iTune vs CD

With a good pair of headphones and a laptop, will I be able to tell the difference between a song purchased from iTune or others like it and the same song from a high quality CD?

 

Not unless you buy a pair of $500 headphones. Cheap headphones don't come with the placebo effect.

 

issues created by the loudness war should be much more hearable than any possible artefacts due to compression. by that i mean, loudnesswar issues are so hearable that they annoy you when you listen to the track. compression artefacts are not identificable.

 

Well, you can hear a difference between low compression FLAC and high compression FLAC - and Dave, we talked about that
This is even though FLAC is lossless.

Its not the actual data that's different, its the decompression - so a CD can sound better than anything you have compressed - the question is though, is it the actual data or the decompression that causes this "Issue".

And on the FLAC one - Sennheiser IE8 in a quiet room and you can make the difference out - its more a feeling - but its very accurate

I personally use 320KBit/s MP3s... I also have some CDs saved as MP4s... but then I do have my CDs at home too

 

actually because its lossless in your case, it just proves you can't hear i at all.

i bet you could do an signal inversion differencial test and wouldn't find a sign.

 

A what test?
You did code a little app to compare bits.

The thing is - there definitely was a difference - I'm not saying the information in the files is different, just that you could hear it.

 

record the output of both playbacks. inverse the wave of one (everything above 0 gets <0, everything below gets above.. multiply by -1, simply), and then summ them up. if they're identical, they result in zero, all over the whole recording.

if it summs to 0, there is no difference, even if you hear one. placebo is strong (and can even physically make you get healed by medicine that does not do anything). so you can even hear differences where there aren't any.

 

Actually, there was no placebo effect.
It was a "double blind listening test" - so I had no idea what was what - and switching between the two tracks was seamless.

Add to that I repeatedly assigned the correct tracks to each other - I think 6 out of 7 were right or something like that... then I was disturbed by another person and stopped.

 

who switched the tracks? you? if so, placebo. you can't do a double blind test by yourself.

anyways, record the output of both. if there ARE differences, report to the developers, as they have a bug. no difference is allowed, that's what lossless is for.

 

Actually, yes you can
It was in my HDD days using Foobar and an add in

Both tracks are loaded into the add in - you get Buttons X,Y and Buttons A,B - you have no idea what is what and have to decide whether X is A or B - the change is seamless - so there is no placebo here.

Recording the output would be a good idea - only I don't have the tools to do it.