MP3 The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment/Debate

Did you listen to the mp3 and the cd on the same sound system? One reason to buy cd's for me would be because my cd player sounds better than my laptop.

at home no to be fair, but listened to the mp3's ripped to CD in the car and the proper CD in the car and still think the proper CD sounded better could all be in my head though, I sure as shit aint no hardcore audiophile and happily buy mp3's over flacs though I do like my mp3's to be 320.

  On 6/29/2012 at 3:32 AM, modey said:

  On 6/28/2012 at 7:08 PM, mcbpete said:

Ah man, this really aint gonna end well if the last can-of-worms topic is anything to go by - http://forum.watmm.c...enough-tickets/

oh wow I forgot about that thread. Still never got a straight answer on whether there is actually a measurable difference (audible or not) between 16 and 24 bit Oversteps.

Mathematically is a difference, but perceptually there probably isn't. 16 bits it more than enough for the human ear (hence it's adoption as Redbook standard), and to my knowledge no one has successfully ABX'd 16-bit vs. 24-bit audio. The burden of proof lies with anyone claiming they can. That said, Oversteps would be a great album to try a blind test with, particularly the opening crescendo (I would except I have shitty ears and only the 16-bit version).

  On 6/29/2012 at 9:39 AM, Blanket Fort Collapse said:

You give me a modern well produced album with really pristine crisp natural cymbals heavily in the mix and I can tell you the difference between 192k and 320k

You probably have good sensitivity to high frequencies. At 320 lame sets it's lowpass filter reasonably high (around 20 khz). The encoder then applies progressively lower lowpass filters at lower bitrates, e.g., around 16-17 khz at 192k. This is to more efficiently use the bits it's allocated (X kilobits/second) to render the content that's within more conservative hearing ranges. VBR is even better in that the bitrate can fluctuate according to the complexity of the content (up to 320k for noisy/complex stuff and down to 32k for digital silence).

Flac and other lossless formats are inherently VBR and can go as low as 1 kbps for digital silence.

Most guys make their tracks with 32bit float wavs (so they don't clip). The mixes are much more deep, clear & the stereo field is very wide.

Mixes dithered to 16bit 44.1khz for cd are a bit of a disappointment when one has been working with 32bit. But I'm talking serious stereophonic headphone music. If you've been working on a tune in 32 or 24 bit, over & over & over... then hear the mix at 16 bit you'll surely hear the difference. The difference between a 16bit audio file & 320kb mp3 are less noticeable to my ears.

always enjoyed the Harmonic 313 mp3 test, its fun trying to hear the differences in the loop :

http://warp.net/scr/download.php?id=866

In my experience 256 seems fine. I can't tell the difference any higher than that, unless maybe there's an issue with the encoder, but then that's not a bit rate issue.

For sampling I definitely want the highest possible quality, though.