[J-Pak]

Just curious what is 320AAC equivalent to in MP3 bitrate?

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ServinginEcuador I thought that iTunes won't work, ie. copy from hard drive to iPod, unless you copy the music directly from the source material???

You can use any MP3 encoder, and then copy the file right into iTines, and then put in on the iPod from there. Very simple.

Quote:

Prove It.

In spite of the generally aggressive nature of this post, I will reply: http://ff123.net/training/training.html

This will help anyone spot what happens. Check out the sample devoted to stereo collapse.

There is a whole company, Neural Audio, dedicated to solving this problem, BTW, so it's not a figment of people's imagination.

 

[nspindel]

The argument over listening to lossy vs. lossless depends on what kind of listening you're talking about, and what the ramifications are for that particular type of listeing.

For portable audio, iPod for instance, you're dealing with a fixed amount of disk space. Mine is 60gig. So the more compressed I make the files, the more songs I get to carry around. Pretty simple. And for my iPod listening, I'm usually either listening to it through pair of $25 headphones in my noisy office, or I'm listening to it in my car. My car is a convertible, so the amount of road noise I get clearly overwhelms any difference in sound quality between lossless and say 128kbps m4a.

But when you're talking about pc listening that's a whole other argument, and the numbers clearly show that this argument is ridiculously in favor of flac.

Let's say I have 500 discs. At $12/disc, you're talking about a $6000 cd collection.

Then I've got my headphone rig. Micro Amp, Micro Dac, Cardas Cable, Senn 650's. Full retail is $1300

Then I've got the computer itself. Decent box - $1500

Finally we come to the storage, which is the ONLY FINANCIAL IMPACT that lossy vs. lossless files have. 500 cd's at approximately 300 mb per cd in flac is about 150gig. Looking at my m4a's for the ipod, average size of a cd is about 50 meg, so that's 25 gig for 500.

So a 250 gig drive costs $100. That's 40cents per gig. The difference between the flac and m4a's is 150-25 = 125 gigs. At 40 cents per gig, that comes out to a whopping $50.

So, am I going to listen to a compressed version of the audio of my $6000 cd collection on my $1300 headphone rig, playing off of my $1500 pc, just so I can save $50? $50/($6000+$1300+$1500) = ~.5%

Now for those who have a better headphone rig than I, let's say top of the $5000 dac/amp combo, now we're looking more along the lines of about .2% or .3% of a financial savings by compressing the audio.

Conversation over.

 

[J-Pak]

I'm going to go out on a limb here (flamesuit on) and say that the ones defending lossy encoding even for critical listening (on high end setups) are probably pirating their music, and need to justify that what they're listening to sounds as good as buying the music

With hardrive space being so cheap and the excellent compression system used by flac (even better with Monkey's Audio, I just don't use it since it's not open source) there isn't any reason not to go lossless if you have the equipment to match

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by J-Pak I'm going to go out on a limb here (flamesuit on) and say that the ones defending lossy encoding even for critical listening (on high end setups) are probably pirating their music, and need to justify that what they're listening to sounds as good as buying the music

Hey, that may be! It's the best explanation I have heard. Otherwise, it's hard to figure.

I understand why people might want to use it on a portable player (even though I don't). But to rip CDs in lossy-compressed audio so that's the ONLY way you can hear it? That I don't get. As Nspindel pointed out, HD space for a computer is too cheap to have this make sense...

 

[Ayreonaut]

I have ripped some of my wav files with into Lame 320mp3s and FLACs. I ABXed them with the foobar ABX plugin.

I don't hear any "artifacts" or tonal differences, but I can diffferentiate between the two by very carfully listing to the "space." FLAC does have better imaging.

But this requires very carefull listing in a quiet environment to discern. I can't tell the difference in my car. You won't notice with a portable if you are in a less than quiet environment.

So if you ever do your listingn in a quiet room, keep your wavs or FLAC them. But don't bother toting those huge files around on your portable.

That's what Foobar's command line encoder is for. Easy ripping from your archive quality PC storage to smaller files for on the go.

Ayreonaut

(MicroStack dm - HD555)

 

[J-Pak]

Yeah I'm all about MP3 with the portable. flac -> --aps mp3 in foobar2000 is around 3-4 minutes on my PC.

 

[maarek99]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BIGtrouble77 If your gonna encode at 320 you may as well just encode to a lossless format. I can hear artifacting in 320 mp3's (I have two albums encoded at this level), never tried ogg at that level.

Are they re-encodes? Many people complain about sucky 320 kbps mp3's, but many of them have been downloaded from the net, and they've been re-encodes of 160-192 kbps material.

 

[BIGtrouble77]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skylab My All-lossless iTunes library is almost 130 GB. When doing your blind testing, listen both for effect on the imaging/soundstage as well as the more typical/obvious effect on the sound of instruments like acoustic guitar and cymbals?

The album I decided to use I critically listened to for about an hour and a half. I tried listening to every detail to pick out the lossy versions. I think soundstage would be the easiest thing to discern, but I could hear no difference.

One thing that could affect soundstage is enabling j-stereo during encoding. I purposely turned that off because I wanted the absolute best quality mp3 that I could get.

The next album I plan to test is a very well produced latin composition. Lots of instruments, different levels of reverb, mixed very wide and extremely clean sounding. Should be a nice contrast to the rush album I'm still testing.

 

[BIGtrouble77]

Quote:

Originally Posted by maarek99 Are they re-encodes? Many people complain about sucky 320 kbps mp3's, but many of them have been downloaded from the net, and they've been re-encodes of 160-192 kbps material.

It could be. I did download those (2) albums. But I have had experience with creative's encoder and was shocked how bad it is at any bitrate.

 

[Oliver :)]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emon Prove it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Skylab In spite of the generally aggressive nature of this post, I will reply: http://ff123.net/training/training.html

Skylab, thanks for the supportive link

Nevertheless, we should not forget that there are people who just cannot perceive certain things, so things that are "obvious" to some may to others be nonexistent matters.

Emon, you should reflect about the general nature of perception in this regard. Do you think that what you see as, say a certain shade of grey, is just what everybody else will identify as just that particular shade of gray? Close your eyes in an alternating manner, keeping each open for 2 seconds maximum. Do all the colors have the same saturation on both eyes (this works especially well with skin-tones in natural light)? Do you have the same sharpness of vision on both eyes? You may or may not notice that each eye gives however slightly different results, and both differ from how you normally "see", as, in simple words, your brain makes up what you "see" from *both* sources of visual input after some "interpolation", a crazy amount of pattern-seeking, etc.. Same for your ears. So there is a high level of variance in perception. Given that variance, how will you try to prove what one person is able to perceive? Of course you can come up with a number of brain-activity-scan setups, fancy things are possible, and they will tell you. But the true problem is: We are talking about perceiving the *absence*, not the *presence* of information. You might A/B a person in a PET scanner, should the thing be quiet enough for the purpose. Yet it is questionable if by such means the small yet obvious nuances in quality we are here considered with may be identifiable or whether the the intensity of brain activity is the same for each level of detail the ear shovels in, since your senses should, under normal conditions, always be running at "full resolution"

 

[Emon]

Someone said that it's proven fact that MP3 (or any lossy compression) reduces soundstage. I want to know how that has been proven.

 

[Publius]

I also take a little offense at some people saying "HD space is close to free which leaves little excuse for not using lossless for PCs." It gets increasingly impractical to go fully-lossless beyond 500 CDs or so - that's going to average out to be somewhere around 300 gigs of needed space, and anything more than that is going to involve quite a bit of money for a new hard drive. For those people with 2000 CDs (and I'm not one of them), 600 gigs of space may be required.

This is the reason why I usually listen to my collection with MP3 or Vorbis at work. Half of the storage space on this system I've bought myself, and even then I can't justify throwing 60 gigs away on lossless.

 

[nspindel]

Quote:

...somewhere around 300 gigs of needed space, and anything more than that is going to involve quite a bit of money for a new hard drive. For those people with 2000 CDs...

2000 CDs at $12 a pop average is a $24,000 disc collection. 600 gigs for the 2000 cd flac collection. Lossy mp3 would be about 100 gig. Difference is 500 gig. At 40 cents a gig, that's an extra $200. If you've got a $25,000 collection, I'd hardly describe $200 as "quite a bit of money."

It's like I said on my earlier post. If you're listening with $25 headphones on an ipod in the office, then by all means listened to compressed.

But for someone who's spent thousands and thousands of dollars on rigs and computer equipment and a large disc collection, the price difference between storing lossy and storing lossless is half a penny on the dollar. That is an indisputable fact. It's not something for you to take offense to. It just is.

 

[Publius]

Your analysis doesn't take into account that $200 generally being far more useful being applied in other areas, namely more music. Of course, as mentioned before, some people prioritize sound quality over more music, and they can't be criticized. But they are in the vast minority IMHO. Personally, as long as I can guarentee one lossless rip to begin with, I will definitely go for the dozen (or more) CDs over a new hard disk. My equipment cost/music amount ratio is too high as it is to justify buying more gear.

Also that $200 is going to depreciate with a loud "thunk" once the disk crashes in 10 years. Their value is effectively zero after two or three years of use - nobody sane should buy a heavily used hard disk! CDs won't crash and will still have quite a bit of value to them after 10 years. Also the $200 can't be spread out over time like CD purchases can, unless you do stupid things like Best Buy loans.