From: Dylan Stewart (rxs015500_at_utdallas.edu)
Date: Sun May 04 2003 - 21:21:01 PDT
On 05.5.2003 at 2:30:37, Rick Ludwig said:
> Wow. The longest I have is an 8 hour lecture on Science Fiction which
> comes to a walloping 126 MB (and my 10 gig plays it fine).
My largest is probably one of the various renditions of Adagio For Strings,
weighing in at 11:51 and 8 MB. It is safe to say that everyone here has me
beat.
> I have a question though. I've hear a lot of people talk about how
> listening to a 128k mp3 ripped off a cd is so horrible sound quality
> and on and on. How can you hear that?? I rip my CDs at 64k mp3 and it
> doesn't sound bad at all to me! I know I'm not an audiophille, and I'm
> not trying to rip on people who can hear that (mostly because I get
> made fun of for prefurring McDonalds soda over other fast food
> joints... oh there IS a difference in taste..). I bought a $150 pair of
> nice studio headphones and listened to the same song on a vinal record
> off of a $6000 1 year old stereo system, and a 64k mp3 recorded from a
> CD and I couldn't tell the difference (the piece was Beetoveen's 5th
> symphony BTW).
> Okay, the question is (because I am def to this): What is the
> difference? Is the music dulled (i.e. you can't hear all the sections
> of the orcestra)? I'm just curious.
Not many people can tell the difference between CDs and 128k MP3s. Everyone
that I've talked to can tell a 64k MP3 from a CD, though. Perhaps that song
simply encodes well at low bitrates.
The difference that I hear mostly involves either very low or very high
frequency tones. Enya is simply intolerable to me at anything less than
192k because her voice gets scratchy during the high notes. It's almost
painful to listen to it being mangled like that by bad encoding. I also
noticed that MP3s eliminate some low frequency hums, so some music is
changed quite dramaticly. Oddly enough Enya's music suffers from that
compression problem, too. It just strips them in my experience.
Since I got an iPod, I always encode VBR MP3s using LAME's r3mix settings.
These set LAME to make an MP3 that has the highest possible quality, but
very little wasted space. For instance, silences are encoded at 32k (or
even lower), but most of the music is at 192 or so and it goes higher if it
needs the space to sound good.
Going through my collection,
A Beautiful Mind's music 192 classical, almost
Mannheim Steamroller 200 electronic classical
Tom Lehrer's An Evening Wasted 128 spoken word and piano
Dave Matthews Band's Busted Stuff 224 alternative rock
Depeche Mode's Exciter 192 electronic rock
Yes' Magnification 200 rock
Chip Davis' Renaissance Holiday 160 classical (the way it's meant to be
played!)
Voice Male's Six 170 a capella
U2's Best Of 90-00 and The B-Sides 192 rock
LotR: Fellowship of the Ring 185 classical
Nick Drake's Way To Blue 180 spoken word and acoustic guitar
Keep in mind, all of these bitrates are approximate. I just looked at my
icons and decided what the average bitrate looked like from them. The
numbers are just meant to give you an idea of how well various types of
music compress to MP3 relative to each other. These are all set to give me
uber-quality with a fairly small file. If you scale the quality down, the
bitrate shrinks accordingly. However, some bitrates introduce strange
artifacts, so under some weird circumstances, you might find that 128s
sounds worse than 112s of the same song.
The genres may also be wrong. I just put what I think they are, not
necesarily what others would classify them as.
I have no idea why Tom Lehrer encoded so well at such a low bitrate. It
could just be that the CD isn't exactly prisine quality. It sounds like it
was transfered directly from a tape. Meanwhile, the Nick Drake is just
crystal clear.
I also prefer McDonnald's soda. :-)
> -Rick
Dylan Stewart AC5ZH
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