MP3 vs. CD

[Zealot125]

Well, I took it upon myself to do some blind comparisons using a

friends music room. For the sake of purity, we kept all testing

conditions constant, including household noise. We listened on a

2.1 setup 2 RF-7's and a RSW-15 run of of a Denon (3801 or 4801,

something like that, not exactly sure right now) at identical volumes

and listening distances one person at a time. MP3's were ripped

with Exact Audio Copy utilizing LAME encoding at 320 kb/sec CBR sample

rate and VBR sample rate varying between 128 and 320 kb/sec.

Audition music was various tracks from Dream Theater's Six Degrees of

Inner Turbulence, Steely Dan Aja, The Very Best of Chicago, Alice in

Chains Greatest Hits, The Best of Blood Sweat and Tears. After

blind testing, it is now apparent to me without any analyses whatsoever

that the results are completely random. I can see no trends

whatsoever. This either means that we are inexperienced

listeners, or that there is little or no audible difference unless you

were a music connoisseur with an anechoic chamber with Khorns on an

amazing amp. I would be happy to perform a T-test to rule out any

significance in the data. May not be an extremely scientific

experiment, but it proved a point to me.

[Marvel]

I love it! Different music will compress differently than others. Some

will sound great when ripped to MP3 format, and 320kbits almost always

gives me good results. But in many respects, I'm not that picky about

it.

Some might say that you should have used real music to test this with.

[] Good orchestral music might be a challenge, as acoustic

instruments can be hard to record to begin with, so compressing the

audio can be difficult to do well.

My thought is if it works for you, enjoy it. It works for me on a lot of material, and depends on where I am listening.

Bruce

[Zealot125]

Thats a great idea! Tomorrow the testing continues with Mozart, Wagner, Dvorak and Greig.

[Duke Spinner]

FLAC ...'n VBR mp3 .....

both sound pretty good to me ....

hey, ....I'm after the Music, anyways

64 bit mp3 ....well, now we got a problem....[]

[nuclearay]

Yeah, when it starts to sound like a caller phoning in to an AM radio talk show... yikes.

The only problems I've had with music at 128kb/s (or higher) were actual source/recording issues.

[jacksonbart]

In my car when I take a 320 kbps MP3 and burn it to a CD format its difficult to tell in tha car (maxima/bose), but if I put the same burned CD and put it in the Denon 3900/5803 (in the basement room w/ RF7s), well it sounds better, but nothing like the CD, specially if we are talking about dual/SACDs. That said I just had a winter party and in my HT (per my wife) I set it up as a Dance room with MP3/160to320kbps dance music played loud and it worked. Depends on what you expect.

[jacksonbart]

Here was a warm up, it worked well w/ 160 to 320kbps MP3 for dance, but again the crowd was not critically listening.

[rplace]

I have always liked the look of your room JB. Nice Job.

BTW, what was the dance? Macharaina, hookey pookey, chicken dance, other? And which one is Mrs. Jackonbart?

EDIT: I see drinks on the speaker...hmmm, I have that problem at my house too. B-52s "Party out of Bounts" must have been playing:
Who's to blame when parties really get out of hand?

Crashers get bombed, slobs make a mess
Ya know sometimes they'll even ruin your wife's dress
Crashers gettin' bombed. (Who's to blame?)

[Petrol]

I ditched the 6 cd changer I had in my Epedition and installed a Alpine HU that plays mp3...

I ditched the 6 cd changer I had in my work truck and installed a Kenwood HU that plays mp3...

I found that while driving around at well above the posted speed limits, not only can I not hear an audioable differance between a store bought cd and a cd-r full of mp3 files, I also don't have to swap cds nearly as often either.

when at home, I rarely get to do any truely "critical" listening (maybe 1-2 hrs. per week if I'm lucky) because wife and daughter seem to always have other priorities so for most occassions, a decent mp3 would probably work fine at home as well.

[Zealot125]

Well, Im going to have to take a rian check on the orchestral

comparison, as his HT is unavailible at the moment. However, on a

side note, I compared MP3s encoded at 320 kbps CBR by the windows MP3

encoder with LAME encoded VBR MP3's ripped with the "preset --extreme"

setting (VBR b/t 192 and 320kbps). Frankly, I was stunned by the

quality transition my the LAME encoder. I was able to pick out

the LAME MP3 every time in a self-blind test. Well, its time to

re-rip all of my MP3s. The VBRs even save space!!!

[Duke Spinner]

i pretty much only save VBR stuff on my HD ....

sounds damn near FLAC, and takes up only 1/2 the byte's

[Marvel]

Well, Im going to have to take a rian check on the orchestral

comparison, as his HT is unavailible at the moment. However, on a

side note, I compared MP3s encoded at 320 kbps CBR by the windows MP3

encoder with LAME encoded VBR MP3's ripped with the "preset --extreme"

setting (VBR b/t 192 and 320kbps). Frankly, I was stunned by the

quality transition my the LAME encoder. I was able to pick out

the LAME MP3 every time in a self-blind test. Well, its time to

re-rip all of my MP3s. The VBRs even save space!!!

Are you saying the LAME encoder is better? That's what I would be

thinking anyway. I have used the LAME encoder for all my stuff for a

long time.

Bruce

[Zealot125]

The LAME encoder is significantly, audibly better. The best, some would say.

[hooting_monkey]

I've found myself liking Ogg better than mp3s lately, especially now

that I have an mp3 player capible of playback. I rip only Ogg Vorbis @

256 VBR on my Xbox and PC now. Usually use my Xbox to do ripping since

its usually just sitting there, and then I ftp it to my PC.

I'm thinking that while you have the means you should try all the

popular audio formats... (WAV, WM Lossless, Apple Lossless, AAC, MP3,

OGG, WMA, and FLAC. Obviously you can't really compare them when they

are all at 320, so maybe compare them at bitrates you can easily find

anomolies at, like 96, 128, and 160. Them compare them at their higher

bitrates like 192, 256, and 320 against the lossless formats. Might be

hard to get AAC and Apple Lossless. Not sure if you actually need an

Apple or just iTunes to do Apple Lossless, and only premium audio

programs rip AAC. If you have any issues needing a program to rip,

gimme a PM, I will 'aquire' a program for you. That is only if you

would like to do this though.

[DrWho]

Maybe I've just trained my ears for it, but I can tell you upon entering a room if something was in the mp3 format...on so many occasions I'll walk into a training session (either in the studio or the booth) and the trainees will be listening to mp3's while waiting for me to show up! It is a most discouraging thing really because I spend hours trying to train their ears and then they go listen to crappy quality music....*sigh*

Though I must confess that I do listen to mp3's since after a few minutes you can usually tune out the crap and enjoy the music (except for dedicated listening of course). I also check all my recordings in the mp3 format as just one of the many "translation tricks" used in the studio. On a few occasions, I have come across recordings that actually sounded better as an mp3! In fact, one of the albums that made it onto the radio was one of them, which still to this day drives me nuts.

But with the constantly cheaper disc storage prices, I'm surprised more people aren't getting more into the lossless compression formats. It costs about $1 per GB of memory now, so storing an entire CD losslessly compressed to 250mb comes to about 25 cents per CD. So averaging $12 per CD we're talking an extra 2%...so for every $100 in music it costs $2 to store it on the computer.

[Marvel]

Dr. Who,

It still costs money to buy that storage space, and you are still a

student. I can tell the difference too, on a lot of songs, but I have

'trained' myself to just enjoy the music. Like those who don't have

perfect pitch, I am not so annoyed as those who do, when confronted

with slightly out of tune instruments, or a piano that is tuned a fifth

of a step off.

I wondered when someone would come in and tell us it sounds bad. [] Do you dislike b/w movies as well?

Bruce

[Duke Spinner]

I can tell you upon entering a room if something was in the mp3 format...

You can discern a 320 bit VBR MP3, Who .......????

are You sure .......[:|]

so storing an entire CD losslessly compressed to 250mb comes to about 25 cents per CD. r.

I dunno, Who .....

80 min compressed w/ FLAC comes out to a Gig......

what "lossless" format are ya talkin' here ...??

[Zealot125]

The thing is, I have a fileserver "in the sky" consisting of around 750

GB storing music, movies, tv shows, data, and everything in

between. I have plenty of space. I wholeheatredly agree

that OGG is better compression with better quality, but with my

investement in an Ipod, I must make due with MP3s. In the future,

I will end up ripping all of them with FLAC as well, just for archival

purposes, but for the sake of having high quality music wherever I go,

MP3 VBR with LAME is the best one can do with an Ipod.

[DrWho]

I can tell you upon entering a room if something was in the mp3 format...

You can discern a 320 bit VBR MP3, Who .......????

are You sure .......[:|]

so storing an entire CD losslessly compressed to 250mb comes to about 25 cents per CD. r.

I dunno, Who .....

80 min compressed w/ FLAC comes out to a Gig......

what "lossless" format are ya talkin' here ...??

Well for starters, the maximum storage on a CD is 700MB (which is a max of 80 minutes). And most CD's are only using 350MB (about 40 minutes of music). So 250mb is a bit more than half the storage space....I've not actually gotten hardcore into lossless compression because this poor college kid don't have the HD space so these numbers might be a bit off []

Btw, I find VBR to sound much much worse than a flat bitrate so I bet I can hear your 320 VBR mp3 [] But I don't actually know the bitrates these "students" (If I can call them that) are using...I would guess closer to 128 or 192.

And like all things audio, if you're actually enjoying the music it's funny how all the other flaws drift away after awhile. But I can't get there with VBR because the "quality" is constantly changing and it drives me nuts - perhaps I've just not heard it done correctly. The only time I find mp3 unacceptable is during a dedicated listening session where I'm doing nothing but listening to music (you know...motionless with the eyes closed and all that).

Btw, what is the native compression format that macs use? I dunno why I can't remember the name right now (it's not .aiff because that's the equivalent for a .wav file), but all I know is that it sounds infinetly better than mp3. Well at least on the few songs me and a friend compared in the studio. Is it AAC? (but that can't be right cuz isn't it limited to 128kbps?)

[Zealot125]

Apple has a compression called "apple lossless" which is another of the

good compressors out there. Whether it is native or not, I dont know; I

dont have a mac. Anyways like FLAC it is lossless.

Also, ont he topic of VBRs I really dont follow your logic. The

way the algorithm was explained to me, it only uses a lower bitrate

when it would be impossible for the listener to discern the degradation

in quality. In extemely simplified terms, it could be loosely

compared to instead of recording silence in the music, telling how long

that there should be silence. Not sure if that is accurate or

understandable, but this chart on hydrogenaudio claims that V0 (preset

--extreme) encoded with LAME are pretty much exactly the same quality

as 320 kbps CBR, but takes up less space.

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME