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Topic: Explaining Lame Presets (Read 30356 times) previous topic - next topic
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Explaining Lame Presets

Being new moderator in CD Freaks, I'm facing the usual trolling "FhG 192 CBR is better than Lame, I can hear it".
I always acknowledged that those people had a valid argument :

http://forum.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?s...=&postid=340907

Quote
instead of just blindly going off someone elses' opions they read from somewhere else, put those 2 encoders head to head and i bet sound forge is as good if not better. and thats from actual testing on my behalf not just passing some review along

(emphasis is mine)

All we currently do is
-linking to the recommended Lame settings
-tell to RTFF, in other words, search the forums...

...but searching for what ?
The only public blind test between 192 CBR, and Lame settings I can remember of was in r3mix.net, before the --alt-presets were made.
After that, the development was slowly commented on the forums, in threads difficult to find for the newbie, and with very specific infos in each one. I once spent hours making a list of all those threads, but the list is now completely unuseable, since both r3mix.net and HydrogenAudio.org have changed all their URLs in the meantime.

So I asked a sample. But, naturally, asking a sample, I must provide one too, so I linked http://static.hydrogenaudio.org/extra/samp...3-Test_Samples/ and http://www.ff123.net/samples.html

Dibrom, is it OK to link the first directory ? It was originally made for development purposes, and I'm not sure if I can redirect many people there. Also, will it remain online in the future ?

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #1
probably best to ask if they've actually done any ABX testing, or if they're just firing up one mp3 and then the other and just convincing themselves that one sounds better without actually comparing either to the original or each other.  There is quite a bit of talk here about how FhG actually does sound better than LAME if for some reason you're using 128Kbps, but at anything much higher than that LAME easily takes the cake, especially when talking about --alt-preset standard, etc.

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #2
i would try to explain the vbr vs cbr thingy 1st to that person, that is the basic concept that goes in favour of vbr, the constant quality vs constant bitrate that is (at least in theory), next i would request the abx test in way that the person would compare '192cbr' vs '--alt-preset standard', if he/she can hear a difference there is something to talk about further on, otherwise the debate can end there imho.
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #3
Pio2001:

Yes, you can link to that directory.  It will be online indefinitely or at least until it starts taking too much bandwidth for me to host, which will be unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.

As to what I would do to convince people of the merits of actual blind testing and listening tests to determine quality:

1.  I'd do as smok3 said first.  Explain some of the basic concepts and talk about some of the widely held misconceptions (ie. vbr == bad,  joint stereo == bad, lowpass == bad, etc).
2.  Point them to some general resource of information.  The forums here, specific threads, etc... all are good examples.
3.  Point them to ff123's page or Arny's page and tell them to download an abx utility and try for themselves.
4.  Point them to some test samples.
5.  And finally, and perhaps most importantly, point them to a sample where you know that their setting will fail compared to the others.  The idea isn't to setup the test to where you know that you're side of the debate will win, it's to instead show them that their assumption did not hold true in all cases and to hopefully get them to start thinking about where it might fail elsewhere and that in order to be sure, they need to do more testing.

After this, you really don't need to say anything else until they come up with a useful and relevant response (ie. not just something like "that's dumb, I won't do it").

 

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #4
Thank you for the answers, I do not deal with Mp3 often, but they will be surely useful 

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #5
could you please point to some samples that are bad for specific encoders/settings? as mentioned above.

thanks for your time
juglesh        B>{)}

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #6
I think it would be a good idea to add to the recommended settings/compile problem samples, “these are samples which show these are the highest quality settings/compile for mp3 encoding, to test d/l  http://ff123.net/abchr/abchr.html.”.



Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #9
Quote
Is the problem in "badvilbel" (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=16&t=1059) taken into account in those samples ? It was said to be the same problem as dogwhistle. It is ABXable in alt preset insane.

Well.. I assume at least that it's the same problem as the dogwhistle clip, but it might not be.  I don't have badvilbel there though, but I suppose I could add it.

Explaining Lame Presets

Reply #10
If you need it, you've got the CD : Autechre - Tri Repetae, bonus track Second Bad Vilbel  .
The sample is available at http://www.ff123.net/samples.html. The problems run longer on the CD. The sample is a short example.