The difference between mp3 128 kbps, 320 kbps and flac

Good afternoon, dear readers!

Have you ever wondered what exactly is lost when compressing from lossless to mp3 128 kbps or 320 kbps?
I checked and the result seemed interesting. First of all, I suggest that you take a survey to see if you can even hear the difference. If you are not sure what you hear or are sure that you don’t hear, then I offer you a simple and elegant idea: you need to take and push two sound waves with your forehead, one of which will be in antiphase, respectively, when mixing two tracks, it’s mostly audible that not extinguished. I don’t promise any interesting graphics, but you can hear on your system exactly which sounds were lost during compression from flac to mp3 128 \ 320 kbps, an archive with examples at the end of the article.

Poll

You need to download and listen to 12 tracks for 30 seconds. Then specify for each of the 4 tracks one of 3 options (128 kbps, 320 kbps or lossless).
The survey is anonymous, but you can specify a unique hash and tell it to me, as a last resort, publish your opinion here, but definitely under the spoiler. The survey will last until 25.02, after I publish the key and statistics.
Files on Yandex Disk , mirror on Dropbox (~ 80Mb).

Initial data

The Black Keys - Everlasting Light (flac, 44100 Hz, 24-Bit, 1613 kbps), available on Youtube .
Ludovico Einaudi - Drop (flac, 96000 Hz, 24-Bit, 2354 kbps), you can see on Yandex Music .
CC Coletti - Rock and Roll (flac, 192000 Hz, 24-Bit, 4845 kbps), available on Youtube .
Annihilator - Ultra-motion (flac, 44100 Hz, 16-bit, 1022 kbps), available on Youtube .
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Soft

Audacity 2.1.2 .
Lame 3.99.3 .

Options to convert to mp3

44.1kHz, stereo, 128 kbps or 320 kbps

Description of the experiment

Source files are cut into pieces with a duration of 10 seconds, each of the pieces is exported to wav. After importing the received tracks, 2 seconds of silence and a second tone signal are added to the beginning of each one, then converted to mp3. After importing mp3 files, it turns out that relative to the original, the resulting file “went ahead”. This is not a bug, this is a feature . We make synchronization with respect to the given tone of the original (I tried several values ​​for each mp3 file, which I later refined to the best result), discard the tone, silence and export the resulting tracks to wav. Now it remains to invert the tracks to get multidirectional peaks, and to reduce to the original.

Result

I will not discover America ... Yes, there is a difference. Yes, especially with compression up to 128kbps. Yes, it depends on the music. Yes, even more from the audio section.
You can make an independent conclusion and hear the difference by downloading files on Yandex Disk or Dropbox (~ 57Mb). This archive contains tracks with sounds that were lost during compression.

Key.