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Topic: FLAC or WAVE? (Read 41880 times) previous topic - next topic
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FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #50 –
Quote from: oldtimer5 on
Lossless preserves tones only dogs and bats can hear.  Maybe your dog enjoys music.


Obviously, it's the sampling frequency in the first place, rather than lossy/lossless compression scheme, than may preserve frequencies that dogs and bats can hear, but most humans can't. To cover dog frequency range, you need sampling frequency of at least 96 kHz, to cover what certain bats can hear, you would have to go above 200 kHz with the sampling rate.


Quote from: oldtimer5 on
They range 17-19 kHz. No one above 25 can hear those tones so they are used in HS for ring tones.


Age-related HF hearing decline does not occur in the same way in all people, and there are people above 25 who can hear in this range.

Ceterum censeo, there should be an "%is_stop_after_current%".

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #51 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
a decent mp3 player is more "available", cheaper, and more widely used than a Dansette record plays from the 1960s, or a cheap music centre from the 1970s. The idea that iPods and mp3s have decreased the audio quality available to "normal" people is plainly wrong...


Mp3 players, and CD before them, have reduced the high quality analogue audio that people have been enjoying since the 1960s?!

I dug out a "suitcase" style record player from the late 1960s. I connected the tape output to my sound card. This gives a fairly accurate recording of what the machine sounds like - except the machine's own speaker has far less top-end (and mid-range!), and a far more pronounced and boomy bass, than anything you're likely to play these files through.

The Beatles, The Red Album, last track on record 1 side 2:
[attachment=5092:Vinyl_33...esterday.mp3]

The same song from The Beatles 1 CD:
[attachment=5093:CD___The...esterday.mp3]

Oh how CDs and mp3 have robbed us of the wonderful sound quality people could afford in the 1960s! 

(Note: this is a stereo record, played back in mono, as was common in the late 1960s / early 1970s - this gives hit-and-miss results - in this case it's a really phasey sounding mixdown. This really is a bad example of vinyl in every way, but it's what people actually listened to!).


To be fair, here's a 7" 45rpm single played on the same record player:
[attachment=5094:Vinyl_45...ulations.mp3]
I have thousands of records, and I've owned tens of these kind of record players - this really is typical of the sound. Sometimes it's better (newer stylus, mint record), sometimes it's worse (cheaper record player, more worn out record, completely wrecked stylus with a coin on top to make it track!). On the record player itself, the boomy bass (louder than everything else) helps to hide the crackles and distortion a bit.


The point? Yes, there was some great hi-fi around in the 1960s for rich people, but the sound quality that "normal" people got from "normal" equipment was variable, and generally poor. Plus the records scratched easily and wore out very quickly.

A half-decent mp3 player, that "normal" people own in the 21st century, is a world away from the sound quality of 1960s and 1970s analogue - it's 1000x better!

Cheers,
David.

P.S. but my kids still love stacking some 45s on this old record player and dancing around to it!

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #52 –
Quote from: pawelq on
Quote from: oldtimer5 on
Lossless preserves tones only dogs and bats can hear.  Maybe your dog enjoys music.


Obviously, it's the sampling frequency in the first place, rather than lossy/lossless compression scheme, than may preserve frequencies that dogs and bats can hear, but most humans can't. To cover dog frequency range, you need sampling frequency of at least 96 kHz, to cover what certain bats can hear, you would have to go above 200 kHz with the sampling rate.

It would be interesting if so-called super tweeters and 96kHz were tested with animals... I wonder if those ST are even doing anything. Has anyone even cared to try? It seems to me that nobody would bother. The believers of course won't, and the rest of us think the question isn't even worth asking (but I just asked it...  )

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #53 –
Well, CD can do 20kHz - 22kHz (despite common specs) - to humans that's inaudible at sensible levels, while various animals can hear those frequencies quite well.

Many super tweeters, reproducing hi-res recordings, certainly do something - as in you can record the output and see it on a spectrogram.


Anecdotally, our hamster used to go mad whenever I played vinyl, while it seemed completely uninterested in CD. Hardly scientific though!

Cheers,
David.

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #54 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Anecdotally, our hamster used to go mad whenever I played vinyl, while it seemed completely uninterested in CD. Hardly scientific though!


Watching the Hydrogenaudio community neglect even the profoundest evidence, that vinyl is still superior to Redbook audio, is worthwhile. Things are arbitrarily called scientific or unscientific, just as it fits this community's agenda.


John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #55 –
Quote from: rpp3po on
Watching the Hydrogenaudio community neglect even the profoundest evidence, that vinyl is still superior to Redbook audio is worthwhile. Things are arbitrarily called scientific or unscientific, just as it fits this community's agenda.


John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile


RPP3PO, did you forget your quote tags?

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #56 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Anecdotally, our hamster used to go mad whenever I played vinyl, while it seemed completely uninterested in CD. Hardly scientific though!

Maybe your hamster was nerved by the crackling and rumbling of vinyl 
.halverhahn

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #57 –
Stereophile should be delighted to emphasize its decade long commitment to trustable reviewing. For years we have been using a battery of 16 hamsters at every audio review. They are all coming from only the most reputable AES member households. It is aggravating to read again how a questionable protocol seems to be the only accepted "scientific" method around here.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
 

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #58 –
Quote from: .halverhahn on
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Anecdotally, our hamster used to go mad whenever I played vinyl, while it seemed completely uninterested in CD. Hardly scientific though!
Maybe your hamster was nerved by the crackling and rumbling of vinyl 
No joke - it wasn't the music - it went mad the second the needle hit the record, before the music itself started.


rpp3po - LOL! - stop it!

Cheers,
David.

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #59 –
rpp3po ,
I'm still processing the idea that John Locke isn't really John Locke.  So please wait until I sort that out before you turn into John Atkinson. 

FLAC or WAVE?

Reply #60 –
Quote from: tefleming on
With wav files, you have a more universal format, supported by more software, than FLAC.  FLAC is not (yet) a standard.  Maybe it will be and maybe it will not.  As of now, it is not universally supported.  I can say the same thing for all of the lossless formats.  So I prefer wav files.  I have solved the metadata problem simply by using WMP and backing up my metadata periodically.  It also eliminates the need to use Jaikoz.

lol, so your solution to FLAC not being a standard is to use a non-standard way to store metadata?
Creature of habit.