[Greenears]

 
May as well try to herd cats.

Cats like vinyl too?

 

[BackToAnalogue]

k

 

[BackToAnalogue]

  In fact, I just remembered a conversation I had with a fellow hifi nut back in Jr High School. We had just played with one of the first reel to reel B&W video tape recorders in a class, and we were talking about the future. I predicted that we would contain our entire record collection on a crystal cube the size of a softball and our stereos wouldn't need speaker wires because the sound would go straight through the air like radio. We could wear a wristwatch that could play our music or television wherever we were, and it would act as a video telephone too. I predicted that we would have television screens that covered an entire wall and we would be able to watch any program we wanted at any time we wanted, and record it and save it too.
 
All that was Buck Rogers talk when I was a kid. But now that I think about it, even though some of the details may be a bit different, I have just about all of this today... well everything except that doggone flying car I also predicted.

Wow, and I am not 'taking the micky' as we say here in England, you are clearly far more prescient than I am. Not only did I never imagine that, ( though I was looking forward to the 'hover packs'), in 2001 I had an argument with a sales guy over a software bid I was managing because he wanted to put in a load of guff (as I saw it) about investigating the use of voice recognition software in the near future. I said -
'it would never work well enough to be useable in real life applications in our lifetime because the algorithms necessary would require much more powerful CPUs than we would ever have'.
Less then 10 years later I had it on my mobile phone. So sorry Harry.
Clearly I am not very good at predicting the future, but I am quite good at understanding the past (at least in my lifetime). Yes of course there are a few exceptions to the general rule, if there weren't it would be obvious to everyone. I am talking about the consumer end not the top end, and in the last few years several things, like Turntables and vinyl pressing quality have suddenly started to get much better.
Also some of you are confusing 'consistency' with 'quality'. One of the main reasons CDs took off with vinyl fans is because the record companies were no longer able to produce consistent quality vinyl pressings.
Bigshot  says - CD beats vinyl on every aspect you can measure.
He is absolutely one hundred percent correct about that, indeed it does, and very clearly and convincingly.
But most of the things you measure come from the analogue world and tell you nothing about the performance of digital equipment. Putting a SINE wave through a DAC and then measuring Harmonic Distortion, SNR, DNR and a few others tells you two things.
1) Whether or not it has been turned on.
2) If it is has a fault and is seriously outside it's design specification or not.
For top end DACs all they usually tell you is that it has 20.5 effective bits of output accuracy, i.e. 123 DB SNR. Which is a very important thing to know, because those bits really do matter a hell of a lot.
The only measurement which might help to really measure the difference is impossible to achieve. What we really want to know is how accurate the reproduction of the sound wave is compared to the original. I have had this idea for ages but finally came across the word for it in the 'JBL Sound System Design Reference Manual'  which I highly recommend if you are interested in this subject to some depth, because I have only read the first 2 chapters and learned a great deal from them. Anyway, if two sound waves (from 2 speaker stacks for example) are not identical but contain very similar information, then they are 'coherent'. If we could measure and compare 'coherence' then that would almost certainly prove it one way or the other. But I don't think we ever will be able to. But then I was wrong about voice recognition and it is a very similar problem.

 

[BackToAnalogue]

I am listening to The Doors- Morrison Hotel in CD format now as I type and it sounds very good indeed. It has clearly been taken from an excellent, probably first generation, source tape and has been very well mastered. It sounds great. But if I sit and listen for the main difference that I always notice first, then I can immediately hear that the sound is in a flat plane between the speakers.


When people say it lacks depth, they really mean it doesn't have any 3D, whereas with Vinyl and, in my recent experience, with 24/192 it does sometimes have depth.

When people say, 'there is no space between the notes', or 'it sounds all fuzzy to me', then they are talking 'bollocks'.


When they say 'it just sounds better to me', then they are not talking 'bollocks'.


If you would like to try and understand how it may be possible that a pair of loud speakers could carry three dimensional information about sound that the brain can interpret then I strongly suggest you read this. It certainly opened my mind when I read it after I had been listening to a Wren moving around the perimeter of my garden and had started to wonder how on earth we did it.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_localization


Another interesting test of this is 'the market'. I started dealing in vinyl first pressings about a year ago, as a sort of hobby + little earner. British, USA and Japanese first pressings of LPs from pre 1974 are sometimes quite valuable these days and there is a very active market on Ebay and elsewhere. I am very good at spotting whether anything is likely to be valuable even if I don't know the LP. A friend of mine asked me how you can tell, I replied the first test is whether it was any good or not. That works 70% of the time. Obviously if someone is now recognized and they weren't at the time, like Nick Drake, those are the most valuable. There are quite a few anomalies, like Budgie, Queen, Uriah Heep, Nazareth, and a few others, which mystify me. The only LP I can think of from the late 70s which is worth anything is The Wall (and that is because it is Pink Floyd, not because it is a great work). People are not buying these just to collect them, they are buying them to play them and there is a reason why they aren't as interested in LPs after the mid 70s, even the good stuff isn't worth that much. But it certainly keeps its value a lot better than CDs do. Have you tried to sell any CDs recently? You can't give the horrible little things away.


There is a very similar but different 'value' effect in the classical LP market which Bigshot may be aware of? It tells you precisely where and when the highest quality was.


This bit is very OT.


I buy my records in collections when people sell theirs off. I only buy collections (100 - 300 LPs) in which I have spotted some 'good stuff' and I haven't made a mistake yet. There is one popular artist/group  that was in every single collection I bought and the next closest was in 4 collections.They were very big in the 80s but went back to the 70s. Anyone like to venture a guess?

 

[Greenears]

Its been a while since the creation of mp3. And by "a while" i mean  21 years. Its a fact that technology has advanced a lot since then. We had creations like WAV, SA-CD, DSD playback, and mainly, FLAC which are not what i would call new, but they are definitely newer than mp3. The main reason why mp3 became the standard was that you could store many songs and they wouldnt take much memory space, meaning that you could store (in low file rates) at least 6 albums in less than 500mb. But with time, memory space became wieder, much, much wieder. we have 128 gb micro sd cards and upcoming 256gb micri SDcards. With all of this, i ask the audio technology community, When will lossless audio formats will became the standard? SA-CD and DSD need expensive gear to run naturally, so i think that lossless is what i think is more capable of becoming the standard. I can´t predict the future, but i see this happening. What do you think? 

I've been looking into the OP intensely and doing some testing. I'm at the cusp of a major expansion if my digital library hence I need to know.

Tentative conclusion is that FLAC 16/44 may be the final audio standard forever. I think there will be some attempt to sell FLAC 24b but unclear if it will fizzle. There is reasonable evidence you can digitize your DSD and vinyl in this format and not be able to differentiate double blind. If so, you should. Much more convenient to have one master format. Then you cross convert as needed.

 

[Greenears]

A few friends of mine are in the process of doing a final clean up of all our digital libraries.  These libraries have been created over the last 10+ years and are littered with the bones of every possible audio format and DRM scheme ever dreamed up.  Time to clean up.  There are lots of tracks with multiple formats that are no longer needed.
 
We are toying with FLAC 16/44 as the "golden" archive, and then do a one-time batch re-encode using latest LAME encoder to MP3 265 kbps CBR.   They lossy is for all possible player compatibility. In our mutual ecosystems we have every type of device and OS you can think of, and one or two you would never guess.
 
Opinions?  Is it worth considering MP3 320 or will the difference be inaudible?  Is LAME a good choice? Others?

 

[RRod]

 
A few friends of mine are in the process of doing a final clean up of all our digital libraries.  These libraries have been created over the last 10+ years and are littered with the bones of every possible audio format and DRM scheme ever dreamed up.  Time to clean up.  There are lots of tracks with multiple formats that are no longer needed.
 
We are toying with FLAC 16/44 as the "golden" archive, and then do a one-time batch re-encode using latest LAME encoder to MP3 265 kbps CBR.   They lossy is for all possible player compatibility. In our mutual ecosystems we have every type of device and OS you can think of, and one or two you would never guess.
 
Opinions?  Is it worth considering MP3 320 or will the difference be inaudible?  Is LAME a good choice? Others?

 
I keep my collection as lossless, and since that's mostly CDs it's 16/44.1 FLACs. I batch recode from there depending on the device, so for instance I have a script to convert to 256 AAC for my little old iPod classic. Most of my FLACs end up in the 500—600kbps range, so I'm using double the space an AAC collection would take. I'm sure there's no audible difference, but screw it, I got the space.

 

[Greenears]

   
I keep my collection as lossless, and since that's mostly CDs it's 16/44.1 FLACs. I batch recode from there depending on the device, so for instance I have a script to convert to 256 AAC for my little old iPod classic. Most of my FLACs end up in the 500—600kbps range, so I'm using double the space an AAC collection would take. I'm sure there's no audible difference, but screw it, I got the space.

Doesn't your old iPod classic play 256 MP3?   Not every decoder plays AAC and it's many header variants without some mucking around or plugin you have to buy.  I just re-bought MM Codec pack (for the second time) my .m4a just stopped playing.  I'm soooo tired of format wars. 

 

[nanaholic]

 
A few friends of mine are in the process of doing a final clean up of all our digital libraries.  These libraries have been created over the last 10+ years and are littered with the bones of every possible audio format and DRM scheme ever dreamed up.  Time to clean up.  There are lots of tracks with multiple formats that are no longer needed.
 
We are toying with FLAC 16/44 as the "golden" archive, and then do a one-time batch re-encode using latest LAME encoder to MP3 265 kbps CBR.   They lossy is for all possible player compatibility. In our mutual ecosystems we have every type of device and OS you can think of, and one or two you would never guess.
 
Opinions?  Is it worth considering MP3 320 or will the difference be inaudible?  Is LAME a good choice? Others?

 
I've done ABX with 256kbps mp3 and it isn't quite transparent to my own ears (IIRC I got > 80% correct with 20 tries), so I went with 320kbps mp3 across my entire system (desktop and portable) for playback.
 
I used to do 256AAC when I was only using Apple hardware like iPods and iPhones, but switched back to mp3s due to incompatibilities when I started to use different devices/OSes.  Though that was many years ago and I think AAC compatibility is almost as good as mp3s now in terms of playback compatibility.  If I was to rebuild my library again I'd probably use 320kbps AAC.

 

[Greenears]

   
I've done ABX with 256kbps mp3 and it isn't quite transparent to my own ears (IIRC I got > 80% correct with 20 tries), so I went with 320kbps mp3 across my entire system (desktop and portable) for playback.
 
I used to do 256AAC when I was only using Apple hardware like iPods and iPhones, but switched back to mp3s due to incompatibilities when I started to use different devices/OSes.  Though that was many years ago and I think AAC compatibility is almost as good as mp3s now.  If I was to rebuild my library again I'd probably use 320kbps AAC.

 
Thanks I'll try it out. By the way, I don't think AAC320 is completely universal, my friends are telling me MP3 is the only reliable play-anywhere. But I don't know for sure it takes a lot of testing.

 

[nanaholic]

   
Thanks I'll try it out. By the way, I don't think AAC320 is completely universal, my friends are telling me MP3 is the only reliable play-anywhere. But I don't know for sure it takes a lot of testing.

 
Yeah I'm not confident that AAC is completely universal like mp3 either, but so far in terms of desktop and mobile software and recent PMPs I think it's there (which is all that I deal with now).  If you have some really exotic stuff or perhaps some old in-car stereo systems which can't be software/firmware updated then I can still see compatibility issues.  Fairly certain that one of my head units in my car about 5 years ago only does mp3s and wma - granted it was a very cheap JVC unit which cost maybe 100 bucks.  

 

[RRod]

 
Doesn't your old iPod classic play 256 MP3?   Not every decoder plays AAC and it's many header variants without some mucking around or plugin you have to buy.  I just re-bought MM Codec pack (for the second time) my .m4a just stopped playing.  I'm soooo tired of format wars. 

 
Yes it does, but I'm converting anyway so I go with the native format of the player. If I were archiving using lossy format, I'd probably go 256 or 320 mp3. Note that I can't really tell apart 256 and 192 mp3 blind, but it's always nice to give yourself a cushion with lossy. You can't ABX ALL your tracks and still actually listen to music ^_^

 

[castleofargh]

AAC is more efficient in sound/octet, so when looking for a gain of space AAC makes more sense. but AAC never replaced mp3 as the universal codec as was planed by the fraunhofer guys.
so for space, ACC, and the lower the bitrate, the more AAC wins over mp3. but for universal compatibility, mp3 is still the more convenient one. it's mostly apple people who jump the gun and go all AAC. because there AAC is the best choice.
 
 
about mp3 320 and 256, I have a very subjective thing going on, I tend to prefer the 256vbr version. that may just be me giving a + for space saving in my brain, but as the audible difference is super small anyway I went all 256 on my DAPs. but I have to admit I'm not really an audiophile, I sacrifice sound quality for ease of use all the time when picking new gears. if I could get a DAP that sounds poorly but needs charging once a year, I'd go for that sucker.

 

[bigshot]

In the listening test I've been sharing, no one seems to be able to tell the difference between any of the codecs at 320. It's only in the 192 range that they can be told apart.

 

[bigshot]

   
Yeah I'm not confident that AAC is completely universal like mp3 either

 
Youtube and many streaming services use AAC. It's pretty standard. Even car stereos play it now.