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Recent Posts
11
CD Hardware/Software / Re: AudioCD checking station for thrift shop
Last post by gunverth -
I suppose people who sell CDs on ebay run this sort of test when they claim ”no errors”?

Why bother? …
Well…getting it sold with a proof the disc is 100% OK is better than trashing it. This is for collectibles, not €1\10SEK discs. Customers always check for scratches and some of them starts haggling at PoS. This Sweden so a verbal promise is a written contract. ;-)
15
MP3 / 32000Hz MP3 sounds worse than 44100Hz
Last post by Klymins -
Hello. I noticed that 32000Hz 96kbps stereo MP3 sounds worse than 44100Hz 96kbps stereo MP3 with this sample (Erase/Rewind by The Cardigans, I currently listened encodings of only this and Sonic Boom from Sonic CD). I'd expect the opposite to happen because 32kHz allows for longer MDCT blocks (in real-world time) and they are much shorter than ideal in 44100Hz MP3s. They both use the same cutoff point and they both should have their sfb21 empty according to this (it was 15kHz). I attached the samples and the ABX report (between two lossies to prove that they are audibly different). Why could this be happened?
16
Polls / Re: 2025 Lossy format poll
Last post by lovecraft -
I started to encode to opus for a while but then realized that most of the affordable bluetooth earbuds (if not all) only support 44.1khz SBC or AAC. Opus is natively 48. And add in the fact that most commercial music is in 44.1khz still, which means "double" resampling. Both during encoding (44.1 to 48) and then again during decoding (48 to 44.1). This can't be good. So i went back to mp3. We had a good relationship for so many years now. I also tried ogg vorbis and musepack at some point, but is the difference really worth it in around 192kbps? Or shall i say, is it worth the lack of support? Can i even abx it? Probably no. Those formats are slowly dying anyway. When i look at recent listening test results, i can see that the last version of lame in 128kbps is not really very far off from the modern codecs in similar bitrates. New codecs like opus "only shine" in lower bitrates which is why they were created, to sound better with low latency internet streaming.

So yeah, i think opus is not a good idea unless you will stream your own radio. I encode with lame using v2 which should be more than enough for my cheap audio setup. And widespread support is guaranteed so no need to worry about that either.

Well i think i should admit that i was wrong with my comments above. Opus, even though it resamples everything to 48kbit, still maintains a much better quality at "lower" bitrates compared to mp3 (or even other formats too). Resampling, as suggested and probably rightfully so, has lesser and even negligible impact on audio quality compared to the compressing alghoritm of these codecs themselves. So yeah, ignore my comment above.
20
Opus / Re: Can anyone reliably ABX OPUS at 160kbps?
Last post by Kartoffelbrei -
I can't even abx it at 60kbps :) Seriously, i had to go down to 50 to actually hear something to bother me. I know that my ears are old, but back in my heyday, when mp3 was the only show in town, i had to go up to 192kbps to make it transparent to me. Of course, compared to the wav files we have extracted from our clunky CDs, a 192kbps mp3 album meant a lot of storage space saved, it was like night and day. So yeah, the storage is cheap today but it is still fun to see "how small this thing could get without me noticing it" :)

So in my case, 96kbps is more than transparent. Absolutely. Opus is really something. Or i lost most of my hearing :)

Dont feel bad. The people here including Kamedo2 are insane at this stuff. :D