Audio Compression Blind Test - test your hearing!

[Jon P. Inghram]

Oohh, if you want some really good sounding MP3's encode with LAME using these command line parameters:

-b 32 --cbr --resample 44.1 --lowpass 20000

[spadnos]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
[audiophile prick mode: ON]
LMAO, you're such a noob! If you didn't spend at least $500 on fiber optic cable and an expensive "jitter corrector" you couldn't possibly get good sound!
[audiophile prick mode: OFF]

True. I guess I should just scrap the entire system (and the house, that's not a perfect listening environment either)

[When using a Live! card beware of the stupid AC97 sampling rate conversion issues... I've never understood what the point was behind that crap.

Except that we were using the Audiotron for output, not the SBlive. I only mentioned that so some bonehead wouldn't say "but you screwed it up with your crap sound card"

- Steve

[Jon P. Inghram]

I misunderstood your post, thought you ment you were using the digital output from your SBLive! card, guess I should pay more attention. My stopped my "audiophile" purchases at my HD600's, Corda HA-1, Denon DCM-370, and a Technics EQ, I'm not worthy to comment about audio quality.

[Maggi]

I'm all in, so let's hear it ...

I could offer my own HQ VBR settings for LAME, in order to compare it to 320kbit CBR, what do you say ?

[az]

I want to limit this to not too many variants, because comparing 10+ samples per song (and I want to offer at least two pieces) would get tiring, not to mention it would become very hard to keep a memory of sound quality across so many files. I think I'll also limit the number of mp3 bitrates.

Please everybody, give the favourite encoders and bitrate you'd like to hear.

AZ

[Jon P. Inghram]

Last night I gave Ogg Vorbis a spin, at least at low bit rates it sounds far better than MP3.

[SpiralDragon]

i am willining to test... have active reference monitors and a creamware Luna II card.... this will be a good chance for me to learn the difernce between the difrent compretions... i have never bothered to listen to it... but its about time i did... els i should forget about calling my self a sound engineer.... unfortunatly i dont have the "golden ears" and i seem to be getting some hearing problems in my left ear.... go figure.... this will be a good ear excersise for me... thank you for the opertunity..... some of us (namely me) are too lazy to do it them selves

[GuchiGuh]

/ot

Founder of The MURC Club of Confusion. Guchi is the president

excuse me? i just noticed..... you dingdong, you are the president!!

/ot

[Umfriend]

What about Diana Krall? Or "The Rainbow" from Talk Talk?

[az]

as I said, if you think you have suitable music for this test, you can mail it to me as RARed .wav, maximum attachment size per mail is 20 MB for azrael_katz@gmx.net. Or upload it somewhere and tell me where to dowload. I will decide which samples to use in the test when it starts.

AZ

[GuchiGuh]

Az, I ripped a nice modern classical piece which has lots of nice distinct instruments and nice heavy drums

The Last Samurai Soundtrack - Track 5 - To Know My Enemy

(Original CD, WMG Soundtracks)

Its 48.5 MB in WAV format. I could use FLAC to halve that and send it to you...
do you have a gmail account?

Is there another way of getting this huge file over to you?

[Jon P. Inghram]

If you want to email to him you can make a multipart zip or RAR archive, or you could download an FTP server like FileZilla (which is what I did.)

[az]

Or just upload it to your webspace.

If you want to mail, 20MB per mail, 1GB altogether.

I think I'll upload the files this weekend (at least I hope so)

AZ

[Jammrock]

Frank (dZeus) might be willing to host the files, so long as it's a MURC only thing.

Jammrock

[Maggi]

is there still a need for critical songs, ie. the kind of music that suffers most from compression ?

I could offer one or two, if needed as well.