bigshot
Headphoneus Supremus
As I said, I don't think mono has anything to do with it. I think it's the sort of distortion created by 1950s era signal processing combined with complex tones of massed violins. If you listen to old popular music recordings with orchestras, you'll find some that have not very natural sounding string sections. They sound good, like in an old movie; but they don't sound like real orchestras. I think the people who created the codecs probably used modern high fidelity recordings to tune the compression, not older recordings like this. The codec wasn't designed to handle that euphonically distorted kind of sound.
In case anyone is interested, this is the album I am talking about. Encode this in 64, 128, 192 and 256 and take note of the sections that artifact the worst in the lowest data rates. Then check those sections in the higher rates and your find the stubborn sections that won't encode as easily. Make sure you have VBR turned off or it will try to fix those sections.
https://www.amazon.com/Decca-Years-Sammy-Davis/dp/B000002OF2
In case anyone is interested, this is the album I am talking about. Encode this in 64, 128, 192 and 256 and take note of the sections that artifact the worst in the lowest data rates. Then check those sections in the higher rates and your find the stubborn sections that won't encode as easily. Make sure you have VBR turned off or it will try to fix those sections.
https://www.amazon.com/Decca-Years-Sammy-Davis/dp/B000002OF2
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