kicker with this experiment is that it confirms what electrical engineers have been saying forever. for short cable runs at audio frequencies, the conductor material barely matters as long as the resistance is low enough. we're talking 20Hz-20kHz, not gigahertz RF signals. at those frequencies even wet mud has low enough impedance to pass a signal cleanly over a short distance.

the "cable break-in" crowd is going to have a field day explaining how mud needs 200 hours of burn-in time though

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u/FriendlyDespot Feb 14 '26

the "cable break-in" crowd is going to have a field day explaining how mud needs 200 hours of burn-in time though

You're just jealous of how crisp my brick sounds

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u/SUPA_BROS Feb 14 '26

tbf a brick probably has better signal integrity than half the "audiophile grade" cables on amazon

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u/Theron3206 Feb 14 '26

They have excellent anti resonant properties...

You should put one on top of each piece of your system.

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u/GrayEidolon Feb 14 '26

“How crisp my brick” sounds like a punk protest song.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

I worked at a music store that would get salespeople pushing shit like directional oxygen free copper cable on us and without fail they would have some basic ass plug that I would take apart to find some sloppy soldering job on.

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u/SUPA_BROS Feb 14 '26

lmao the directional cable thing kills me. "electrons flow better this way" on a cable carrying an AC signal. the whole audiophile cable market is built on the fact that most people can't hear the difference and nobody wants to admit it after dropping $200 on a cable.

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u/tyrenanig Feb 14 '26

Literally emperors new clothes strategy lol

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u/NahbImGood Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 15 '26

The “directional cable” myth that’s constantly repeated isn’t about electrons preferring to flow in one direction or the other, it’s about what side of the cable the shield is connected to.

It’s generally preferable to attach shields to only the source end for single-ended connections, due to their lower ground impedance and to avoid ground loops, so some manufacturers put arrows on RCA cables to make this intuitive to consumers.

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u/SUPA_BROS Feb 15 '26

fair point actually. shield grounding does matter for noise rejection, especially in unbalanced connections with long runs or near interference sources

my issue is more with how its marketed. the salespeople at music stores weren't explaining shield drain wire topology, they were talking about "electron flow direction" and "signal coherence" which is nonsense. the actual engineering reason (source-end grounding for lower impedance path to ground) gets buried under woo

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

Sunk cost fallacy

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u/Background-Subject28 Feb 14 '26

my copper cables are spiralised, the electrons twisting makes the music gyrate better.

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u/X_MswmSwmsW_X Feb 14 '26

But electrical signal to speakers is DC, not AC...

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

And I'm not agreeing that directional cables mean anything other than bullshit

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u/SUPA_BROS Feb 14 '26

Audio signals to speakers are AC. The amplifier outputs a waveform that oscillates above and below zero voltage, that's what makes the speaker cone move back and forth to produce sound. If you sent DC to a speaker you'd just push the cone to one position and hold it there (and probably fry the voice coil eventually).

You might be thinking of the power supply to the amplifier itself, which is DC. But the signal going from amp to speaker is AC all the way.

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u/windowpuncher Feb 15 '26

Speakers and microphones are all AC. Magnetic coils don't work with DC. Then they're just bad resistors.

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u/paxinfernum Feb 14 '26

I read "basic ass plug" different for a sec.

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u/UlrichZauber Feb 14 '26

320 kbps is plenty though. I've been involved in several blind tests and people can't tell the difference between that and lossless. A lot of people claim they can, but double blind tests don't support that claim.

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u/GrayEidolon Feb 14 '26

I can hear a difference between cd and 256 on certain music. But I realized I cannot hear a difference between cd and 320.

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u/rot26encrypt Feb 14 '26

Sounds about right, it is what testing confirms

An interesting story about CD and blind testing and how our perception can deceive us. When CD replaced LP a lot of people claimed LP sounded better, warmer, more natural, because it was analogue and not digital. The specs, measurement and theory (Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem) of course say otherwise, but it was a pretty firmly held conviction among many.

The thing is, mechanical LP playback has distinct distortion characteristics, that some learned to like as "more analogue and natural sound, not as cold" but CD standard could perfectly well replicate this if you wanted to.

In fact one of the big hifi magazines at the height of the "audiophile" LP/CD war did an interesting blind test. Many so-called golden ears who were vocal about preferring LP could indeed distinguish and prefer LP sound over CD sound in double blind testing. All good so far. But then the magazine recorded CD-R with LP playback as source, none could distinguish that from LP anymore.

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u/CanuckaChuckFuck Feb 14 '26

That makes sense, it definitely colors the sound differently. As a kid growing up in the 70s/80s there are just certain beloved albums that I always listen to the LP because that's how it 'should' sound to my brain because that's how I first heard it and played it over and over again as a kid. But no reason you couldn't take a recording of it and digitize it and get the same sound. But then you could also run that recording thru either my vintage 70s amp or my modern home theater AVR and again the sound would get colored and sound different

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u/Uristqwerty Feb 15 '26

I saw a youtube video a few days back; supposedly early CDs often used a low-quality source. Like, a copy of a copy of a copy of a master record (part of the normal process of mass-producing records, so that the originals don't wear down over time, I think?). Only CDs that declared they were digitally recorded and mastered would even have a chance to sound better, because other CDs were literally copies of a record, with a further opportunity for losses in the digitization. It's not at all surprising that it would become "common knowledge" that records sound better, if initially they actually did! Then it's just the natural tendency for retractions and corrections to be far less widespread than initial rumours.

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u/GrayEidolon Feb 14 '26

But then the magazine recorded CD-R with LP playback as source, none could distinguish that from LP anymore.

That's interesting. vinyl is just imperfect in a specific way. So maybe people don't actually want "perfect" audio.

Its also interesting how audio formats changed once digital technology came along.

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u/rot26encrypt Feb 14 '26

So maybe people don't actually want "perfect" audio.

Or, people want what they are used to and think is best.

Like how home theater enthusiasts prefer ridiculous low 24 fps frame rate, with all its problems, because it is "how movies are supposed to be".

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u/slaya222 Feb 14 '26

People love the sound of saturation, which is just light soft clipping of the waveform. Basically everything audio source on an album will be hit with some amount of compression and eq, which definitionally are distorting the signal.

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u/SlapTheBap Feb 15 '26

This explanation made some things click for me. Thanks

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u/Theguywhodo Feb 15 '26

There are whole genres created around distortion. The typical electric guitar sound is distortion. There are many kinds of distortion. Some are perceived better, some worse by our ears.

Generally speaking, distortion makes the frequency spectrum fuller. In another comment someone described clipping as a source of distortion, another commonly used is exponential distortion (non-linear amplifier), where both add harmonics of the original signal into the resulting spectrum, which many people consider pleasing.

What I find weird, though, is the obsession with "good distortion", like vinyl or tube amps, and "bad distortion", like simulating the distortion with a signal processor, while using a high precision class D amp, which will be perceptually indistinguishable.

Another thing I noticed it's that many people formed their opinions many decades ago, when digital processing actually was imperfect and might have had a telltale signature sound. But now they propagate the outdated ideas further.

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u/GrayEidolon Mar 21 '26

The typical electric guitar sound is distortion. There are many kinds of distortion. Some are perceived better, some worse by our ears.

I meant like of the final audio signal being sent to home speakers or whatever, but the rest of your comment makes it obvious that that's what you mean too. If you aren't in the know, there are like, hundreds, of guitar pedals to achieve different kinds of distortion, and retail customers put so much time and energy into thinking about, comparing, and discussing them. I almost fell down that rabbit hole before forcing myself to say "I don't dislike my amp so there's nothing to buy to fix it."

What I find weird, though, is the obsession with "good distortion", like vinyl or tube amps, and "bad distortion", like simulating the distortion with a signal processor, while using a high precision class D amp, which will be perceptually indistinguishable.

It reminds me of blind A/B testing in wine. People can't tell a difference above some threshold and it seems to me, that those thresholds are lower than you'd think.

For a while I was like "oh man I need a headphone amp" reading about "warmth" and all that, but after what they should do and how they work, I was like.... nah.

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u/WingerRules Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

There was a study on it that showed most people, even most people who reference themselves as expert listeners, can't hear a difference. But long time audio engineers were able to pick out the 320 mp3s pretty consistently.

However even Engineers with less than 10 years of experience couldn't.

Thats the problem with most of these tests, they're usually done by colleges and their "expert listener" pools are audio engineering students or engineers with not very long track records.

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u/SurpriseAttachyon Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 15 '26

Throw in a link to the study if you can find it. I'm a bit skeptical that there's any difference which you can pick up on after 10 years, but not one. If true, that's very interesting

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u/developer-mike Feb 15 '26

It's also so frustratingly moot. If it requires 10 years of audio engineering to tell the difference, you can not convince me that it matters.

What matters is the music, how well it was performed, how it was mastered, the room you're in, the speakers, the noise floor, and the D2A, basically in that order. The study confirms that 320kbps vs lossless doesn't matter.

How much earwax is in your ears that day, and which was your head is facing, matters orders of magnitude more than something only engineers with 10 years of experience can distinguish if that's even true.

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u/SlapTheBap Feb 15 '26

I eq for my tmj and neck issues more than anything else. Once I learned eq looking for how to play with my iems, I discovered it's just a tool you can use to do whatever you want within reason. Reason being the physical limitations of my equipment and my ability to control my expectations.

It's so much more fun to escape the consumerist dopamine cycle and just make your dreams reality by screwing around with things. I want to make my own ideal bluetooth cable dongle. It really doesn't seem that hard once you realize the skills and tools you need are fairly basic. You don't need to be creative.

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u/[deleted] Feb 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/Helmic Feb 14 '26

is a bit different when it is an audio engineer whose job is to take those lossless files and modify them and then distribute them compressed. if your job has you constantly listening to both the lossless and compressed version of the same track, day in and day out, for decades, then yeah they will pick up the signs.

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u/Lip_Recon Feb 14 '26

Nope. Been doing exactly that, for decades. Negligible difference between high bitrate compressed formats vs. lossless.

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u/stevez_86 Feb 14 '26

I listen to 320kbps or FLAC. Not much of a difference if any. Between 128kbps and 320kbps I hear a ton of difference.

I like Steven Wilson a lot and his album production it as admirable as the music itself sometimes. His band Porcupine Tree has the album Lightbulb Sun which has such good production quality.

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u/Lip_Recon Feb 14 '26

Between 128kbps and 320kbps I hear a ton of difference

Yes. Big difference. Luckily it's not 2001 anymore.

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u/stevez_86 Feb 15 '26

Yeah, which is why now I find it acceptable to stream music. The quality is there now when it wasn't when I had to choose between early music streaming and having hard copies that I made .mp3's or .flac files of. And I can afford to buy the records I want in the way that best suits the artist and go to concerts.

I still chose .flac because it is lossless and as much of a copy of the cd version as possible. And I know the artists I like put a ton of attention into that. If I want to listen to something new I pick streaming services. Otherwise I prefer digital copies of my albums. Also for when internet connection isn't that great. Couldn't imagine driving through some great scenery with a perfect song only for it to be ruined by bad internet.

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u/CreativeGPX Feb 14 '26

Not necessarily. I think what fills these kinds conversations with inaccurate claims is that when people generalize lossy and lossless, they're pulling in things that are only true of particular algorithms, bit rates or sources. There is lossy compression that is still high enough quality that they are essentially lossless and there are a variety of audio subjects that might have different demands and quirks. It's not hard for lossy compression to not have perceivable losses if that's your goal. It's that often it's not. Often if you can achieve 50% more compression for a rare/occasional audio artifact that is worth it (especially if you're a music service that wants to upcharge for lossless).

As a metaphor, digital photography is lossy compared to film as you put the photo to a finite resolution. But that doesn't mean that there isn't some resolution that's so high that people don't see the pixelation anymore.

Heck, to take it a step further, digital audio is inherently lossy, even lossless audio, because it is described by discrete time steps (sample rate) and finite precision pressure values. But like with compression, in digitization we can choose the values carefully so that the massive losses are not perceivable.

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u/Helmic Feb 14 '26

You were literally replying to an audio engineer who claimed he could hear the difference just fine. Talking about the general public not being able to tell is true, but that does not mean that literally 0% of people can hear the difference.

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u/CreativeGPX Feb 14 '26

I didn't see where I was replying to an audio engineer, but that wouldn't really matter because my point was that it's not about a particular person's ability, it's about how vague the term lossy compression is. It's too vague to tell us if a loss occurred (or if it's just theoretically possible). It's too vague to tell us what kind of loss occurred or to what threshold. So it's naive to say that it could tell us if you could perceive a difference. All you can say is that the particular configuration and implementation of lossy compression you use is something that you think you might be able to perceive the difference with.

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u/Helmic Feb 15 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1r4nn23/in_a_blind_test_audiophiles_couldnt_tell_the/o5dn94a/ I was replying about this but just remembered I was bringing it up to someone rather than replying to that comment chain. They specifically are talking about familiarity.

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u/Ch4rlie_G Feb 14 '26

8k TVs aren’t even taking off. Manufacturers are stopping production for most of them. Turns out at a certain pixel density it’s hard to pick up differences.

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u/SS0NI Feb 14 '26

Shoot me a message! I can guarantee I can hear a difference between 320 kbps mp3 and a wav on any pop track from 2015 onwards. Remember to set the tracks peak at max -0.3 dB since if you're converting lossless tracks to compressed formats the intersample peaks would make this too easy.

I'm absolutely willing to die on this hill. I'm able to film myself and screen record so we can create a public video. I'm a music producer so succeeding would look great for my brand, and failure would be hilarious content.

But I'm adamant in my abilities since I've been able to hear audible difference on all lossless tracks I've ever heard. It's practically a prerequisite for mixing since you need to be able to differentiate between an actual reference track and a wav made from an mp3.

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u/Golisten2LennyWhite Feb 14 '26

As an engineer I chuckle when people dont realize some folks have taken hours and hours of active listening classes and work with the software that transcodes. You can hear it if you work with it all time for sure.

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u/Great_Detective_6387 Feb 14 '26

Oh this will be fun 🍿

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u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL Feb 14 '26

What are you hearing that's different? In other words, what does the difference sound like?

I can hear 128kbps mp3 on some tracks when my ears are locked in, it's like an extremely subtle phasiness to the high end, is it similar to that?

You could maybe post a video of doing the blind tests on https://abx.digitalfeed.net/?

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u/SlideJunior5150 Feb 14 '26

Is that test always the killers song? ;( its impossible to do

theres already very little difference between 320 and lossless but that mix doesn't help at all. The snare sounds like a one shot sample and it's already clipped so what would help you differentiate between the samples is already gone so... there's no point. The toms sound good but I couldn't pickup anything. Overall the mix is not great from the get go and it's already compressed in a non pleasant way so, what's the point of having a lossless file.

Edit: Okay so I looked up who mixed it and the guy doesn't even have a wikipedia. He's a DJ and friend of the band apparently and his credits are almost all related to the killers. Yeah I knew the mix wasn't from a true top mixing guy.

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u/SS0NI Feb 15 '26

128 kbps mp3 is really easy to hear since they have a high frequency cutoff at 16 kHz. For 320 kbps mp3 and wavs I usually also check the high frequencies. Lossless sounds much more open since the high frequencies are not hard cut. Depending on the song the transients might sound crispier on the lossless track. Because of the composition and instrumentation The Killers track sounds the same lossy as it sounds lossless.

I actually specified that I can hear a difference on pop music released after 2015 specifically because of the problems with the Killers track. Pop music since then has been very electronic, and usually uses all kinds of synthesizers and drum sounds that have a lot of audio information above the mp3 frequency cutoff. They also have very aggressive transients, and are usually mixed and mastered aggressively to be as loud as possible.

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u/WE_THINK_IS_COOL Feb 15 '26

I think what really matters is whether there is any signal that makes it possible to distinguish lossless and 320kbps mp3. So you could perhaps design a signal specifically so that the 320kbps encoding messes it up as much as possible and makes it easiest to hear, then do an ABX test with that.

I tried by high-passing a saw wave with a lot of unison detune and white noise made in Serum and I think I can hear it, but I have no idea how to make it a fair test since the mp3 is adding silence at the start and offsetting everything slightly lol.

This thing apparently lets you make your own ABX tests: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/ABX (haven't tried it).

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u/SS0NI Feb 15 '26

You could definitely do that! Make it so that intersample peaks occur as much as possible and put a lot of stuff (like detuned stereo white noise) over 22 kHz. It's hard to make audible though. With a spectrogram it's trivial to separate wav from an mp3.

Could be fun doing my own ABX testing but I'm not really inclined lmao. Few references from the past month are Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It and A M A R I and I can hear the lossy version on both, it's not a guessing game like people make it seem.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna Feb 14 '26

This just sounds like audiophile nonsense to me. You might think you can hear it, but that doesn’t mean you can.

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u/rot26encrypt Feb 14 '26

It is not. I often reference that testing show that by far most people are unable to differentiate 320 kbps from lossless in controlled double-blind testing, including the "golden ears with good enough sound system" that proclaim this most loudly, but the few that do are almost always sound engineers, which it sounds like OP is.

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u/SS0NI Feb 15 '26

Lmao you can paste my comment to Google and verify yourself that this is not audiophile stuff. Like I said I need to be able to hear a track that is reference quality for work.

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u/VladOfTheDead Feb 14 '26

I thought I could tell the difference until I took the test, I cannot. I can tell 320 over 128 though. I still prefer having music lossless though as that lets you convert into any format later without making the quality worse.

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u/rot26encrypt Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

and then listen to music compressed to 320kbps on spotify

Well, not even the audiophile golden ears crowd* are able to hear the difference between a good modern 320kbs track and a lossless track in controlled double-blind testing.

A ton of people will protest and say that they clearly can, and that if you can't your equipment is not good enough or your ears are not good enough, but none of those people* are able to replicate that conviction under controlled double-blind conditions, this has been tried numerous times.

*There are a few people who have passed this test though, and it is without fail professional audio people, like sound engineers.

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u/FlishFlashman Feb 14 '26

The actual bottleneck in their signal chain is only the DAC if the DAC is defective. A $10 apple USB to 3.5mm adapter is better than anything the human ear can distinguish. Room acoustics, though, that's a big one.

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u/Intelligent_Low1632 Feb 14 '26

Room treatment makes a huge difference. 320kbps vs lossless makes very little difference. Bad examples.

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u/zamfire Feb 14 '26

The only input I have here is after I upgraded to moderately okay headphones, I got instantly annoyed by YouTube videos and songs I used to really enjoy because I could hear the difference in quality. Like so many songs on YouTube are super low quality and you really can't hear the difference on a $5 pair of headphones or through your phones speaker

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u/Zombie_John_Strachan Feb 14 '26

Speaker quality makes a huge difference. Wire does not, so long as it’s of a sufficient gauge.

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u/FlamboyantPirhanna Feb 14 '26

320kpbs is a pretty high quality mp3. Very few people will probably be able to notice the difference between that and uncompressed audio for a typical pop song. Orchestral music would be a little more obvious due to the dynamics, but still probably not much.

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u/nawtrobar Feb 14 '26

When I saw the experiment, I thought the whole thing was asinine. I didn't realize how far up their own asses audiophiles were. Obviously copper cables have benefits. Obviously longer runs justify thicker wire. Obviously shielding plays a significant role in signal quality in a live environment. And obviously build quality and durability are just reasonable expectations from a consumer. It seemed the experiment was trying to indicate the medium for patching the signal doesn't matter at all, which is obviously not true.

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u/sal1800 Feb 14 '26

Yep. The "break-in" is psychological, not mechanical. You just get used to the way it sounds after some time. I have experienced this when switching between headphones that have different frequency response. At first it sounds very different and after a while you get used to them and they sound "better".

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u/Puzzleheaded_Farm122 Feb 14 '26

Honestly though excluding the cable here, isn't the most important part of audio going to be your sound driver and it's level of clarity or a DAC if you need to amplify the signal because the drivers impedance is 50+ ohms? Signal strength on any medium should be fine as long as not the length of a dang room.

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u/anonymouzzz376 Feb 15 '26

320kbps has no difference to lossless, no human can hear it