On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 12:19:55PM +0200, Philipp ??berbacher wrote: > Excerpts from S. Massy's message of 2011-10-12 00:23:42 +0200: > > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 05:35:09PM -0400, S. Massy wrote: > > > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 09:07:33PM +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote: > > > > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 10:57:38PM +0200, Atte Andr? Jensen wrote: > > > > > > > > > My question is: is this really a fair way to judge the artifacts > > > > > introduced by encoding? > > > > > > > > No, it's completely invalid. > > > > > > > > The correct way would be a double blind A/B/X test between the > > > > original and the encoded versions. > > > With suitable hardware. What I mean is, I think a great way of > > > demonstrating the difference between lossy compression and uncompressed > > > audio is to do an A/B test through a consumer device and then do it in the > > > studio. The difference can be striking. > > > > > > I like to think I have decent ears, and I can only very rarely tell the > > > difference once over 192kbps. Though I've also found that bitrate isn't > > > always everything (i.e some audio seems to respond better to a given > > > compression algorithm than other). I wonder what other people's > > > experience has been in that respect. > > Responding to myself here. Out of curiosity, I just did some AB'ing > > (hadn't in a very long time) and you can hear a difference even above > > 192 kbps. A lot of it seems to have to do with emphasised frequencies. I > > think Jostein had a very good point about these formats potentially > > actually being pleasing to people because they make things sound > > "bigger/punchier". > > > > Very interesting... > > > > Cheers, > > S.M. > > Was this a double-blind test? Otherwise you don't really need to test at > all. The idea of a double-blind test is that you can't fool yourself. > With a simple A/B test you might not want to fool yourself but still do > it. No, I'm afraid it was nothing of the kind and extremely unscientific. I certainly cannot discount the possibility that my brain bypassed my ears and fooled itself. What is interesting, however, is that I actually did *not* expect to see a difference between uncompressed audio and high bitrate ogg/mp3, based on experiments I had conducted several years ago, but did. I would really be interested in taking part in some kind of double blind testing some time and see what the outcome is. Cheers, S.M. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
