[Piffles]

HFat: I absolutely agree. That's another misconception caused by the mp3 lies. As a result, people think compressed music is crap, no matter the bitrate or the codec.

In the Hifi scene, everyone treats mp3 as a plague because it lost all its credibility with those people the moment they said "as good as CD". They treat it as a "for idiots only" format whereas, when used correctly, it can be a very effective tool.

That slowed the progress of quality digital players down dramatically, because, by principle, Hifi manufacturers didn't want to go anywhere near mp3.

 

[HFat]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LFC_SL /img/forum/go_quote.gif You mean on a file size/SQ trade off, *most* people can accept 128k. I know its all subjective, but I defy anyone, no matter what LAME encoding settings they use to honestly tell me in a blind test they can't tell the difference between CD and 128k.

No, I mean most people can't tell the difference.
I'm not sure what you call "128k" but I can't tell the difference with V5 *with real music*. What's the big deal? FYI, with even more agressive settings, it's the lowpass I hear first. I guess I could train myself to hear artifacts and such but what's the point?
Oh, and it's not all subjective... passing or failing a blind test is objective (at least if the test is designed and supervised properly).

Piffles: I see what you mean. I had misinterpreted your comment.

 

[LFC_SL]

I'm not talking about artefacts. When I messed about with settings on LAME to see which I would settle on compared to several EAC wav files of the same songs, the wav versions were fuller, had more impact and I could hear small details either more clearly or were just there; cymbals etc. It wasn't until I got to 256k that personally the MP3s sounded close to the originals. I settled on 320k. Maybe I was too forceful earlier, sorry. If you can't tell the difference between V5 and "real music" then more power to you

 

[HFat]

I also hear all sorts of differences between lossy and lossless (mostly impact and sense of space) but blind tests showed me the differences aren't in the files.

Now that I think about it, I did pass a blind test *once* between -V5 --vbr-new and PCM with real music (by which I mean no problem samples and not music picked especially for the test either). The thing is, it took me so long I don't want to do it again.
I'd rather use better quality than V5 (I've been using V3 for non-portable use) because I think I do hear a real quality difference even though it's too subtle to bother with testing.

If you passed blind tests between high-bitrates and lossless based on stuff like impact, I think you should contribute your results to the community if you haven't already.
It might be interesting even for the people such as myself who aren't involved in testing encoders to see what kind of music you picked, how long it takes you to determine which is which and so on. It would be especially interesting if you attached subjective comments on what you hear.

 

[LFC_SL]

Well not just "impact" but also detail. I notice that piano keys "melt" into each other, the lower the bitrate you go. I just found a higher bitrate to have better separation of each key press and it sounded less "constrained" or held back and more 'natural'. Music sounded fuller and not as thin as it was at lower bitrates

I only did what I read on here and hydrogenaudio forum though. I mean I picked out some music; about 5 tracks and tested them on 2 sources with 3 sets of cans, with different bitrates and the original PCM. I won't go into comparing different versions of LAME. Not particularly scientific, but I wanted to do it just for the one time of 1-2 hours testing as I wasn't about to regularly re-encode 3500+ tracks

It isn't objective

My ears so surely if you did it you may have found a different bitrate acceptable?

 

[HFat]

That's right. What you find acceptable isn't objective.
But the results of a proper blind test, now that's objective.

 

[gsansite]

I think that the belief that the mass consumer won't buy lossless downloads is a fallacy, while they don't desire it as a priority, if there was an option on iTunes to get the same music at CD quality and compressed, for the same price, compressed downloads would be the minority. With the increasing ubiquity of high speed broadband, and the rapid increase in storage capacities, I firmly believe that lossless downloads (from whatever standard) will become the industry norm, just not as soon a I would like.

Number 1 advantage of lossless...... transcoding.

 

[CSMR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by seefeel /img/forum/go_quote.gif It worries me that cds and high-rez discs are endangered, while there are not a lot of options for getting good quality music files via download.

New CDs are coming out all the time, and out of print CDs can be aquired all the time. Sales may be falling, but the choices are not.
Quote:

With computer processors getting faster and faster, would it be possible to have hi-rez formats like sacd use a software decoder instead of one that is hardware based in the computer? If there were downloadable high-rez files playable in a software player that has built in copy protection wouldn’t that be a winning situation for everyone? With the new wave of music delivery being downloads, it’s a shame that the only formats mostly available are lossy. If an online download music store had an option for standard or high-rez options I bet a lot of people who don’t even know about the technical details of why it is better would click on the higher quality one just to know they got the best version available.

The average person doesn't care about sound quality. He buys expensive ipods for the style and convenience and uses stock earbuds.
Quote:

What do you all think the future of high quality audio using the computer as a source is?

Playback:
Computer-based DSP with tools to make room correction etc. simpler.
Generally easier and more powerful routing of audio signals by OS and driver improvments.

Content:
More lossless 16/44 content. Will come slowly as it isn't worth the bandwidth and space for most people now.
Eventually you will get lossless >16/44 recordings available. Probably with content restriction which won't be too inconvenient once they get it sorted out.
These things not very important...but:
Once there is a good DRM system, the economics of selling music become better for everyone. I would expect a lot of music to be made available fairly directly. You only need a recording engineer (is that the word?) and you can start selling music basically.