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Topic: Trying to understand why people go lossy. (Read 12642 times) previous topic - next topic
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Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #25
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... a collection of over 8000 albums.
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sounds like someone who copied every CD he/she got his/her hands on...don't tell me you have listened to them all nor that you really like all of them...even if you buy 2 Albums a week you'd still need more than 70 years to collect that many CD's...some people just collect stuff just to have it...
--alt-presets are there for a reason! These other switches DO NOT work better than it, trust me on this.
LAME + Joint Stereo doesn't destroy 'Stereo'

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #26
8K albums, at 10 u$s minimun each is a lot of money to expend on CDs!!!!

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #27
Who said all of them were ripped by 2Bdecided himself?
Infrasonic Quartet + Sennheiser HD650 + Microlab Solo 2 mk3. 

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #28
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Particularly I find the lossy encoders and the computers very useful for music. My stereo home system is only 3 components: One old Dell computer (266 Mhz) with 60 Gb of capacity; one stereo amplifier of 100 watts RMS, and; the speakers. No more tuners, cd players, turntables... The music center is only the computer  , this is very useful. I encoded all my CDs with Lame 3.96.1 -aps and Vorbis 1.1RC1 -q7 and I listen these files in my old Dell with my stereo system.

I find that Lame -aps and Vorbis -q7 are total transparent for me.

In my particular case; I don't find any necessity to use lossless, because I store the original CDs; I don't use my CDs at all, only for rip to mp3 or vorbis for my DAP and Stereo system. For my personal use outside of my house I use only the lossy files, never the original CDs.

Why people use lossy? because you can obtain total transparent sound with only aprox. (1/6) of the size of the original files.
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The operative phrase is, "total [sic] transparent for me." If you are satisfied with the sound quality you are getting, more power to you. But the el-cheapo analog circuitry on the typical $100-$200 soundcard just cannot compare with the top-notch $1000+ line-stage preamp in an audiophile-grade audio system. Before we even started considering the lossy vs. lossless argument, the soundcard alone would be "Game Over" as far as I was concerned. There are good, and correspondingly expensive (about as much as a low-end laptop), high-end computer sound cards out there for sure, but I doubt your old Dell has one of those.

I do use lossy compression for casual listening, usually through my DAP. For that, I am currently using EAC/LAME at a high variable bit-rate. And over my DAP or my computer's audio system - a typical SoundBlaster Audigy 2/Klipsch ProMedia combo - I admit that I cannot hear the difference between my EAC/LAME MP3's and FLAC. And I have tried, BELIEVE ME, I have tried - with all kinds of music, especially acoustic jazz and classical, which is what I listen to most of the time.

But when I play a CD through my good living room audio system and then play an MP3 CD of the exact same material, to my ears, there is a difference. Compared to the CD, the MP3 sounds flat - all the highs and lows are there, but the sense of impact, space, and front-to-back depth is missing - the soundstage collapses. So the answer for me is, well-encoded lossy formats can sound indistinguishable from CD originals or lossless formats over mediocre equipment. But over a system capable of true high-resolution audio reproduction, lossy doesn't cut it. As the very word "lossy" implies, something, albeit subtle, is lost, and what is lost is what makes a high-end audio system worth all that money.

Before the sysop gets on me again for violating TOS #8, I will quality further by saying that my experience would not be everyone's experience. For one thing, the necessary testing would not be repeatable except with very good to excellent audio gear. And even under those conditions, not everyone is likely to hear the alteration in soundstage that I hear unless they have trained themselves to listen for it.

I did the above testing on a single blind basis with help from my wife and with my chosen material at least (Berlioz: Les Troyens; Charles Dutoit/L'Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal on Decca), which includes extremes of dynamic range, with chorus, vocal solos and full orchestral, recorded in a spatious venue, I can reliably hear the difference significantly more than half the time, but only on my best equipment.

What that all boils down to is that if one can listen to a lossy format on the best equipment he or she uses and be happy, go for it. For my purposes, I always encode twice - FLAC for my good stereo and for archives, and MP3 for everthing else. When I run out of hard drive space, off to CompUSA I go and buy yet another drive - they really are very cheap these days.

Lossy and lossless compression are objectively different. Whether the difference is subjectively audible is a matter of good equipment and the individuals doing the listening. Is it possible for a lossy codec to be absolutely transparent to everyone on all material, all the time? Maybe, but I have yet to hear about any controlled, double-blind tests using a large enough statistical sampling of people to convince me one way or the other. If there is such a test involving a large sample of people - at least 100, but the larger the better - and someone knows about it, I would be grateful if someone steered me toward it. For what it's worth, FLAC is the only compression scheme that I've ever heard anyone from the "golden-eared" high-end audiophile community admit (albeit grudgingly) is not totally execrable.

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #29
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Who said all of them were ripped by 2Bdecided himself?
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Oh MoOzOoH - what are you suggesting!

Anyway, most of you missed the fact that I said albums, not CDs. Most of them aren't ripped at all because they're LPs or 78s (which aren't really albums, but anyway...).

You must remember - I've lived through a decade or two when people decided LPs weren't worth having, and so were available at next to nothing. I also know a good shop which sells used CDs at £1 ($2) and amongst the junk some real bargains can be had! So the collection itself didn't cost that much.

The point is, if I ever do contemplate putting everything into a PC (and I contemplate it a lot - but never actually get around to it!) the idea of doing it losslessly is painful!


When I said "5x the time to backup", I meant backing up the backups. If you can make a second or third copy 5x quicker, then you're more likely to do it, and less likely to lose all your hard work because of media failure.

I work on the principle that you should always have at least two copies, those copies will require checking regularly, and at least one of those copies will require re-copying at least every five years. Why make that job 5x more painful than it already is?

Cheers,
David.

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #30
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Lossy and lossless compression are objectively different. Whether the difference is subjectively audible is a matter of good equipment and the individuals doing the listening. Is it possible for a lossy codec to be absolutely transparent to everyone on all material, all the time? Maybe, but I have yet to hear about any controlled, double-blind tests using a large enough statistical sampling of people to convince me one way or the other. If there is such a test involving a large sample of people - at least 100, but the larger the better - and someone knows about it, I would be grateful if someone steered me toward it.


I think what you ask for has been done. C't, the most reknown German computer magazine, in cooperation with the/one of(?) Germany's most popular audiophile magazines performed a multiformat (Ogg Vorbis, MP3, MP3pro, WMA9, Real Media and AAC at 64, 128 und 160 kBit/s) vs. uncompressed blindtest, with a) professionals and audiophiles (among others, a studio engineer from a classical music label, a soprano of the Lower Saxony State Opera, a Sennheiser headphone developer, and even the MPC devel himself)  and b) 3500 readers who downloaded and rated samples. The test for the 'Pros' took place in a studio; additionally the Pros could bring their own favourite music and favourite headphones for a 2nd round without timelimits. General results were as could have been expected; compressed not being distinguishable from uncompressed - even MP3 getting better ratings than uncompressed regularly etc.

Considering this test is two years old, codecs that are under active development should have even less problems delivering transparency now.

The magazine c't has conduced such a test with solely MP3 before, in 2000, where 256-kbps-MP3 was etstablished as 'transparent'.

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #31
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But when I play a CD through my good living room audio system and then play an MP3 CD of the exact same material, to my ears, there is a difference.

From New Scientis: The Placebo Effect

DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.


Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #32
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The magazine c't has conduced such a test with solely MP3 before, in 2000, where 256-kbps-MP3 was etstablished as 'transparent'.
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And because of this test there are still people in Germany claiming that this was a proof that 256kbs MP3 is indistinguishable to CD!

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #33
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And because of this test there are still people in Germany claiming that this was a proof that 256kbs MP3 is indistinguishable to CD!

i think for most (99%?) of the people it is

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #34
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And because of this test there are still people in Germany claiming that this was a proof that 256kbs MP3 is indistinguishable to CD!
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You'd have to use a pretty bad mp3 encoder not to achieve that, though

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #35
Personally, not going lossy has nothing to do with the actual quality of lossy codecs- my ears aren't tuned anywhere near as well 99% of the people on this board.  I stay away from lossy because as soon as you do, and you want to convert to another format for whatever reason, you're forced to *transcode* with lossy codecs, and that's when you run into severe quality problems.  I'm willing to take the 5x hit in order to have the freedom of portability between formats.

I mean, my 160 gig drive cost me $130CAN.  So, I can go lossless at 40 cents per album or lossy at 9 cents per album.  Given I've already spent $20-$25 just to get the CD, I'll take go lossless for 40 cents to give me options in the future.

Mind you, that logic doesn't hold when you've got 8000 albums....

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #36
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I mean, my 160 gig drive cost me $130CAN.  So, I can go lossless at 40 cents per album or lossy at 9 cents per album.  Given I've already spent $20-$25 just to get the CD, I'll take go lossless for 40 cents to give me options in the future.

but you have the best lossless ... your original CDs

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #37
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... a collection of over 8000 albums.
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sounds like someone who copied every CD he/she got his/her hands on...don't tell me you have listened to them all nor that you really like all of them...even if you buy 2 Albums a week you'd still need more than 70 years to collect that many CD's...some people just collect stuff just to have it...
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Local pawn shops where I live sell CDs in as-new condition for less than two bucks each; all you need to spend is $30 per week to collect 7800 in ten years.  Imagine listening to a different CD every day on the drive to work, and the drive back..  my commute is an hour each way, so I need 10-15 new albums per week. 

In other words, it's damned easy to go through that much music.

For people in Canada, since we're being charged for backups anyways (CPCC levy, if u care), we like to make copies and pass the originals along.  It's legal, it's morally OK, and you never have to hear the same song twice.  Dig it.
Sorry for the OT 

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #38
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I mean, my 160 gig drive cost me $130CAN.  So, I can go lossless at 40 cents per album or lossy at 9 cents per album.  Given I've already spent $20-$25 just to get the CD, I'll take go lossless for 40 cents to give me options in the future.

but you have the best lossless ... your original CDs
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Original CDs are a pain in the ass.  The best lossless is hard drive, with flac-DVD backup.  Even my 800 CDs are a nightmare to organize and store, I pity the fool with 8000 originals kicking around the place.

 

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #39
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I mean, my 160 gig drive cost me $130CAN.  So, I can go lossless at 40 cents per album or lossy at 9 cents per album.  Given I've already spent $20-$25 just to get the CD, I'll take go lossless for 40 cents to give me options in the future.

but you have the best lossless ... your original CDs
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Original CDs are a pain in the ass.  The best lossless is hard drive, with flac-DVD backup.  Even my 800 CDs are a nightmare to organize and store, I pity the fool with 8000 originals kicking around the place.
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riggits beat me to it. 

Also, if anything happens to those CDs (fire, theft, anything), I'm out a good $4000 in the hard cash I paid and even more on a personal level.  I keep all the rips on my drive backed up to DVDs at a buddy's place, just in case of the worst.

Trying to understand why people go lossy.

Reply #40
Well, as my first time ever reading/posting in hydrogenaudio, I'll share my point on the subject; Reason why to go lossy:

Because my cd collection grows faster than my hard-drives, and i want to keep all my music in there! (so far 1000+ coded)

No to talk about the backups on lots of dvds, and the need to transcode everytime you want to have the music in mobile media (like mp3 player, palm, car...)

For my ear, which I'm quite proud of, latest lame stable at V 0 q 0 is similar enough to original. The main drawback is the coding time, and my personal solution is to rip groups of CDs into monkey (takes less than 5min per cd) and then let the computer working day-night-day-... in building the mp3.