THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => BAND => Topic started by: StaedlerMars on 12 Mar 2009, 01:52
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http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html
He has them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality. He described the results with some disappointment and frustration, as a music lover might, that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. In other words, students prefer the quality of that kind of sound over the sound of music of much higher quality.
The author than makes a link between this and the crackle records have.
What do you guys think? Is familiarity more important than sound quality?
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The context changes our perception, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. Listening to music on your iPod is not about the sound quality of the music, and it's more than the convenience of listening to music on the move. It's that so many people are doing it, and you are in the middle of all this, and all of that colors your perception.
This is a big factor, I think. Add to this the clipping (see the Loudness War) of music in general, so sound quality doesn't matter as much because the source material is getting worse.
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I like mp3s when I'm listening to music on the go on my iPod or at my computer (which has a pretty craptacular soundcard).
mp3s tend to sound... flat on my stereo, so I still tend to use CDs for speakery listening.
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Well, I finally got around to comparing 128 kbps mp3 to CDs again, and I'm glad to say I can actually hear a difference now. Or maybe not. Now I'll have to re-rip all the stuff I have and 128. It's not really the night and day difference people talk about, I'd say, although I'm guessing as my ears improve it'll get worse. I can't imagine anyone preferring the mp3 sound, however.
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There is zero reason to have MP3 in 128 (read: shit) kbps. 192 is the lowest I'll tolerate, but VBR or 320 is so easy to come by for most music that there's really no reason to have shit quality MP3s. Even if you get shit quality from iTunes, just download the album from a music blog somewhere, safe in the knowledge that you already paid for the album. If you have the CD, you can set up any ripping program to rip at 320 kbps, and even 192 kbps is almost inaudibly different from CD quality.
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If you like music perhaps I can recommend to you a discussion about the loudness wars
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Are the loudness wars a huge issue outside of mainstream pop/rap/etc.? I haven't really had problems with the mastering on any albums I've listened to lately.
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Man I swear half the people who hark on about mp3 quality couldn't tell the difference between 192kbps and lossless if you switched the labels round. It's an elitism thing.
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Proper double-blind trials have shown that virtually no-one can tell 160k mp3s from the original, but 128k is fairly easily distinguishable.
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I'm proud to say that outside of clipping and fuzz and all that shit, I can't tell the difference between a 128 and a CD unless I try really hard.
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Well in my case, it depends on where the sound is coming from.
For instance on the crappy speakers on my Motorola Z3 RIZR, you can definitely hear the difference between the 320kb/s and the tracks of much lower quality (things people Bluetooth to me), but you can't really tell the difference between a 256 and a 128 track.
Now, If I'm in my second home (my best friend's place) with the 7.1 stereo speaker system all around the freakin' room, you REALLY do not want to be listening to a low quality track (let's say the "Down Below It's Chaos"- Kinski album in the Mediafire thread) on that.
I'm not much of the audiophile I'd like to be, but I do wish all my music were high quality tracks. If I could:
a) Donate a whole day to converting my music to a lossless format (e.g. FLAC)
b) Spend money on a good portable music player that plays FLAC files (and various other formats) and has a large capacity.
c) Spend some money on some good headphones,
I most certainly would.
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People who play FLAC files on an mp3 player are either the victims, or the perpetrators of a really sick joke.
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Man I swear half the people who hark on about mp3 quality couldn't tell the difference between 192kbps and lossless if you switched the labels round. It's an elitism thing.
Personally everything above 160kpbs sounds the same to me.
I pretty much agree with this, I definitely prefer 192 to 128, but once you get above that I CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE.
That and I think a lot of people are going to like mp3's over over formats just for the sheer utility of the format with the current media playing platforms.
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For a lot of music it really doesn't matter to me whether something is on mp3 or what the bitrate is because for the most part I listen to music on my ipod, but when I put almost anything on my stereo I can immediately tell the difference between mp3 (even at 192 kbps, though less so for 320) and a CD or a record. I've got pretty decent speakers and to me it sounds like the music doesn't lose much range with mp3 but is completely robbed of its depth, almost like you're listening to a thin, flat cross-section of a song. For some music even that doesn't make a difference (a lot of old punk rock records were recorded on really cheap equipment anyway and the vinyl sounds pretty much like a 128 kbps mp3, even with a pristine copy) but for music with complex and precise arrangements like, say, Philip Glass, mp3 pretty much kills the sound for me.
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I also can't tell the difference with anything above 190k, but then again, I'm not a real audiophile. ;)
Still, a good portion of my music collection (mostly the stuff I got way back) is encoded with 128 and I just don't have the nerve to somehow get that stuff in better quality.
Concerning FLAC: I know disk space is cheap nowadays, but I don't want to imagine the size of 90gb mp3 in FLAC. :p This is even worse for portable players.
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Well in my case, it depends on where the sound is coming from.
For instance on the crappy speakers on my Motorola Z3 RIZR, you can definitely hear the difference between the 320kb/s and the tracks of much lower quality (things people Bluetooth to me), but you can't really tell the difference between a 256 and a 128 track.
Now, If I'm in my second home (my best friend's place) with the 7.1 stereo speaker system all around the freakin' room, you REALLY do not want to be listening to a low quality track (let's say the "Down Below It's Chaos"- Kinski album in the mediaf!re thread) on that.
I'm not much of the audiophile I'd like to be, but I do wish all my music were high quality tracks. If I could:
a) Donate a whole day to converting my music to a lossless format (e.g. FLAC)
b) Spend money on a good portable music player that plays FLAC files (and various other formats) and has a large capacity.
c) Spend some money on some good headphones,
I most certainly would.
People who play FLAC files on an mp3 player are either the victims, or the perpetrators of a really sick joke.
Guess.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855228033
I want this.
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Anything above 256kbps and I can't tell the difference between MP3, FLAC and .wav. No surprise Mp3s are popular, really; the difference in sound quality above a certain bitrate is rather small, they don't take up a lot of space, they work on basically every player.
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Personally everything above 160kpbs sounds the same to me.
Pretty much.
Hodges I am not surprised. This all reminds me of when I used to be big into online gaming, and a dude claimed superiority to me because his computer could play a certain game at 100 fps whilst mine managed a mere 40. The fact that the human eye is physically incapable of distinguishing between anything past about 25 fps did not seem to mean much to him.
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I think in higher quality videos having a higher framerate does help, especially in video games, because they don't have the motion blur films do.
But he's still wrong, 100 fps is definitely excess, you're fine with 40, and the quality of the internet connection would be the issue. I know I got a lot better at CoD4 when we swapped our shitty wireless connection for a more steady wired one.
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"The human eye cannot perceive more than 25fps" is nonsense. ;-) Read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate) up. (http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm)
There is a huge difference between 25 and 60fps in a computer game. ;)
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Shaolin: That wikipedia article is pretty much useless and has virtually no citations whatsoever in regards to the bit about gaming.
Anyway, I tend to shoot for around 50--60 frames per second, but it's not really because I can tell an appreciable difference between 30 frames vs. 60. It's because frame rates often change during gameplay, and if I must cope with some spikes of video lag, I'd rather my system be working at 30-40 frames rather than 10 to 15 frames. Above a certain minimum threshold you're just mostly working to avoid bad disruptions.
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True, that wiki article isn't that good. But the "up" is a link as well. :)
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Yeah, it's more like 50 or 60 hertz. I forgot about interlacing. That's only really for perception of brightness though. In an evenly lit scene the threshold is more like 25-30.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold)
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The difference is that while a TV will only run at 25 FPS and a PC can run up to like a zillion or whatever if you're playing DOOM, there's no blur on a PC so it looks less smooth than the TV.
It's a shame most developers can't make the motion blur setting just fix this issue and not overdo it because they're stupid or something.
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ACTUALLY ON TOPIC
So I bought the Loveless LP yesterday and was subsequently blown away by the sound quality. Granted, my roommate is somewhat of an audiophile, so that helps, but fuck me that was pretty awesome.
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Are the loudness wars a huge issue outside of mainstream pop/rap/etc.? I haven't really had problems with the mastering on any albums I've listened to lately.
Yes, yes they are. I recently got a copy of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, a work which should pay great deference to dynamic contrast. The last movement sounds sort of like they just let everything limit just because "what the hell, it's supposed to be loud, right?"
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I recently got a copy of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, a work which should pay great deference to dynamic contrast. The last movement sounds sort of like they just let everything limit just because "what the hell, it's supposed to be loud, right?"
Classical stuff is very variable - some is totally uncompressed (which can be hard to listen to in a domestic situation), most is subtly compressed (quite possibly manually), and some is clipped to hell because they couldn't be bothered to at least compress it "nicely". There shouldn't be the same pressure to stand out on the radio, so there's no excuse. And if it's not loud enough, I mean, what's the volume control for?
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ACTUALLY ON TOPIC
So I bought the Loveless LP yesterday and was subsequently blown away by the sound quality. Granted, my roommate is somewhat of an audiophile, so that helps, but fuck me that was pretty awesome.
Sigh.
The whole vinyl v cd "which one sounds better" argument is even stupider then people saying they can tell the difference from 320 kbps to a CD. Chances are it doesn't sound any different to your CD or Mp3 version, unless if you ripped it at 160 or less. Perhaps there's a bit of noise added in the signal path, at the most. Pretty sure you just want to justify buying a large, unwieldy and expensive bit of music.
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It had to be vinyl because of the aforementioned roommate's sound system, CD's don't sound nearly as good on that setup.