[Ewok]

Greetings audiophiles. I have been checking a bunch of my FLAC's with SPEK and found something very odd with 2 Oasis albums FLAC's I have. One is supposedly from a 2011 remaster (on the right), another is from a 2014 deluxe special edition remaster (on the left).

Both are clearly legitimate FLAC files due to the frequency ranges and being far from an expert I had wondered if the right hand one was simply louder. Much to my surprise the left hand track is a lot louder. The right one does show a slightly higher bitrate but the difference between the 2 images is huge and doesnt look like a slight difference in bitrate.

Can anyone shed some light on this, I am trying to decide which one to keep, i.e. which is the better quality file. To me it looks like the quieter but much fuller SPEK file on the right is the one to keep but I am not sure if I am reading it correctly or not, it looks like there is a lot more data in there. Listening to them it is hard for me to judge which is better as I have not used replaygain on them yet and the left one is a lot louder making it hard to judge. They do definitely sound different though. It is not isolated to these 2 tracks either, it is the same thing across the entire album.

 

[MindsMirror]

Bit rate is not important for FLAC files, that shouldn't factor into your decision of which sounds best.

You probably thought the right one was louder due to it having more green at the top, but there is actually very little musical content in that frequency range. Frequencies from 10KHz to 20KHz span only one octave, while human hearing spans 10 octaves. On a linear frequency scale, the chart shows a disproportionate amount of the upper octave bompared to the other 9 octaves, so that kind of chart is not a good way to judge how it will sound. The left one is actually louder due to the deeper shades of orange and red in the lower part of the graph, where the important stuff is. That will be more obvious if you generate the graphs with a log frequency scale, which uses the same amount of space for each octave. Even then, the charts are not a good way to judge the quality of the tracks. The only way is to normalize their volume with ReplayGain and decide for yourself which you prefer.

 

[Strangelove424]

Spectrograms can be useful for establishing which track has harmonic content in the upper frequencies, and is high resolution sourced rather than upsampled. However, as the previous poster notes, those upper frequencies arguably don’t contribute much to the musical enjoyment, and become more and more elusive with old age. The dynamics of the track, I think, are far more important and I would personally choose the quieter, more dynamic track, regardless of data depth/rate. Dynamics are best analyzed by comparing waveforms in something like Audacity. Also keep in mind that this album was a loudness war offender from its original release, so you will likely have to choose between lesser evils. In the long run, though, you have to make a decision based on listening. Graphic analysis of audio data can tell you a lot, but ultimately your ears should be the final decision makers.

 

[Ewok]

Thanks, yeah I decided to go with the left one which was louder before replaygain but I think sounded better. the album was terrible thats why i was looking at these remasters to see if there was actually a good one out there, im stil not sure they are much better.