ATRAC3Plus Has Trouble with LOUD Passages?

[vranswer]

Just ripped 'Acid Again' track from my awesome "Actual Sounds & Voices" CD (Meat Beat Manifesto). I'm very familiar with this track, and was hearing it for the first time encoded with ATRAC3Plus 256. It was playing on my Sony NW-E507 flash player (incredible bass) with E4Cs plugged in. The E4s kick serious arse when pumped up with the Sony, believe me.

But then a wierd thing happened. At a peaking moment of the song the signal clearly became overloaded and sounded quite blaring. Having heard the CD on a PCDP, I am well aware of how the track should sound. Bottom line is, I like the presentation generally of ATRAC3Plus 256, but have to report that it straight up could not handle the critical juncture of this music track. Not smart enough to know the hows or whys, just know it couldn't cut the mustard. I'll be trying the LAME APS version on my Sony player, and may even compare to an ALAC version on iPod for reference. Kind of disappointed though, as A3+ had been sounding really good before this. Clean presentation, potent bass, etc. Anyone else concur?

 

[notnormal]

The various lossless codecs have their strengths and weaknesses. You'll find samples for which ATRAC3Plus 256 will fail and mp3 will succeed. The vice versa is also true. See hydrogenaudio.org for more indepth information on samples that will cause problems for many lossy codecs.

 

[D-EJ915]

Interesting, I've had no such problems with my A3+ rips but I'll try more CDs I guess (maybe some classical).

 

[notnormal]

Fatboy Slim's "You've come a long way, baby", is a known torcher sample for lame -api, and atrac3plus.

 

[sno1man]

Acid Again is a great track off a great album. Prime Audio Soup rocks as well.

Atrac is not the only codec that has issues with that Album. AAC (itunes) does too. Finally encoded it at 320kb MP3 to get it to sound right

 

[ZackT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by sno1man Acid Again is a great track off a great album. Prime Audio Soup rocks as well. Atrac is not the only codec that has issues with that Album. AAC (itunes) does too. Finally encoded it at 320kb MP3 to get it to sound right

Really? So AAC wasn't as good? At what bitrate? Did you try a higher bitrate AAC? The only reason I ask is I've just made AAC's from all my lossless files and I'd be mighty sore if it turned out 320 MP3 was better.

 

[vranswer]

I've been really enjoying the A3+ 256 rips. Sound is generally excellent, and haven't heard any wierd artifacts until problem noted above. I'll be interested to see how LAME APS handles it, and may just toss in a comparison to 320 Kbps mp3 for grins. I find APS to be just as good as 320 Kbps but smaller, however something like this may benefit from the constant bit rate - I don't know.

Oh, and you're right, the other song I pulled from ASAV was Prime Audio Soup. Freakin' awesome.

 

[abitdeef]

I have to get ASAV- FLAC ASAP.

 

[sno1man]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZackT Really? So AAC wasn't as good? At what bitrate? Did you try a higher bitrate AAC? The only reason I ask is I've just made AAC's from all my lossless files and I'd be mighty sore if it turned out 320 MP3 was better.

In general I'm pretty happy with AAC for portable use and rip 90% of my stuff at 256k AAC. That strikes me as a decent compromise between size and sound quality. However AAC seems to have trouble with really dense/complex bass content in electronic music.

Another example would be Angel by Massive Attack. On both Acid Again and Angel, the sound on the low end gets muffled a bit. hard to explain but easy to hear.

Overall though i still like AAC

 

[halcyon]

Atrac has serious issues at low volumes, although I've yet to experience it at high volumes.

I've done some abchr/abx testing with ogg/aac/mp3/atrac3+/wma9std at 128kbps and Atrac is almost always the easiest to spot from the original (wma9 also being quite horrid at times).

I'd be very surprised if AAC (Apple's iTunes/QT implementation) fares worse than atrac3plus.

Then again, some people do like atrac3+ better than the original PCM, so who am I to say

 

[notnormal]

Quote:

Originally Posted by halcyon Then again, some people do like atrac3+ better than the original PCM, so who am I to say

That's because it colours the sound to give it a warmer sound.

 

[dura]

Quote:

Originally Posted by halcyon Atrac has serious issues at low volumes, although I've yet to experience it at high volumes. I've done some abchr/abx testing with ogg/aac/mp3/atrac3+/wma9std at 128kbps and Atrac is almost always the easiest to spot from the original (wma9 also being quite horrid at times). I'd be very surprised if AAC (Apple's iTunes/QT implementation) fares worse than atrac3plus. Then again, some people do like atrac3+ better than the original PCM, so who am I to say

i found A3+ 128 kbs strangely and unpredictably sibilant too, not at first but it started to get annoying. I love A3+ 256 Kbs however.

 

[vranswer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by halcyon Atrac has serious issues at low volumes, although I've yet to experience it at high volumes. I've done some abchr/abx testing with ogg/aac/mp3/atrac3+/wma9std at 128kbps and Atrac is almost always the easiest to spot from the original (wma9 also being quite horrid at times). I'd be very surprised if AAC (Apple's iTunes/QT implementation) fares worse than atrac3plus. Then again, some people do like atrac3+ better than the original PCM, so who am I to say

It's the very high volume peak passage which threw me for a loop on Acid Again track. I'll have to listen to it again to find the spot and post time location for anyone interested. I would agree that A3+ actually has some pleasing audible advantages over the original as a result of warmer bass-coloring, with the exception of the aforementioned melt-downs in performance.