Can someone here help me check a few audio files for lossiness?
 

Hello humans (you are not just ducks) - a friend of mine bought a 24/96 FLAC album from a certain hi-res store and kindly sent it to me. I ran it through Lossless Audio Checker 2.0.7 and the verdict is that 11 out of the 12 tracks are upsampled. Then I used auCDtect 0.8.2 (via Trader's Little Helper; I had to convert to WAV and downsample to 16/44.1 with Foobar2000) and its conclusion is that every single track "looks like MPEG with probability 95%". Ouch.

The reasons I ask for help are: 1- I don't have my high resolution player with me right now to simply let my ears do the judging (in fact, I only have the laptop's built-in speakers!); and 2.- I know the two methods I mentioned above are not the gold standard, which apparently is this - and I ain't shrewd enough to read such tea leaves yet.

If you're game, send me a PM and I'll send you the files. Do not follow me on Twatter, Facemook, Instacrap, or down the street. Thanks in advance!

I can give it a try, but I also will use the steps as suggested by the Wiki page.


btw: what do you use to play the high-res audio? I to be honest have never heard a definite difference between high-res 24/96 and 16/44.1, but I mainly listen from desktop PC or phone. But also on my stereo (a sony soundbar, which is supposed to be recognizing high definition audio) I can't tell a big difference.

A Pono player (with VSonic earphones). It's such an enraging shame that the business didn't take off like Neil Young expected it to, because it's the best sound I've heard in my life (and when something is supposed to sound raw/crude/shitty, the Pono doesn't ruin it with gloss). The technology was provided by Ayre, so that explains it. I can also connect it to my own Sony with RCA cables for analogue goodness, but the sound that comes out of my stereo is 16/44.1.



That's mine - limited edish signed by Patti Smith. :)

I'll PM you in a bit, _tunic_.

thanks for the share! Hadn't heard this album yet, lost track of her a bit. Don't like what she did with the Nick Cave song but oh well.


Anyway, I checked the frequency analysis and spectrum plot for some songs in Audacity as well as Exact Audio Copy, in both original format and some tracks down sampled Audacity to 16/44.1 and it looks fine to me. I'm no expert though.
I even checked if this album was on bandcamp but it isn't. Otherwise I might have given myself a xmas present so that we could compare the files from that source.

Thank you so much! Goes to show those lossiness detectors can be pretty paranoid...