HydrogenAudio

Lossy Audio Compression => Ogg Vorbis => Ogg Vorbis - General => Topic started by: navarre on 2009-03-14 16:28:36

Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: navarre on 2009-03-14 16:28:36
hi there, can someone tell me what is generally considered the minimum ogg bitrate for a file to be considered "transparent listening"? i know in mp3 is generally regarded 192k.
Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: Teqnilogik on 2009-03-14 17:32:11
hi there, can someone tell me what is generally considered the minimum ogg bitrate for a file to be considered "transparent listening"? i know in mp3 is generally regarded 192k.


Well, transparency varies per listener.  Nobody here and tell you what will be transparent to you.  Only you and your ears can decide that.  If you are looking for a quality setting that will give you around the same bit rate of a 192 kbps MP3 then you could use the -q6 setting.
Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: Dynamic on 2009-03-14 17:43:23
Ogg is a Variable Bitrate encoder, so the quality target determines what's "transparent".

Something like quality level -q 5 to -q 6 (usually -q 5) is typically considered transparent. With the aoTuV (Aoyumi's Tuned Vorbis) encoder, the performance at a given setting is widely considered to be superior to the xiph.org encoder (see Hydrogen Audio Wiki Article (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Recommended_Ogg_Vorbis)). Typical bitrates aren't far from 160 kbps at -q 5 or 192 kbps at -q 6, partly dependent on genre of music.
Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: ameyer17 on 2009-03-14 22:48:00
I find -q 3 to be near transparent, even with older, pre-aoTuV encoders (I've never ABXed it)
I usually use -q 4.25 (Theoretically 136 kbps, allegedly more like 128 kbps in practice)
Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: dyneq on 2009-03-15 04:26:58
Please always check the 'Wiki' (see the link at the top of this page) before asking these types of questions. This (http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Recommended_Ogg_Vorbis) has some great guidelines, but as others have said, only you can answer your question correctly using ABX testing (also described in the Wiki). There are also some listening test results there which would give you some idea of what most people's perceptual limits are.

In my tests, I could not ABX above 2, so I went to 3 because compared to other formats the files were still incredibly tiny.
Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: HotshotGG on 2009-03-15 18:56:55
Quote
Hi there, can someone tell me what is generally considered the minimum ogg bitrate for a file to be considered "transparent listening"? i know in mp3 is generally regarded 192k.


It depends in the wiki when we created the page we went along with the consensus of the community, which was a -q 5. Obviously everyone's hearing is different and you need to ABX first. I use between a -q 6.5 and -q 8, because I have a lot of hard-drive space and even though it's overall kill I find it to be transparent on almost everything I listen to. 
Title: minimum ogg setting for transparent listening
Post by: pepoluan on 2009-03-17 11:16:46
Quote
Hi there, can someone tell me what is generally considered the minimum ogg bitrate for a file to be considered "transparent listening"? i know in mp3 is generally regarded 192k.


It depends in the wiki when we created the page we went along with the consensus of the community, which was a -q 5. Obviously everyone's hearing is different and you need to ABX first. I use between a -q 6.5 and -q 8, because I have a lot of hard-drive space and even though it's overall kill I find it to be transparent on almost everything I listen to. 

Good for you

Since I listen on-the-go (i.e. inside a shake-shake-rattle-rattle bus), -q 1.5 is transparent enough for me

At home, I listen to the FLAC / WavPack files