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Digital audio
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
in General Chat
This is a rather anal thread. If you get bored by many of my other postings, I guarantee you'll find yourself bored by this one very quickly. Go elsewhere, read up about some teenager getting his end away in his parents bed 
.
Well, for a long time, I thought I'd got things sussed. I'd encode my music using the LAME MP3 encoder, with one of the highish presets - --alt-preset-extreme. At this level, everything I encoded sounded transparent to the original source on my computer.
How wrong was I...
A little before Christmas, I got myself a pair of good headphones. I find they offer more detail and tighter reproduction than a pair of speakers - even good ones. Both are best in different ways, but this isn't really why I started this thread.
I'd feel somewhat disappointed when I listened to music from my PC, after listening to my CD player. My CD player isn't anything all that fancy - it's an Aiwa XC-750, which I bought back in 1993 or 1994. Most people haven't heard of it, but at the time it was £100, sounded noticeably better all-round than the Marantz CD53(£200), and nothing like £150 worse than the CD63. £150 back then was significantly more than £150 today - especially to a 14/15 year old
.
Compared to my PC, it had a touch more sparkle, more energy, more... just more vivid. It sounded cleaner, crisper, and like it generally had more 'body' than music coming from my PC - whether it was an MP3, a CD, a film - whatever. I'd overlooked my sound card for years, assuming that 16-bit as as good as it got.
Last month, I upgraded it - not to anything vastly expensive. I bought a Creative Audigy SE for £20, and the difference is bloody startling! I know there are better cards on the market - but for the money, this is a huge improvement over the cheap stuff. Audio from my PC now matches, and exceeds, my standalone CD player. This is without any fiddling with the equalizer, plugins, anything like that. With my old card, I'd increase the bass and treble very slightly - it would still be an almost flat line of controls. This made the computer sound better, in my opinion.
Anwyay, anyway, I'm off on ANOTHER tangent.
The problem arose when ripping music - I now realised that I could hear a difference between uncompressed audio, and my MP3 collection. After a little research and testing, I settled on MPC - at high bitrates(270-290kbps), I genuinely couldn't hear a difference between compressed and uncompressed audio. Whether it was through my speakers or my headphones, even when burnt to CD and played through my CD player, I could find no audible difference between the original track, and the one that had been compressed using MPC(and, obviously, then decompressed back to CD audio).
I've just been having another fiddle around tonight, and I've found that Ogg Vorbis manages the same thing. On a wide range of different music, I am unable to tell the difference between the original CD, and the sample encoded with Ogg or MPC.
However, the real surprise is yet to come. As said before, with MPC I'd be using a bitrate up in the high 200's - 270-290, on average. With Ogg, I'm averaging 192.
The difference in filesize is huge - 100mb for an album that took 150mb using MPC. It takes less time to encode, there are no gaps during playback, I don't get any screwed up tags(my biggest annoyance with MPC) - I now have to go through and rip all my CD's again, which is somewhat annoying.
Ogg has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last few years, and I've overlooked it for far too long. My MP3's were always recorded well - but Ogg gives me much noticeably better sound quality than those same MP3's, and at a noticeably reduced filesize.
I really am shocked by this. I know nobody on here will really care about the differences, I just thought I'd post them up in case anyone else had made the same mistakes I did. I'm now in for a long night - I've got LOADS of CD's that need ripping again. Once this is done, they're going in a box, along with my CD player - neither of them get used these days.
I'm quite fussy about music - I like a good sounding system. The fact that I'm ready to box my CD player up should speak volumes about how highly I rate Ogg.
ZZzzz.... boring post over.
.Well, for a long time, I thought I'd got things sussed. I'd encode my music using the LAME MP3 encoder, with one of the highish presets - --alt-preset-extreme. At this level, everything I encoded sounded transparent to the original source on my computer.
How wrong was I...
A little before Christmas, I got myself a pair of good headphones. I find they offer more detail and tighter reproduction than a pair of speakers - even good ones. Both are best in different ways, but this isn't really why I started this thread.
I'd feel somewhat disappointed when I listened to music from my PC, after listening to my CD player. My CD player isn't anything all that fancy - it's an Aiwa XC-750, which I bought back in 1993 or 1994. Most people haven't heard of it, but at the time it was £100, sounded noticeably better all-round than the Marantz CD53(£200), and nothing like £150 worse than the CD63. £150 back then was significantly more than £150 today - especially to a 14/15 year old
.Compared to my PC, it had a touch more sparkle, more energy, more... just more vivid. It sounded cleaner, crisper, and like it generally had more 'body' than music coming from my PC - whether it was an MP3, a CD, a film - whatever. I'd overlooked my sound card for years, assuming that 16-bit as as good as it got.
Last month, I upgraded it - not to anything vastly expensive. I bought a Creative Audigy SE for £20, and the difference is bloody startling! I know there are better cards on the market - but for the money, this is a huge improvement over the cheap stuff. Audio from my PC now matches, and exceeds, my standalone CD player. This is without any fiddling with the equalizer, plugins, anything like that. With my old card, I'd increase the bass and treble very slightly - it would still be an almost flat line of controls. This made the computer sound better, in my opinion.
Anwyay, anyway, I'm off on ANOTHER tangent.
The problem arose when ripping music - I now realised that I could hear a difference between uncompressed audio, and my MP3 collection. After a little research and testing, I settled on MPC - at high bitrates(270-290kbps), I genuinely couldn't hear a difference between compressed and uncompressed audio. Whether it was through my speakers or my headphones, even when burnt to CD and played through my CD player, I could find no audible difference between the original track, and the one that had been compressed using MPC(and, obviously, then decompressed back to CD audio).
I've just been having another fiddle around tonight, and I've found that Ogg Vorbis manages the same thing. On a wide range of different music, I am unable to tell the difference between the original CD, and the sample encoded with Ogg or MPC.
However, the real surprise is yet to come. As said before, with MPC I'd be using a bitrate up in the high 200's - 270-290, on average. With Ogg, I'm averaging 192.
The difference in filesize is huge - 100mb for an album that took 150mb using MPC. It takes less time to encode, there are no gaps during playback, I don't get any screwed up tags(my biggest annoyance with MPC) - I now have to go through and rip all my CD's again, which is somewhat annoying.
Ogg has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last few years, and I've overlooked it for far too long. My MP3's were always recorded well - but Ogg gives me much noticeably better sound quality than those same MP3's, and at a noticeably reduced filesize.
I really am shocked by this. I know nobody on here will really care about the differences, I just thought I'd post them up in case anyone else had made the same mistakes I did. I'm now in for a long night - I've got LOADS of CD's that need ripping again. Once this is done, they're going in a box, along with my CD player - neither of them get used these days.
I'm quite fussy about music - I like a good sounding system. The fact that I'm ready to box my CD player up should speak volumes about how highly I rate Ogg
.ZZzzz.... boring post over.
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
I download a lot of bootleg albums, and the tapers from the shows swear by FLAC and really hate MP3 because of the loss of quality they get with it.
I like the quality of FLAC, but I don't have the disk space or the cd media to go burning all the FLAC to, so I encode it as MP3. Sad as it is, I know i'll regret it at a point when I appreciate proper quality. Ce la vie.
Best bit is that I don't have to bother transcoding to a smaller format when I move stuff to my phone for listening to on the move
FLAC is awesome - it will always be a perfect match to the original. I didn't perceive a difference between a high-bitrate MP3 and a CD, until I upgraded my soundcard and spent some money on headphones. I dare say that at some point in the future, I'll upgrade again and find differences between Ogg and the original - but I'll not be upgrading for a good while yet. I've had my speakers for 9 years now, my amp is from 1984, my tape deck doesn't count(it's a bloody good one but I never use it!), and the same can now be said for my CD player. By the time I do upgrade, hard drives will be so huge that the size of my ripped media will be meaningless
Whichever way you look at it, MP3 does a bloody fantastic job. It gives very good sound quality, it is widely supported, lets you choose whether you want more quality or a lower filesize - if you're happy with MP3, then I see little reason to move elsewhere. I'd have stuck with it if I hadn't bought these stupid headphones
Ogg is the codec best suited to me - I can play any format on my phone, it sounds as good as the original to me, and it takes less space then an MP3 offering the quality I desire.
It'll probably be a good few years before I switch to anything else.
Unless I lose my head, order a DAC and build my own headphone amp. At which point, I guess I'll start to see the shortcomings of Ogg. Damnit
Meh!
Ogg is still awesome, whatever I end up doing