[LAU] How bad is mp3/ogg

[S. Massy]

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.