I no longer use FLAC or MP3. I did my own tests a few(5-6) years back, and ended up settling for Ogg/Vorbis.
1. I ripped an album - can't remember what it was. For arguments sake, we'll say "The Road To Hell - Chris Rea". It's a great album, it may be old but it's very nicely mastered, and I'm quite familiar with it after all these years. We'll say the track was "Daytona" - the start of it, there is a triangle struck after a couple of seconds. It was something as small as that which made me elect not to use MP3.
2. I take the ripped audio tracks, and encode them as MP3s with the various "preset" settings for lame. I set the filenames of the tracks to be the bitrates used.
3. I decode all the audio, back to wav. I then burn them, in a random order, onto a CD.
4. Take the CD to my fathers, where I'm able to compare on some relatively high-resolution equipment - certainly higher than my PC audio of the time. He had a Naim CD5, Linn amplification, Spendor BBC studio monitors.
5. I listen through the tracks many, many times. I write down which track numbers have audible problems, and the tracks that appear to have no artifacts or issues.
My results were that I could accurately find the CD-quality track 100% of the time, even when compared to a 320kbps MP3. There was one particular part of one song that gave it away each and every time. The other tracks, the MP3 was totally transparent to me and my ears.
Running the same test, I found that Ogg/Vorbis was totally transparent with the same music at a setting of q6, which equated to ~192kbps(variable). I could find no difference whatsoever - absolutely nothing.
From that day on, everything has been encoded as q6. Something particularly detailed - female vocals, or complex and detailed albums - I do them at q7, for no reason other than it moves the threshold further from the point I could hear, and should give me a little extra 'headroom' when it comes to avoiding distortions or unwanted artifacts.
Now, this (IMO) was a harsh test, using gear I wouldn't normally be listening to. I feel it was a great way to find a good compromise between outright performance and the performance I could perceive - even today, with a dedicated DAC and better speakers(my own studio monitors
), I can't find the difference at the bitrates I selected.
I was ~22 years old at the time, so I had good young ears. I don't abuse them. I was using top-notch gear at the time, and my results were repeatable. IMO, the "lossy" aspects of MP3 aren't a patch on "Vorbis". MP3 at ANY bitrate adds a certain colouration, or audible alters the sound, on at least one part of one track of a popular CD.
FLAC is totally inaudible. Anyone trying to argue otherwise doesn't understand that "1" is different from "0", and there is no other variable involved.
Ogg/Vorbis will give better outright sound quality than MP3, on an expensive Naim CD player, at a much lower bitrate.
It was a no-brainer for me back then, when I only had a 40gb hard drive. These days, I have 2x 160gb drives, with music and films. Have I moved up to lossless? No. What's the point? It's dead space for my ears at the age of 22, and my hearing is only going in one direction from that point. You may end up preserving as much detail as possible, but the chances are you'll never benefit from it. You'll only find it a problem when you upgrade your hard drives 4 times as often as me.
Quote:
610 directories, 8533 files
51.7GB |
I'm using ~60-100mb per album, rather than ~300-500mb for FLAC.
Cor... what a long post that ended up being!
~Phewl.
