What audio compression yre you using ?

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by Gurm
MP3, because Julie has an MP3 player and I have to maintain compatibility.

PLUS, I'd need a MUCH nicer sound card AND speakers (than my Audigy eX and Altec ADA880's) in order to hear any difference any of the other formats would make.

This ain't hi-fi.

- Gurm

Technically it is hi-fi...but only technically. You should be able to hear some difference between OGG and MP3 and the same bit rate with your rig. I can using a SB Extigy and a pair of Sennheiser HD570 headphones.

Now if you were to plug in yout computer to your HT, then you should definately be able to hear it. MP3 sounds like crap vs. OGG.

Jammrock

[az]

The difference becomes much more noticeable with a pair of good headphones.

Crap, I erm.. "obtained" a Glenn Gould recording of the Well Tempered Clavier, and what must I hear on the headphones? HE IS HUMMING THE MELODY HE PLAYS!!! This stuff came in a collector's box...

AZ

[Liquid Snake]

Originally posted by Indiana
Hmm, I have a MD player and the quality of MD is lower than an VBR mp3 @~160KBps when using a good encoder.

I haven't listened to MD extensively. But what I generally hear is that standard MD is fine and the LP modes are not.

Yeah ~1400kbps WAV is pretty much the same as CD (16-bit, 44.1KHz).

[Maggi]

Thanx a lot for all your feedback, guys !

Originally posted by Indiana
Hmm, I have a MD player and the quality of MD is lower than an VBR mp3 @~160KBps when using a good encoder.
Except for some few special tracks I'd say it's VERY hard to really tell the difference between the original and a mp3 done with VBR min 128Kbps, max 256KBps - even though I have the computer connected to my Hifi.
I can hear the artifacts from the MD (I don't use it much anymore).

hmm ... makes me wonder which MD recorder and brand you have.

I have an old portable MZ-R 30 from Sony, using ATRAC 3 and a deck from Sony (forgot which model) using ATRAC 3.5. Both sound a lot better than any MP3 with bitrates below 192kbit/s !

...

Also, I want to clarify two points:

- using joint stereo for MP3s, basically destroys all stereo enhancing effects such as chorus, flanger, exciter etc. (often used with guitars and synthesizers), thus it's absolutely neccessary to encode in full stereo

- any MP3 bitrate below 256kbit/s distorts high pitch sounds, so that you loose definition and cannot differ between an artificial sound or natural instrument (eg. natural hi-hats and cymbals suffer first and most)


Finally, to really observe differences in sound quality, you should use a true surround amp (or receiver) that is fed via S/PDIF and set its output mode preferably to Dolby Prologic II Music !

Doing that, you can easily spot any distortion and loss of definition.

On my home system (Denon AVR-1802 with 5.1 speaker system), I did a row of intensive comparisons between various MP3 settings and figured the settings I posted above (full stereo, no high/low pass filtering, VBR 0) is the minimum quality that I can enjoy without any noticable sound degradation compared to the original audio CD and it seems to be on par with my MD equipment.

[Indiana]

It's an old Sharp portable device. Anyway the sound is really "flat", has quite some hiss in the trebles. All in all it really doesn't sound good.

As for mp3: I'm always astonished on how anyone can claim to hear those VERY subtle artifacts (at compression rates >160KBps) when real blinded studies showed that even people that are into professional sound-processing have a hard time discerning the mp3 from the original at >128KBps - and this on highest end equipment.

O.K. there are artifacts in the trebles and you can make them more hearable with special tricks like the one suggested by Maggi (The WOW soundprocessing plugin amplifies those artifacts as well).

But then normal stereo tracks sound crappy anyways when played back with DolbyProLogic decoding enabled, so why should I do this. Artificially amplifiying those pumping artifacts in the trebles by such a procedure and then comparing soundquality is not a valid thing as those are meant to be "masked" by other sounds when you do a normal stereo playback - which you would want to do anyways for the sake of good soundquality.

The shortcomings of a bad soundcard like e.g. the Creative Soundblaster Live! are IMO more disturbing than that of a good encoded mp3 at decent bitrates (>160KBps).

I wholeheartedly agree on the joint-stereo argument. I never had this enabled, because in the few tests I did it did degrade stereo definition quite a bit and seem to lessen the overall stereo-bandwidth.

[az]

Well I DO hear artifacts on downloaded 128 kbit mp3 easily, and on 160 when I'm really listening. Never had a 256 kbit one. But artifacts can not only come from too low a bitrate, but from a lot of other things as well, such as read errors, encoding errors, stupid settings, xing encoders ... I'm really astonished how many people manage to produce horribly clipping, noisy, or much too quiet mp3s from a CD. What are these people doing?

AZ

[Umfriend]

Hang on, what about CD vs SACD (or HDCD even)? People do hear the difference between these, don't they?

[az]

No

AZ

[GNEP]

My brother recently partook in a classical recording on SACD - and it's been a really really good seller - because there are so few recordings around, the audiophiles with the equipment just buy all the classical recordings released on the format

[az]

Heheheh

"Audiophiles"...

AZ

[Maggi]

Excellent feedback ...

Originally posted by Indiana
It's an old Sharp portable device. Anyway the sound is really "flat", has quite some hiss in the trebles. All in all it really doesn't sound good.

I thought it was a Sharp, but wasn't too sure ...

IMHO, those plastic thingies suck rox, compared to the ones from Sony.
Not only do they severly lack sound quality, but also they have a tendency to break into pieces on the first occasion they drop down to the floor, whereas my Sony survived half a dozen of those drops, hitting a concrete floor really hard.

As for mp3: I'm always astonished on how anyone can claim to hear those VERY subtle artifacts (at compression rates >160KBps) when real blinded studies showed that even people that are into professional sound-processing have a hard time discerning the mp3 from the original at >128KBps - and this on highest end equipment.

Well, that depends on the audio system you are using and the procedure of how to compare different audio sources.

O.K. there are artifacts in the trebles and you can make them more hearable with special tricks like the one suggested by Maggi (The WOW soundprocessing plugin amplifies those artifacts as well).

But then normal stereo tracks sound crappy anyways when played back with DolbyProLogic decoding enabled, so why should I do this. Artificially amplifiying those pumping artifacts in the trebles by such a procedure and then comparing soundquality is not a valid thing as those are meant to be "masked" by other sounds when you do a normal stereo playback - which you would want to do anyways for the sake of good soundquality.

don't you think that is a very subjective opinion ?

I really enjoy the "new sound" that my old CDs deliver when played back through Dolby PL-II and only for some old fashioned recordings like "real band plays life in a small club", I switch back to dry 5 channel stereo.

Thus, my claim would be normal stereo tracks sound absolutely fabulous, when played back with DolbyProLogic II Music decoding enabled, except for a few old fashoined recordings ...

The shortcomings of a bad soundcard like e.g. the Creative Soundblaster Live! are IMO more disturbing than that of a good encoded mp3 at decent bitrates (>160KBps).

to me, the soundcard is only secondary, because mine is hooked up via S/PDIF

more important for me, is the choice of an apropriate decoder and during my tests, I found the MAD plugin for Winamp delivered the best sound, followed by the Fraunhofer MP3 DS filters (media player) and the built-in decoder from WinAMP 2.92 came in last of the three.

I wholeheartedly agree on the joint-stereo argument. I never had this enabled, because in the few tests I did it did degrade stereo definition quite a bit and seem to lessen the overall stereo-bandwidth.

makes you wonder why so many "high quality" presets are defaulting to joint stereo ...

Thanx for your input, Indiana !

Originally posted by az
Well I DO hear artifacts on downloaded 128 kbit mp3 easily, and on 160 when I'm really listening. Never had a 256 kbit one. But artifacts can not only come from too low a bitrate, but from a lot of other things as well, such as read errors, encoding errors, stupid settings, xing encoders ... I'm really astonished how many people manage to produce horribly clipping, noisy, or much too quiet mp3s from a CD. What are these people doing?

AZ

oh, so true ...

as I posted above, this seems to be mostly a problem of lousy presets and, as you mentioned, the choice of software for ripping and encoding.

Thanx for your input as well, AZ !

Originally posted by Umfriend
Hang on, what about CD vs SACD (or HDCD even)? People do hear the difference between these, don't they?

interesting aspect, Umfriend !

some do, some don't ...

as usual, this is a matter of equipment and if the listener is capable of hearing a difference (quite a few people are literally deaf above certain high frequencies) and if he has a real chance to compare both standards

Anybody know of an audio compression format that goes beyond 16bit per channel ?

L8erz,
Maggi

[az]

mp3 can go to at least 48bit. We had one such file that would slow the old pc with cheap soundcard to a crawl on playback

AZ

[Indiana]

Originally posted by az
Well I DO hear artifacts on downloaded 128 kbit mp3 easily, and on 160 when I'm really listening. Never had a 256 kbit one. But artifacts can not only come from too low a bitrate, but from a lot of other things as well, such as read errors, encoding errors, stupid settings, xing encoders ... I'm really astonished how many people manage to produce horribly clipping, noisy, or much too quiet mp3s from a CD. What are these people doing?

AZ

Yes, at 128KBps I'd say that I could hear those artifacts as well. But I'd not dare to claim that I would be able to distinguish a >160KBps mp3 from the uncompressed original in a real blinded test, save a few problem-tracks. For instance mp3 seems to have major problems with Voyage, Voyage from Desireless (even when using LAME).
Another thing: if you know that it is a mp3 encoding and specifically search for artifacts you might find them even at those HQ settings - but I don't really think you would stand a real (blinded/prospective!) test.


And I'm NOT talking about those various mp3s found on the net, they're mostly REALLY bad, and this is one of the main reasons that I don't download any mp3. >>90% of the mp3 files I have are ripped&encoded by myself from the original CD.
It's of course easy to hear artifacts in the average mp3 from the net, even in many of the160KBps ones.

I'm talking about mp3s encoded with decent bitrate and settings (i.e. no joint-stereo; when using VBR, I like to up the lower bitrate limit to 128KBps,...), of course using decent encoders (LAME 3.92 here) and rippers (EAC).

[Jammrock]

Originally posted by Umfriend
Hang on, what about CD vs SACD (or HDCD even)? People do hear the difference between these, don't they?

Yes

[Umfriend]

OK, I have a small integrated amplifier, a van Medevoort MA111 driving a pair of Quadral Shoguns. Nothing special but a bit more expensive than the median hifi equipment buyer would spend on stereo machines. I hooked this up with a Marantz SACD player of a friend of mine. We also hooked my speakers to his tube pre-amplifier and two mono op-amps. Finally, he happened to have both a CD and a SACD recording of the same music.

Result: I heard a differences alright. First of all, between my amp;liefier and his set-up on my speakers. Got jealous alright

But also between the two formats, and this difference was more pronounces with his amplifier than with mine. Finally, my $500 a piece speakers outdid his 2700$ a piece JBL's L-7s (I think it was).

There is of course a question of what is a metter of "quality" and what is a matter of taste........ I liked the CD recoding better than the SACD one in ALL FOUR SETUPS!

But then, did not know, nor did I like the music...
Umf

BTW, Them Quadral Shoguns are awesome. I still hope to find the Quadral Wotans sometime, the real big brothers of mine.