Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Digital Out from soundcard to receiver

THe last time i used winamp was at least a year ago. I'm sure new versions have come out since but i simply have not gone back to it. Netscape installations usually come with it now as well so i do still have it around here somewhere.

I've been curious to hear more about the mp3 debate and whether they can be used on quality systems without hearing any difference between wav original versions.
I know that the standard mp3 sampling sounds 'thin' on my present system. There are no heavy bass sounds and the upper range seems lacking compared to the original songs on cd. THe mid range is not very rich. I guess this is not surprising since the mp3 encoding process is designed to shrink the file by removing or reducing the info from similar notes, ranges of sound beyond or between human hearing limits (supposedly), etc. But on a quality system, you can notice these shrunken data holes. However, if you increase the sampling rate of the mp3, how much more would you have to go to get quality sound that is indistinguishable from the original?

This is just a question from an interest point of view. All the mixed cds i make are still wav to cda format since playing them in the car requires compatibility and my car cd player is not mp3 compatible, nor will it be upgraded anytime soon.

I would agree with pretty much everything you say about MP3 quality. A lot of people will say that 192k VBR is good enough to be transparent, but in my testing it was not. That said, the Lame encoder has come a long way and at very high bitrates the quality is excellent. I decided to just go with 320k because disks are cheap now and it's still much better compression than you get with the lossless codecs, and for me 320 is totally transparent.

If your primary reason for ripping is to make compilation CD's, it's probably not worth it. But I have a large collection of MP3's on my server, and since I use an HTPC in my home theater I have access to all of my music this way without having to shuffle CD's.

BTW there's a tool that you can use to perform blind testing at pcabx.com. I think it's easy for people to come to whatever conclusion they want to when they're not doing true blind-testing, so this tool is pretty useful for separating actual differences from imagined ones.

All,

I guess I started/continued an interesting discussion topic here (do we want to move it to a separate string??) – I just don’t have the capability to directly connect my PC to my Stereo/HT system (they are in different rooms) So my experience of the quality of sound produced by the different encoders/decoders is limited to my SB card and my Yamaha PC speakers (they are pretty decent – but they are NOT anything like good stereo [Axiom] speakers).

Personally (at least on my system at the moment) I found that 160k provided a real good compromise between sound quality and disc space usage. (128k was really hit or miss) Perhaps I need to be a bit more critical and give 192k another audition…..

But to touch on an even different topic, here is a link to and article in PCWorld magazine last year that compared different encoding formats (mp3, wma, aac, real) to see how a panel compared their “accuracy” to the CD. It’s interesting – but still doesn’t take into account the different decoding engines available (Lame. Fraunhofer, etc.) So I still am at a loss to find the “best sounding” one until I can get connection of PC to Stereo. Many of you are fortunate in that you can do just that. With the huge collection of mp3 files I have, I hope to be able to do that one of these days – but since the quality of the encoding varies, they may not sound much better than listening to FM radio over the Stereo.

jkohn – thanks for all those links. I will check them out!

Randyman

I went into the mp3 listening without any preconceived notions of what i would hear, or at least i tried. I just did it on a whim the other day out of curiousity.
But the audible difference was so noticeable, i didn't need to do a true blind test. Again i used 2 cd players which i've already determined to be so close in performance that with my test cds, i could not distinguish a difference. I take the same music copied to 2 cds and start both in each cd player then swap back and forth between the inputs. This mostly eliminates the long wait for audible memory to lose any thought.
However, that being said, if we go back to the higher sampling rates, then i would agree for sure, blind testing may be the only method of discerning any difference.

Mp3's at 320, to me, are not as good as on the CD. Not with my M22's to test with

i will look up that MAD 24 bit decoder and try it.
Otherwise, i agree, SONIQUE all the way!!