24-bit codec comparisons?
Reply #14 – 2007-07-07 20:17:47
But then I started to test some of my 24/96 files. To my great surprise, WavPack not only had the smallest file size, but it also had the fastest decoding speed (by a pretty decent margin). FLAC (which I thought would come in first) was runner up (again with the largest file size), with TAK coming in dead last (although much better file size compared to FLAC, though still bigger than WavPack). Even though I would like to see better decode speeds at 16/44.1, I decided to stick with WavPack as my codec of choice (besides, David is a stand up guy ). I was very impressed with how well WavPack scales, and conversely disappointed with how bad FLAC/TAK scales. Is this bad scaling just an inherit flaw in the FLAC/TAK algorithm or does this just happen to be one of WavPack's strengths (or maybe a mix both)? It's always a bit dangerous to draw conclusions regarding compression performance from limited file sets. These are the results of my 24 Bit /96 Khz test corpus:WavPack -f 58,08 % TAK Turbo 54,52 % Here TAK is performing 3,5 % better than WavPack. Possibly your files are something special. I would be interested to analyze a snippet (10 to 30 seconds) of one of your files to check what is going on. Could you please send me one via email? For the speed: Those fast modes are usually limited by the speed of the io system (unless you have a really ultra fast hard disk array). I doubt, that TAK's codec is encoding or decoding slower than WavPack on those settings, but it's possible that TAK's io system is responsible for worse results. With 24 Bit /96 Khz TAK 1.0.1 is using quite large io buffers which can considerably decrease the speed. Funny, but i am just working on a new io sub system for TAK 1.0.2 which will use considerably smaller buffer and at least on my system achieves significantly higher speeds than V1.0.1 on high resolution audio. Thomas