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I didn't think I was an audiophile, until I noticed a crispness missing from some of my jazz. I encode at 320kbps out of paranoia now, but what's an extra few megabytes per album?
FYI if anyone is using Google Music, turn on HTML5 audio (via labs). I swear there is a perceptible improvement.
192kbs VBR with a good encoder. There's been countless tests and this is indistinguishable to the vast majority of listeners (teens might have a slight edge as the ability to hear high frequencies diminishes with age). I don't have time to dig up citations but check out the Hydrogen Audio forums and other sane, non-cranky-audiophile, evidence based sources.
As for me, with my current medium-quality headphones, I can't distinguish between the original and an 128kbps mp3.
Asking which file sounds "better" is meaningless; some distortions sound good. The proper way to do this is an ABX test, where you compare both to a known original, and ask which sounds more like the original .
Yes, there are crazy audiophiles who will tell you that special crystal bullshit gives them a better sound, nevertheless there is an element of truth in a degree of audio fidelity than is immediately and consciously apparent upon a single casual listen. Sometimes it can take listening to a given recording a few times before you start to appreciate all of the nuances. Maybe you don't notice the little things like the squeak of the bass drum pedal the first few times you hear it, or the richness of the intonation of the clarinet. Or maybe you don't immediately notice that the cymbal crashes are all fuzzed out to hell and back by compression artifacts because you weren't paying close enough attention the first time you listened, but on the 10th listen it starts to become a real annoyance and you start to think seriously about acquire a better recording or encoding.
Here's a perfect example. Pink has a very popular song called Raise Your Glass, you can listen to it on youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjVNlG5cZyQ. In that song there are many prominent and annoying high-pitched beeps (right in the middle of the chorus even), but I find that most people do not even know they are there, they do not consciously hear them, their brain just filters it out. But once you pick up on it, they become obvious, you can't help but hear them. And the same is true of things like encoding distortion. If you draw the bar at exactly the boundary where people will be able to consciously perceive a difference in quality based on a single listen then you will have placed the bar too low. People will have a slightly lower appreciation for the recordings due to factors they may not even consciously be aware of.
Yup, tested this before. Also with quite good hardware (sound card, circumaural quality headphones), between 128kbps and 192 you're already not sure whether there a difference or not, but anything above 192 is really wasted effort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is wrong. CDs are sampled at 44.1khz with 16-bit samples, making for (calculates) 706kbps. And that's ignoring stereo.
The depth of the sample doesn't get around the Nyquist-Shannon sampling limitation. This means resampling a 44.1 KHz * recording at a higher bit rate is pointless. To be specific, a 44.1 KHz sampling rate provides a bandwidth of 22.05 KHz, period, full stop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samplin... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_rate A quote: "The full range of human hearing is between 2…
- The sampling rate, measured in kHz, for CD tracks is 44.1 kHz (not kbps), which determines the frequency range. Nyquist-Shannon applies to this.
- The bit-depth, number of bits/sample, determines the SNR of the signal, but has no effect on the frequency range. A typical audio CD has a bit depth of 16.
- The bit-rate, measured in kbps, is (sampling_rate * bit_depth * channel_count). So for an audio CD, this would be 441000 * 16 * 2 = 1411200 bps = 1411.2 kbps.
This is meaningless. Statistically meaningful tests are performed using ABX testing methods ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test ) with high-quality equipment. And, yes, many people have trained ears (and brains?) that can easily distinguish the artifacts made by the MP3 compression even in 320kbps. See this ( http://listening-tests.hydrogenaudio.org/sebastian/mp3-128-1... ) as an example of an ABX test. As for me…
And the audiophile loons start appearing in the comments: "on high end gear you can hear the difference between a factory and a copied CD.". No. You can't, sir.
But it's really a stretch