THE DIGITAL AUDIO THREAD: Finally, the definitive answer on lossy vs lossless music: you be the judge (resutls added)

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Goosemaster

Lifer
Apr 10, 2001
48,775
3
81
Originally posted by: RaynorWolfcastle
This has been done before (by me, on ATOT), the conclusion is that high bit-rate AAC and 320 kbps AAC is transparent to pretty much everyone
Click to expand...

which is a good thing:)
 
mobobuff

mobobuff

Lifer
Apr 5, 2004
11,099
1
81
I'm going to try this, but I'm not going to use my ear phones. Just going to use my 5.1 stereo, because that's what I almost always listen to music on.

Edit: Averaging 736KB/s. Not bad.
 
fleshconsumed

fleshconsumed

Diamond Member
Feb 21, 2002
6,486
2,363
136
You should have made three separate files for every track so that we could switch between tracks easily with foobar abx plugin.
 
R

RaynorWolfcastle

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2001
8,968
16
81
Originally posted by: Goosemaster
Originally posted by: RaynorWolfcastle
This has been done before (by me, on ATOT), the conclusion is that high bit-rate AAC and 320 kbps AAC is transparent to pretty much everyone
Click to expand...

which is a good thing:)
Click to expand...

The second thread I wanted to make, which I never did get around to, was at what bitrate is AAC transparent.

MP3s are essentially dead to me; there's really no reason to encode anything in MP3 at this point with AAC and OGG around.

The music I encode for my Ipod is all AAC encoded to ~180kbps (VBR) which is totally transparent to me
 
mobobuff

mobobuff

Lifer
Apr 5, 2004
11,099
1
81
So theoretically, which of these should sound better? Obviously WAV is the control, as it has no compression, but in theory, is the 160Kbs perceptual transparency supposed to sound better than the 320Kbps LAME encoding? I can imagine which has the smaller file footprint.
 
fleshconsumed

fleshconsumed

Diamond Member
Feb 21, 2002
6,486
2,363
136
Hey Goose, can you make 9 files, one for each track? Take 3 masters. Compress them to 160, save, convert them back to flack. Do the same with 320, compress masters to 320, convert them back to flack. Name them differently though. So that we could abx them?
 
mobobuff

mobobuff

Lifer
Apr 5, 2004
11,099
1
81
My results? I can definitely tell a difference in quality. Or maybe I can't and it's one of those seek-and-ye-shall-find things.


Edit: Removed results for now.


Seems I was close but fooled on a few. If there's one thing this has taught me, it's that I wish all of my mp3s sounded this good :(.
 
Sphexi

Sphexi

Diamond Member
Feb 22, 2005
7,280
0
0
I'm downloading now, I'll put up some mirror links once I have them, fast ones ;)
 
G

Goosemaster

Lifer
Apr 10, 2001
48,775
3
81
Originally posted by: fleshconsumed
Hey Goose, can you make 9 files, one for each track? Take 3 masters. Compress them to 160, save, convert them back to flack. Do the same with 320, compress masters to 320, convert them back to flack. Name them differently though. So that we could abx them?
Click to expand...

dude...that sounds like a LOT of work:p

and I just nuked all the source files and audacity project since they were taking up so much space:eek:


I'll try to make one later
 
E

Eos

Diamond Member
Jun 14, 2000
3,463
17
81
I failed miserably. Not even one right. But, those are the nest .mp3 files I have EVER heard.

< Not an mp3 music listener.
 
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Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
8,808
0
0
If you can't split it into files, AT LEAST put up a note in the OP saying at what time offset the clips start.

Clip 1 A/B/C start at about 4:40/8:40/12:40

Clip 2 A/B/C start at about 16:50/18:24/19:55

Clip 3 A/B/C start at about 21:40/23:10/24:45

For clips 1 and 2, I was definitely able to pick out the lowest-quality sample, but in both cases I flipped the WAV and 'insane' in my ranking. However, they were both pretty damn close in quality IMO.

Clip 3 was giving me fits. I got it totally wrong. It may be that on this particular clip the compression artifacts are just less noticeable, or maybe I was focusing on the wrong things. This clip was also much 'busier' than the first two and seemed to contain fewer points where very subtle gradations in quality could come out -- at least for me.

This was with a pair of Koss Pro 4/AA stereo headphones, coming out of a Sound Blaster Audigy 2. I'm pretty sure that with lower-quality speakers or headphones, I would be unable to tell much of a difference between any of the clips.

Originally posted by: Rubycon
How about pre masters? :p
Click to expand...

Yowza. How did you get your hands on that?
 
NaOH

NaOH

Diamond Member
Mar 2, 2006
5,015
0
0
Got the first one right so far using klipsch...They sound pretty close though, except for the transparent one.

The robotic voices make me LOL.
 
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