Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Perceptual Encoding & Age (Read 2880 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Perceptual Encoding & Age

Hello

It's my understanding that LAME uses perceptual encoding when using the alt-preset-standard setting.  If so, I would like to know if anyone knows if the human ear models used within LAME take age into account.  Perhaps a better way to ask this is: does anyone know if our hearing degrades linearly with time and if it does/doesn't how would that effect the perceived quality of a decoded mp3 15 or more years down the line?

I'm asking this because I'm currently in the process of acrhiving my cd collection - i had about 40 stolen from my car recently and never want to part with my music like that again.  I chose the MP3 format because of its wide spread use and the alt-preset-standard setting, to me, sounds really good.

Thanks for any info you can give!

Perceptual Encoding & Age

Reply #1 –
Quote
does anyone know if our hearing degrades linearly with time and if it does/doesn't how would that effect the perceived quality of a decoded mp3 15 or more years down the line?

Um, I'd think it would more likely that your ability to percieve lossy audio encoding artifacts would improve over time.

But also, unless you happen to be under the age of 10, your ability to hear will not get any better as time goes on.
edit: sensitivity in particular, such as hearing things at great distances. Obviously people get trained to hear other nuances better (i.e. pitch) in their prime.

So, no, I don't see any evidence pointing toward age-oriented ear models
"Something bothering you, Mister Spock?"
 

Perceptual Encoding & Age

Reply #2 –
Quote
I would like to know if anyone knows if the human ear models used within LAME take age into account.  Perhaps a better way to ask this is: does anyone know if our hearing degrades linearly with time and if it does/doesn't how would that effect the perceived quality of a decoded mp3 15 or more years down the line?

Hearing does degrade with age, but it's not a linear function. Mainly, it's the high frequency segments of the ATH curve which goes up, so the ear becomes less capable of perceiving high frequency signals.

Doesn't really affect MP3 quality much, you will still be able to perceive most artifacts at an old age except for high frequency artifacts (e.g. ringing). You will probably be less likely to perceive the lowpass cutoff too.