[LAU] What is the best MP3 encoder?

[Florian Paul Schmidt]

On 04/02/2013 02:35 PM, Peder Hedlund wrote:
> Quoting Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>:
>
>> On Tue, 2013-04-02 at 12:59 +0200, Peder Hedlund wrote:
>>> You should read Monty's (of Ogg/Vorbis and Opus/CELT fame) 24/192 post
>>> : http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
>>> When recording you should obviously go as high as feasible but 16/44.1
>>> is more than adequate for listening.
>>
>> I didn't read this post, because I already disagree. There already is an
>> audible difference between 44.1KHz and 48KHz. Unlikely that my
>> previously golden ears are still golden, since I'm living for > 15 years
>> in a loud place.
>
> Feel free to post the results of a double blind test to prove you're 
> right.

Anecdote time :D I have a friend who's a mild audiophile. Spends quite a 
bit of money on his amplifier, D/A and speakers and was firm that his 
FLAC collection sounded better than 256kbit/s mp3. We discussed this 
issue quite a bit (there was another friend there who's a musician and 
he sided with him). After quite some time I convinced them to do a 
double blind test. We took one of his most familiar albums and encoded 
it from FLAC to mp3. I then threw a die 20 times and created a list of 
which version to play in each trial. I handed this list to my other 
friend who was responsible for playing the files. The first friend then 
tried to identify which of the versions sounded "better". We went 
through with the test and there was no statistically significant 
discrimination.

My other friend could not believe it, so we repeated the experiment with 
him. I threw the die 20 more times, etc.. Again, no statistically 
significant discrimination.

My semi-audiophile friend then exalted: "Gawddammit, from now on I'll 
encode my music as potato!". A good laugh was had..

Flo

-- 
Florian Paul Schmidt
http://fps.io