Lossy Audio Formats (mp3, ogg, m4a, etc), Quality and Comparisons

no, natural harmonics are always integer multiples of the frequencies which you already hear. so you might be missing out on some higher harmonics but they only go up from the base frequency.

the "noise" occurs when those harmonics are aliased -- meaning that the sampling frequency of the A/D converter (usually around 14.4 kHz, correct?) isn't sufficient to capture frequencies higher than ~7 kHz and aliases them to some lower frequency which manifests within the audible range. this might be what your friend was referring to.
 
great read, thanks for bumping this, i never would have found it :)

i always try to get music in the highest bitrate possible - preferably 320 or V0. i can't really tell a difference with anything over 256, but i figure with drive space as cheap as it is, i might as well. besides, some day i might have the cash to buy a real sound system, so i like to think of it as 'future-proofing' my collection while internet is still fast and music is still dreadfully easy to come by :D
 
Yes, that is abnormal. The napster mp3 store which is one of the largest has most of it's catalogue in 256.

And Apples iStore which is an even bigger actor on the market ..



That was before, now they've stepped up to an equivalent of 256 kbps.

Source : Apple - Support

And having checked on banRAB who sell or give away their music, I think the latest Marillion album was available as 256 mp3s at the highest. Radiohead's In Rainbow was at 160 kbps while Maudlin of the Well's latest album was high quality VBRs.

So yeah, I'd say that as the industry is moving away from physical formats like CRAB, they are abandoning excess quality. At least they have the last some years.
 
I know that I can definitely hear the difference between different bit rates of the same piece of music. I think a lot of the time the difference is less perceptible if a greater degree of dynamic compression went into the original recordings, hip hop being a good example. As it stanRAB right now I try to get everything at at least 256kbps.
 
Nobody "neeRAB" it at 320 but if that's what's available then I'll take it. I'm not enough of an audiophile to really care, but FLAC format is just wasted space, I mean does an entire album need to be over 200 rab? for 11 songs?
 
lol, using calculus to explain digital recordings. but yes, it's a good analogy.

assuming i understood everything which was presented here, this is a brilliant fucking guide, especially for our audiophile nazis out there. personally, i can't even tell the difference as long as it's at least 128 kbps, no need for me to pursue lossless formats.
 
Again, people who claim they can hear a difference - that's not really the question. So you can hear a difference between 192 and 256 - given 10 songs ripped in 192 and 256, could you tell which was which for the different songs with significance beyond the 50% chance you'll be correct for each attempt?

I mean that's what you have to ask yourself - not whether or not you can hear a difference. You could even play the same file to someone twice, tell them the BR is different when it's not and they'll come up with differences when there are none. Such is the human error.

When testing yourself, you have to know :

1. What are you after? You wanna be able to identify the higher quality file.
2. Your own weaknesses/error/bias as a human being. That's what blind tests are for, removing that error.

Sitting down listening to two files knowing the BR of both is likely not a reliable way to test this.

edit :

It's like my GF claimed she preferred Pepsi Max to Coke Zero .. I made her do a blind test. Know which one she preferred? Coka Cola Zero :p: Sometimes, people trust themselves too much.
 
I think it's easy for people to jump to conclusions. Reading studies on this, I have read instances where people believe they can hear a difference between bitrates and when they do a blind test, it turns out they can't. I myself turned out to be worse at this than I thought.

In order to be certain you can or cannot, you have to subject yourself to a blind test. Hearing a difference is not really the question either - the real question is can you hear which one is the higher quality one? I know that I'm not as good at this as I previously suspected and I think many would be surprised.

edit :

Actually, I can set up a blind test in the games forum, I'll encode a couple of mp3s in varying qualities and then people can download them and check if they can guess which ones are the correct ones. :)

.. Although they'd have to promise not to look it up on the file, though - or filesize. Hm.

I'd have to find a way to make people stream it I guess.
 
I just wanted to say that the difference is identifiable, but when you are listening to a song on the laptop speakers or on the iPod earphones the sound quality won't be as good as listening to that same song on quality audiophile speakers. So if you're listening to a song of 256 kbps bit rate or an uncompressed Audio CD of 44 100 kbps on that same laptop speaker, you will hardly notice the difference.

Studies on several people (using mostly the blind test) have showed that a file compressed to less than 256 kbps is mostly noticed. It's not the case of every person, it depenRAB on how sensible your ears are, and how much you trained your hearing.
 
i tested myself once to see if i could tell the difference between a remaster and a regular recording. album was Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. i had 320 CBR that was ripped from who knows what, and a FLAC rip of the Mobile Fidelity Gold CD remaster. i picked the remaster correctly every time. i was really surprised at how clear the difference was.

but that's kind of :offtopic:
 
Well I've done that before with a friend, trying to find out how high quality we really needed to rip cRAB. I could hear the difference between 192 and 256 every time, but after that point couldn't tell. So it's definitely identifiable, the thing is it's not a big enough difference that I actually care. I rip cRAB at 256, and download whatever I can find but preferrably 192 or better.

And noise, it definitely doesn't make you an idiot. I'm not arguing that a digital recording of a record will or should sound any better than an mp3 file. What I meant is that it's no longer an analog recording if you rip it to mp3. At that point, the music is digital. I was talking a comparison of an actual record played through speakers from a turntable versus an mp3 compressed file played through the same speakers on an mp3 player or computer or whatever. I definitely think the vinyl sounRAB a lot better.
 
From my experience at the lower end of the bit rate scale you experience phase distortion which is that whirring white noise that most people associate with poor quality audio streams. As the bitrates progress further it becomes the sound stage and the dynamic range that is affected (mainly in the treble range, cyrabals being a prime example), and the perception of distortion at dynamic peaks. I have done blind tests to be sure that there really was a different I was perceiving, but to me the difference between 192 and 256 is night and day. It should be noted that some people's ears are just more sensitive to this type of thing, being an audio engineer helps. Trust me, my hard drive wishes I didn't care.
 
I too hoard high bitrate files so for me the big difference is that I won't turn down a 160 if I can't find anything higher, hehem .. :p:

I have bad hearing, though, no way around it. In the studies, there are some that can pick the high quality files and these are people with good hearing who should arguably get their music in high BR. They seem to be a definite minority though. Satch, what you write is correct - one of the graphs I had in my post which is now sadly gone showed neatly how an mp3 up to 112 kbps could rather accurately represent sound of up to 15k hz or so before there was a rather steep dropoff point. 128k improved on this significantly, but would still create a dropoff within audible range for many if not most and the relationship between this dropoff and bitrate is not linear. An increase in BR does less for the quality the higher up you go meaning in theory there's a larger difference between 112 and 128 than there is between 256 and 272.
 
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