Auditory Training
Ok, that's good for you. Since most people (myself included) are not trained in the art of audio engineering
at all, they probably can't tell the difference.
The difference becomes evident to untrained listeners as they experience "listener fatigue". They simply become subtly irritated and listen for shorter time periods with a less enjoyable experience over time.
The job of the trained listening auditor [I was an an alpha listening auditor for the Orban AAC codec] is to identify these artifacts as audible in a short time. Untrained listeners can take months to be dissatisfied and they will never have known why they have "grown tired of that song".
I admire the ability of musicians to determine pitch [I can barely sing Karaoke]. Musicians learn using a different auditory training regime than what the audio engineer studies.
We learn to identify distortion and artifacts of the sound, not absolute pitch- and we even learn to ignore off key and off tempo issues in order to myopically focus on our work of critical listening in order to audit the material or system. Please do not confuse this critical professional listening task with the Hifi "smoke and mirrors" crowd of "this speaker wire sounds better". We use valid techniques such as double blind testing and statistical analyzes of results of many tests to obtain reproduceable results in a quantitative form that must withstand critical peer review before publication..
Most home audiophiles are untrained hobbyists dabbling in something more complex than they know, without a professional background or tools for generating reproducible scientific results.
Here is a typical auditing work page, done by my good friend Greg at Orban. This wonderful piece of work is unbiased and is an example of good true psychoacoustic science.
ENCODED AUDIO COMPARISON SAMPLES
Have a Five Bar Day!
Bill
Personal Embedded RTA.
and I upload them to my iPod with no problem via iTunes. :shrug:
