Re: How bad is mp3/ogg

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Am 12.10.2011 18:03, schrieb david:
Hartmut Noack wrote:
Am 11.10.2011 23:07, schrieb Fons Adriaensen:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:57:38PM +0200, Atte André Jensen wrote:

My question is: is this really a fair way to judge the artifacts
introduced by encoding?

No, it is only fair to ask your ears for a judgement.

1.) MP3 and OGG are both *different* compared to the original. So both
are not "HiFi" in the sense of the word.

2.) every publisher of music has to make the decision if the sounds
he/she wants to share with the world are adeaquately represented by
MP3 or OGG or not.

To give an quite extreme example: I made a mix of an 50+ track project
in Ardour. It did sound OK but for my personal taste it should have
been a bit more brilliant/transparent. It was just too fat in a
sense... So I transcoded it to OGG and released it on the net to get
some ideas of other musicians out there how to make that stuff sound a
bit thinner whithout breaking its neck:


http://lapoc.de/demos/lapoc-sos-ashita-141008.ogg

Test-listening to the OGG-file I discovered, that the process of
encoding had made all the difference, I was longing for. So I
recoded(sic!) the OGG-file back to WAV to put it on CD.

There is no such thing as "good sound" there are right or wrong sound
only.


No, it's completely invalid.

The correct way would be a double blind A/B/X test between the
original and the encoded versions.

Amen to that.

My ears are shot (age and rock'n'roll), and my equipment isn't pro
level, but I notice a difference between 32-bit WAV recordings and
resulting MP3s

As I said: there *is* a difference. But MP3 or OGG do not sound "bad", they can reproduce the spectrum hearable by most people and they do not introduce a relevant amount of noise or distortion. They simply reduce the information.

(LAME's variable bit rate, quality 2). Mostly more high
frequencies in the WAV vs the MP3s.

I never had the impression, that high frequencies where reduced by encoding. But I did hear rather dramatic effects on dynamics and density.

But this isn't double-blind testing.

Most double-blind-tests are made with released recordings. Such recordings are in most cases mixed and mastered to meet the expectations of average listeners and to fit the limitations of kitchen-radios and MP3-players. Make a double-blind test with a fresh, un-mastered recording of say, a band like Mastodon or Kyuss and the difference will be obvious. But that does not say, that the listeners in the test will actually prefer the un-encoded version....


How about MP4 - any difference between MP3 and MP4 when it comes to sound?

My mobile-phone uses MP4 for its so called "high-quality"-mode for field recordings. I do not notice any difference compared with the MP3 or OGG used by other cheap field recorders I used.

The only compressed format, I ever found slightly listenable better than MP3/OGG was the ATRAC on my old Minidisc-recorder.

But who cares: real recordings may never be compressed and MP3/OGG are OK for easy distribution. People may get a CD or LP to get the real thing or a flac to have something for net-distribution.

best regs
HZN



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