[LAU] How bad is mp3/ogg

[Jostein Chr. Andersen]

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On Tuesday 11 October 2011 22.57.38 Atte André Jensen wrote:
...
> 
> My question is: is this really a fair way to judge the artifacts
> introduced by encoding?

My subjective opinion: -Probably yes and no. Yes because this artifacts 
often are audible, especially when you know the stuff and No because most 
people don't care and actually like some of them (like stronger 
compression and more generated noise which makes things louder).

This kind of encodings is (I believe) about fooling the ears by removing 
"masked" info and put everything that make sounds in a context, so often, 
we don't really hear or notice this artifacts when we are listening to 
the music.

That said, I believe that lossy compression do reduce sound quality, but 
in many, maybe most (?) cases, I can't say that a good quality lossy 
compressed piece of music sounds bad without listening to the original, 
which often sounds like shit anyway this days.

I often notice that even high quality MP3s often makes essing stronger on 
music I have been mixing, but that might be the way I adjust things (EQ, 
HPF, deess and so on), so I don't really know. I do also dislike many WMA 
files, which in my opinion often generates strong circle saw like 
artifacts. But all this might be my ears.

So I think you should let your ears be the judge of what's good or bad, 
and 128 kbps/q=3 is not interesting when we speak HiFi anyway. 300 kbps 
and higher is much more interesting IM(subjective)O.

Jostein