[Gurra1980]

Quote:

Originally Posted by trose49 /img/forum/go_quote.gif OH NO not again!!!! LOL!

He hasn't changed his signature yet, after you won the battle

 

[trose49]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gurra1980 /img/forum/go_quote.gif He hasn't changed his signature yet, after you won the battle

I believe Febs and I are on a truce. I didnt review all 3 files but did post results of the one test I did! (14/16)

So I didnt eat my ue-10's and he didnt change his sig!

All is right with the world!

 

[zekexz]

where can i get the plugin to encode with blade? or can i just download it somewhere? pm me plz

 

[Febs]

Here you go:

http://www.rjamorim.com/rrw/blade.html

Enjoy!

 

[Sir Nobax]

Damn, thats one hell of a sarcastic link you posted there Mr. Febs.

 

[zekexz]

what program does everyone use to encode?
ive been using nero's encoding program with mp3pro plugin but im sure theres better means of encoding out there that i dont know about

 

[krmathis]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zekexz /img/forum/go_quote.gif what program does everyone use to encode?

I am a very pleased Max user.

 

[verticalforce]

Quote:

Originally Posted by zekexz /img/forum/go_quote.gif what program does everyone use to encode? ive been using nero's encoding program with mp3pro plugin but im sure theres better means of encoding out there that i dont know about

dbPoweramp..best ever converter...can even convert FLAC --> ALAC or ALAC -->FLAC

 

[michael.conner]

If I'm ripping a CD, then EAC with lame.exe or neroAacEnc_SSE2.exe.

If I'm just encoding from .WAV or .FLAC, then foobar2000.

 

[Skylab]

Quote:

Originally Posted by verticalforce /img/forum/go_quote.gif dbPoweramp..best ever converter...can even convert FLAC --> ALAC or ALAC -->FLAC

Agreed. dbPoweramp rocks.

 

[wanderman]

foobar2000 www.foobar2000.org

 

[Aerosushi]

I'm fairly new to Head-Fi, having joined recently do add a bit of insight and technical info to a thread on oversampling. My home stomping ground is HydrogenAudio.org - a site devoted to the advancement and understanding of lossy codec performance (among other things) through objective, scientific analysis - with a strong emphasis on burden of proof. I'd like to chime in with a few thoughts, hopefuly without rustling any feathers. At least, that's my intent. Moving forward...

After having read the first few pages on this topic, I've come to the conclusion that folks in this thread, and probably Head-Fi at large, can be loosely divided into 2 camps. The first camp more or less reflects the same objective attitudes and knowledge base as the participants at HydrogenAudio. The second camp seems genuinely passionate about audio and sound quality, but falls short of fully understanding the science behind how to characterize and identify same.

What I'm getting at is that while the spirit of this test approach may have been completely sincere and well-meaning, it fails to appreciate a simple truism in codec testing: a frequency domain graphic of a test sample will never convey the quality of a lossy codec.

The simple and undeniable reason for this is that the human ear to brain connection is not a visual discrimination device, but rather a psychoacoustic transform with its inherent flaws (ie. frequency, temporal and loudness masking) that are fully exploited by lossy codec algorithms. Furthermore, a visual representation of an audio test sample in the frequency domain may completely mask sound quality cues that are easily perceived by the human ear.

The purpose of an audio codec is not to visually match an arbitrary frequency domain representation of the original audio sample. Rather, it is to fool the listener into believing that it sounds the same as the original. Enter the ABX testing methodology.

I won't, nor do I want to attempt to settle what appears to be a heated discussion between two opposing points of view. What I will suggest, though, is that those who believe this to be a fair and objective codec test take their case to HydrogenAudio with a view to gaining additional insight into why this test is truly and completely flawed.

 

[smsmasters]

Interesting topic. Thanks for the spectrum graphs.

 

[ObiHuang]

I don't know why everybody says that these graphs don't show you how an encoder sounds....

If there's no waveforms high up vertically in the graph, it means that the encoder is cutting off the highest frequencies (some cutoff soft and some hard). If you can't hear past 16kHz or your headphones don't even go up that high, it doesn't matter for you.

If there's missing data, that means there isn't a sound playing at that particular frequency at that particular time, which is analogous to cutting off a harmonic.

If the lines are fuzzy/broad where they were originally straight, distortion is introduced, kinda like a tube amp.

I figure if an encoder can't encode a simple waveform, then it can't encode complex music. I'm sure ABX tests will back up what these graphs show. I'm sure it'll be easy to tell 128kb/sec iTunes MP3 apart from Lossless. I'm also sure it'll be harder to tell 128kb/sec WMA 10 Pro from Lossless.



On a sidenote, the people who say that audio and visual are completely unrelated could stand to take maybe a physics course. I feel many don't realize what sampling rate and bit depth mean. Each sample (1/44100 of a second) has to be represented in 16 bits. It's not some complicated artistry. These 16 bits are a bunch of numbers. Music is a just a lot of discreet numbers that express the amplitude and frequency of a tone. How do you anti-picture people react to that? Music and MATH related!? Blasphemy! Compression is just even more math. Look up "Modified discrete cosine transformation."

 

[aLii]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ObiHuang /img/forum/go_quote.gif I don't know why everybody says that these graphs don't show you how an encoder sounds....

Because they don't. The graphs show how an encoder looks.

Things like the iTunes AAC hard cut-off at 20kHz are incredibly easy to see, but much much harder, if not impossible, to hear. Of course some will tell you that they can "feel" the difference somehow, which is all well and good, but answer me this:

Would you rather have something sound good, but "feel" different, or just plain sound bad?

If you generally listen to very complex music, on a high-end audio system, then you really ought not to be using any lossy codec. If however you are listening to the latest singer-songwriter album, then you're simply wasting huge amounts of space with lossless.