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7
General Audio / Re: Another audiophile "expert"
Last post by mycroft -
Quote from: fooball on
Perhaps you can suggest a situation where the sort of thing people are likely to do in SoX (or whatever) will exceed 32-bit processing.  I can understand needing some headroom in the processing chain over the 16 bits of CD-quality, and I can understand that 64 bits provides a much greater dynamic range, but is that amount of dynamic range ever actually necessary?  You can simultaneously mix 65,536 individual 16-bit sources in 32 bits, and that would be one heck of a sound stage.  Can you tell the difference in a blind listening test between 32-bit processing and 24-bit processing, let alone 64-bits vs 32-bits?

It's a more intelligent approach to understand how much resource is required and only throw that much at it.  Just because you "can" doesn't mean you "have to", and being disparaging about other users' choices is narrow-minded and insulting.

Pointless word salad above, do you know that once clipping happens in fixed integer domain you get distortions?
8
FLAC / Re: FLAC v1.4.x Performance Tests
Last post by Replica9000 -
Same setup as my previous post.

flac git-cfe3afca (2024-05-16)
"Further improve calculation of when to use wide residual computation"
Code: [Select]
     1 thread    4 threads   8 threads
-5   0m13.561s   0m4.579s    0m4.598s
-5p  0m23.162s   0m7.237s    0m5.396s
-8   0m37.276s   0m11.841s   0m7.287s
-8p  2m52.772s   0m57.365s   0m36.769s
9
Other Lossy Codecs / LossyFlac vs Opus 256
Last post by 2FlacShakur -
Hi all,

Long time lurker first time poster.

I have 2 hard drives full with flac files from my CD collection, i would like to listen to some of these on the go on my ipod (rockbox) but i'm a little conflicted regarding which format to use.

On some samples with my PHILIPS Fidelio X2HR headphones, although entry level headphones, i feel like i'm able to hear small differences in background drums / cymbals on some tracks all the way up to Opus 256kbps. I know that even Xiph state that 128kbps should be transparent but it doesn't feel that way to me (is it psychological?).

I would like to have the best quality with all the background parts of the song easy to hear as per the flacs but i would also like a compromise in size vs quality.

This has lead me to consider LossyFlac (extraportable) which i won't claim to fully understand how the loss in quality for the bitrate happens as the Spek shows it to look identical to the untouched flac, or Opus at 256kbps.

My question is as both these options render a similar file size which would give the best transparent sounding files?

I know that Opus uses high pass filtering where as the flacs bit depth is altered with LossyWAV>Flac .

So far with ABX tests it seems both are identical to my ears so which one would be closer to the original flac?.
 
 Any other suggestion welcomed also, I've heard but never used xHE-AAC or WavPack are these good alternatives?

also is there a nice quick way to convert LossyWav to ALAC instead of flac?