12 Oct
2011
12 Oct
'11
6:31 p.m.
Am 12.10.2011 18:03, schrieb david:
Hartmut Noack wrote:
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.
Am 11.10.2011 23:07, schrieb Fons Adriaensen:
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 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. (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