I would like to hear about the quality comparison results of the 4 formats mentioned in the subject.
edit: finally corrected the grammar...
I don't know of any comparisons like that with PsyTEL directly in the mix, but ff123 has performed a test with those formats and Liquid AAC instead of PsyTEL (which is regarded as performing slightly better than PsyTEL I believe).
You can find the analysis of the results here:
http://www.ff123.net/dogies/dogies_plots.html (http://www.ff123.net/dogies/dogies_plots.html)
Although a bit OT, from my personal experience (extensive blind listening tests), in relation to quality (and which ff123's test seems to support as well) the following codecs usually seem to come out in this order, from best to worst:
1. MPC
2. AAC
3. Vorbis
4. MP3
When RC3 hits, I suspect the gap between AAC and Vorbis will start to close. Right now AAC mostly has a big edge on Vorbis because Vorbis' pre-echo is very weak, possibly worse than a well tuned MP3 encoder even. MPC further edges out AAC in regards to issues like pre/post-echo and performance on difficult clips like impulses, etc. From a quality standpoint, MP3 should really only be used if compatibility is a very large factor to take into consideration, such as hardware support.
What I heard is that PsyTEL AAC (VBR) is better than Liquid Audio AAC with bitrates > 128kbps, I wonder whether this is true. By the way, is there any quality comparison results of full bitrate range (from very low bitrate to very high bitrate) of the audio formats?
Well, I feel MPC sounds lifeless comparing to PsyTEL AAC at high bitrates (Don't ask me for ABX tests, I never do) although MPC does handle very well on artifacts (I can't hear artifacts with -extreme) and has average lower bitrate than PsyTEL AAC (-archive) for every track encoded. I suggest to test the audio formats using really good speakers instead of earphones. Earphones can't show whether the music encoded is lifeless or not (unless you are going to blow your ear off with the earphone so close to your ears) although with earphones you are more likely to detect artifacts. And this is why I prefer PsyTEL AAC over MPC.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
Well, I feel MPC sounds lifeless comparing to PsyTEL AAC at high bitrates (Don't ask me for ABX tests, I never do)
Ehh, ok. Now we have again a new very precise and pro definition, which really helps the developers...lifeless. Great, and no ABX or any proofs
of course.
Please...
For newbies: Everytime you see someone say "I feel this sounds like that", the alarm bells should start ringing.
For testers these "feelings" are very familiar...
Just earlier today I was talking about these very types of issues..
It seems there are some common underlying themes to various claims that I keep seeing pop up that people are not willing to back up. You see them most commonly in a very vague description of the sound. Here are some usual examples:
1. <codec> lacks bass.
2. <codec> lacks highs.
3. <codec> sounds colder.
4. <codec> sounds warmer.
5. <codec> sounds dull.
6. <codec> sounds shrill.
7. <codec> has some weird distortion that I can't explain.
etc.
Now this one falls right in to that category -- <codec> sounds lifeless.
Honestly.. if people are so
sure that they can hear something, enough to where they would avoid using it, then why wouldn't they be able to prove it? Or why wouldn't they be willing to try?
At any rate, the type of descriptions I mentioned above, as JohnV says, are the usual signs that something is amiss. Usually psychoacoustic audio compression does not behave in a manner similar to what you would expect from conventional audio and the differences you might hear between systems/media/etc.
In psychoacoustic audio, you don't really get "warm" or "cold". You get "artifacted" or "not artifacted". You for the most part shouldn't get things like a "lack of bass", though you might get distorted bass. With the exception of lowpasses and highpasses used by various encoders,
usually you aren't going to be actually
missing something from the sound, you will more than likely have things "added to it", perceptually, in the form of artifacts. You usually don't get subtle changes in tonality or the general "feel" of the audio, instead you get distortion of the details. Pre-echo, Post-echo, dropouts,
sometimes a distortion of the stereo field, etc.
I suggest to test the audio formats using really good speakers instead of earphones. Earphones can't show whether the music encoded is lifeless or not (unless you are going to blow your ear off with the earphone so close to your ears) although with earphones you are more likely to detect artifacts. And this is why I prefer PsyTEL AAC over MPC.
Testing audio codecs with speakers is fine, testing with speakers
over headphones however makes little sense to me, unless you want to set yourself up to
purposely not hear certain aspects of the sound. It just sounds like a way to set things up to hear what you want to hear, and not hear what you don't want to hear.
However, I completely disagree with the whole "earphones can't show you whether the music encoded is lifeless or not" part. First of all, define "lifeless"? Since we are talking about audio quality, I'll assume that it is related to "not sounding good". In that case, listening with headphones certainly can tell you whether or not something sounds lifeless. To me lifeless is something that sounds artificial. Something that I can actually quantify and relate to artifacting. A good example of this would be WMA. WMA has "lifeless" highs, they sound artificial and synthesized, mp3pro is the same way -- these are things that I can abx and these are both things I certainly can hear on headphones.
Anyway.. no offense to you or your opinion, but there have been so many people lately saying that MPC sounds bad or has some sort of mysterious flaw (and it's always a different story I might add) now that the format starting to gain in popularity more, yet not a single one has provided a shred of evidence of this yet, at all. Period. It's all hearsay and speculation, and now the trend actually seems to be that people want to make these statements but are unwilling to even
attempt to back them up. That means to me that they probably realize they are wrong, or they are so unsure of their statements that they don't want to lose face if they can't deliver the results. Again.. if either of these things are the case, then why bother in the first place?
Just my 2 cents.. and btw, none of this is exclusive to MPC either, statements of these sort made about any codec should really be backed up with some sort of evidence.. that is at least if there is to be progress made.
Dibrom,
What if the problem isn't with the encoder or decoder but the plugin? ABXing wavs would do nothing to expose a problem like this.
Originally posted by layer3maniac
Dibrom,
What if the problem isn't with the encoder or decoder but the plugin? ABXing wavs would do nothing to expose a problem like this.
So decode the file to .wav via the plugin instead of the command line decoder. Problem solved.
Liquid Audio can't be decoded with the plugin. Exactly how did ffc do that anyway? Burn it to a cd and then extract the wav? Hardly a fair method, wouldn't you say? Unless he did that to all the formats.
Originally posted by layer3maniac
Liquid Audio can't be decoded with the plugin. Exactly how did ffc do that anyway? Burn it to a cd and then extract the wav? Hardly a fair method, wouldn't you say? Unless he did that to all the formats.
He used total recorder which just intercepts the audio before it hits the wave device. It provides a perfect digital copy of the audio being played back, in the same manner that something like the diskwriter in winamp would.
For comparison tests, I use a winamp plugin, in_lqt.dll version 1.055, to decode Liquid Audio lqt files (as documented on my pages). I believe this is the decoder usually used by the people in alt.binaries.sounds.aac.
The only codec I used Total Recorder on was WMA8 because there is no "write to disk" function available in WMP 7.1, and I wanted to quell any doubts about this or that decoder (i.e., in_wma.dll in Winamp 2.6) not being the "correct" one to use -- the Winamp and WMP wma decoders differ by a couple of bits.
I was also forced to burn the wma file to CD to encode, because that was the only way Windows Media Player 7.1 allowed me to make a wma file. I could have used wm8eutil.exe, but again there are slight differences in the two encoders (both WMA8!) and I wanted to encode in the way that most other people probably do.
ff123
I'm not going to send any clips or anything of that nature, but I'm going to describe my experiences with mpp/mpc. I started using the format many years ago because I liked the fact that there were no pre/post echo problems. As far as I was concerned, and still am, there are no artifacting problems with the format which is quite an impressive thing.
One day I decided to compare a few formats by burning a cd with the original wav as well as the decompressed formats in a few musical genres. I was quite surprised to find what I thought might be tonality problems with mpc. At first I thought it was just a placebo effect, I had heard others complain of mpc sounding flat in the high end and thought I might have been predeposed to 'hear' flatness in the high end. That was utter crap as far as I was concerned. If anything I would have considered mpc to sound slightly brighter in the high end frequencies than the original.
I am not going to pull out samples for you to double blind test. I have a terribly slow dial-up connection, as well as no burning desire to do so. However, the type of music I was listening to that seemed the most changed was r'n'b/pop vocal music and it sounded as though the timbre of the notes had been stripped from the original. I never found this while listening through computer speakers or a good pair of head sets, but I thought it was prominent enough on a full stereo system to mention it.
Typically I encoded in x-treme
Cool I just downloaded the 1.055 liquid audio plugin. Thanks for the info!
Originally posted by JohnV
Ehh, ok. Now we have again a new very precise and pro definition, which really helps the developers...lifeless. Great, and no ABX or any proofs of course.
JohnV, I know you are 1 of the expert listeners and well trained to detect artifacts. But I think you side too much on MPC and feel that other formats are just craps (psychological problem). When you tend to side something, you would say others are bad. Okay, I clarify that I am not trying to insult any people here.
Please...
For newbies: Everytime you see someone say "I feel this sounds like that", the alarm bells should start ringing.
For testers these "feelings" are very familiar...
In fact I am not a newbie. Very sorry to tell you so if you are trying to insult me as a newbie. I had tried many audio formats (MP3Pro, LAME MP3, Fhg MP3, RM8, WMA8, MPC, AAC, etc) by myself. I had visited other listening results web sites as well, e.g. ff123's (I would like to know about what other people think about the best 128kbps audio format).
Listening is very subjective and I am just voicing my opinion that MPC in my ears not as good as PsyTEL AAC in terms of life of the music. I do agree that MPC gives no artifacts (-xtreme for my ears, have not able to find any music to kill it yet. PsyTEL AAC -archive has no artifacts for me as well), handle perfect on transients, perfect psychoaccoustic model and it is great format (I do agree with this, in fact every invention of audio format is great) but it sounds lifeless compare at the almost the same bitrate (average 10-50kbps difference), MPC -xtreme vs PsyTEL AAC -archive (again to my ears and perhaps to NitTheBlak's too, for his case is MP3. This is very personal).
I never say everybody should use PsyTEL AAC like those people who are still going around to convince people to use their old format VQF. I just said that I feel PsyTEL AAC is good in terms of life of music. And then you people are trying to shoot me on this Eh I want opinions only, you so fast conclude I am a newbie??? It really sounds like brain washing. Even if the person is a newbie, you should not say they are all the same, in fact they may detect other things that you might not able to detect.
Just to point out that artifacts and life of music both are different, you could not say lifeless means there is artifact. To be said clearly, lifeless means you always feel that there is lack of something in the music perhaps the psychoaccoustic model removes too many details e.g. masked too much, etc (e.g. NitTheBlak said it's on the mid frequencies, for my case I use my feelings to feel it). Artifacts means you have extra something (ringing, flanging, etc) due to lossy compression comparing to the orginal. When you tend to pay more attention on detecting on whether there are artifacts, you would have less attention on whether the music is lack of something.
And yeah, by the way, is there any more version updates for PsyTEL AAC?
Originally posted by Dibrom
In psychoacoustic audio, you don't really get "warm" or "cold". You get "artifacted" or "not artifacted". You for the most part shouldn't get things like a "lack of bass", though you might get distorted bass. With the exception of lowpasses and highpasses used by various encoders, usually you aren't going to be actually missing something from the sound, you will more than likely have things "added to it", perceptually, in the form of artifacts. You usually don't get subtle changes in tonality or the general "feel" of the audio, instead you get distortion of the details. Pre-echo, Post-echo, dropouts, sometimes a distortion of the stereo field, etc.
Yes, artifacts is like there something added on the music due to the lack of bitrates to represent the waves. I do agree with you on this. I had mentioned in previous post as well.
Testing audio codecs with speakers is fine, testing with speakers over headphones however makes little sense to me, unless you want to set yourself up to purposely not hear certain aspects of the sound. It just sounds like a way to set things up to hear what you want to hear, and not hear what you don't want to hear.
Good speakers would let you hear not only the increased of loudness, you could even get real ambience as well, and you wouldn't miss a single tone also as you'd mentioned. If headphones are really that good, then why you still go for live concerts? And with the real ambience, loudness, etc (I am lousy on describing and my English is not that good) there you could really feel the life of the music (YES, LIFE OF MUSIC!!!), unless you haven't been to live concerts before. Try to compare the audio formats with a pair of decent stereo speakers, at least not earphones. I do agree that headphones are pretty good to detect artifacts.
However, I completely disagree with the whole "earphones can't show you whether the music encoded is lifeless or not" part. First of all, define "lifeless"? Since we are talking about audio quality, I'll assume that it is related to "not sounding good". In that case, listening with headphones certainly can tell you whether or not something sounds lifeless. To me lifeless is something that sounds artificial. Something that I can actually quantify and relate to artifacting. A good example of this would be WMA. WMA has "lifeless" highs, they sound artificial and synthesized, mp3pro is the same way -- these are things that I can abx and these are both things I certainly can hear on headphones.
Okay, I think we have a misunderstanding here. Your definition of "lifeless" and mine is different. Mine is explained previously.
I do agree that WMA sounds real metallic (artificial and synthesized as you mentioned) and I wonder M$ consider 64kbps WMA 8 is CD quality (craps). I feel that MP3Pro is better than WMA 8 for 64kbps.
Anyway.. no offense to you or your opinion, but there have been so many people lately saying that MPC sounds bad or has some sort of mysterious flaw (and it's always a different story I might add) now that the format starting to gain in popularity more, yet not a single one has provided a shred of evidence of this yet, at all. Period. It's all hearsay and speculation, and now the trend actually seems to be that people want to make these statements but are unwilling to even attempt to back them up. That means to me that they probably realize they are wrong, or they are so unsure of their statements that they don't want to lose face if they can't deliver the results. Again.. if either of these things are the case, then why bother in the first place?
I am not here to say MPC is not good. In fact every audio format is great (they all try to achieve a good size/quality ratio for digital audio). I think I might has chosen to wrong timing as well, as other people are trying to bash MPC.
Just my 2 cents.. and btw, none of this is exclusive to MPC either, statements of these sort made about any codec should really be backed up with some sort of evidence.. that is at least if there is to be progress made.
Evidence is yourself. You are the listener who decides what sounds better to your ears.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
JohnV, I know you are 1 of the expert listeners and well trained to detect artifacts. But I think you side too much on MPC and feel that other formats are just craps (psychological problem). When you tend to side something, you would say others are bad. Okay, I clarify that I am not trying to insult any people here.
Whoa... hold on there. You have some
HUGE misconceptions man. I don't think I've
ever seen JohnV say AAC or PsyTEL was crap, quite the contrary I'm almost positive he recognizes PsyTEL (as I do) as a very high quality encoder. For that matter he also liked Garf's tuned Vorbis encoder quite a bit. So please, try to get your story right here. JohnV's interest in MPC isn't psychological, its because MPC performs extremely well. JohnV actually has participated in helping tune PsyTEL (and many other codecs) to my knowledge, so before you go off saying that you think he is biased and has some psychological problems, you really need to check your facts. You are so far off it isn't even funny.
Listening is very subjective and I am just voicing my opinion that MPC in my ears not as good as PsyTEL AAC in terms of life of the music.
First of all, I don't buy this. Sure, audio quality is subjective, but psychoacoustic audio quality isn't
nearly as subjective as some people would like to think. When I see arguments like "I prefer MP3 artifacts over MPC artifacts" then I have to ask... where are these MPC artifacts? Show me. Provide a clip for me, and
prove that you can hear a difference. You don't like calling that difference an "artifact"? Fine, but you still claim you hear a problem.. so prove it.
I do agree that MPC gives no artifacts (-xtreme for my ears, have not able to find any music to kill it yet. PsyTEL AAC -archive has no artifacts for me as well), handle perfect on transients, perfect psychoaccoustic model and it is great format (I do agree with this, in fact every invention of audio format is great) but it sounds lifeless compare at the almost the same bitrate (average 10-50kbps difference), MPC -xtreme vs PsyTEL AAC -archive (again to my ears and perhaps to NitTheBlak's too, for his case is MP3. This is very personal).
Fine.. say I was to give you the benefit of the doubt -- to you it sounds lifeless. So you should have no problem hearing this "lifeless" quality in a blind listening test right? Because if you
can't even on a clip of your own choosing, then you aren't hearing a difference.
I never say everybody should use PsyTEL AAC like those people who are still going around to convince people to use their old format VQF. I just said that I feel PsyTEL AAC is good in terms of life of music.
And we never said that PsyTEL was bad. I'll be the first to admit, it's an awesome encoder. If there was no MPC, I'd use PsyTEL for my highest quality encodings.
And then you people are trying to shoot me on this Eh I want opinions only, you so fast conclude I am a newbie??? It really sounds like brain washing. Even if the person is a newbie, you should not say they are all the same, in fact they may detect other things that you might not able to detect.
Another misconception. We are not trying to shoot you down on your statement that PsyTEL sounds good. I agree 100% with you there. What I
don't agree with is your statement that MPC is lifeless. I'm inclined to believe people's claims normally, but when someone is so unwilling to provide a test clip or any listening test results, that means to me that what they say should be considered highly suspect.
You say that some people are able to detect things that others are not. I agree with you 100% there also. No doubt about that at all. And again, that brings me back to my point, if you can detect this issue that you claim you can, then why are you unwilling to perform a blind listening test?
Just to point out that artifacts and life of music both are different, you could not say lifeless means there is artifact. To be said clearly, lifeless means you always feel that there is lack of something in the music perhaps the psychoaccoustic model removes too many details e.g. masked too much, etc (e.g. NitTheBlak said it's on the mid frequencies, for my case I use my feelings to feel it).
You use your "feelings" to feel it? That sounds to me like you are convincing yourself you are hearing something that you are not. Somewhat ironic given the fact that you would portray JohnV who is absolutely willing to always back up his statements with hard data, as the one who is affected by a psychological issue in relation to perception.
Artifacts means you have extra something (ringing, flanging, etc) due to lossy compression comparing to the orginal. When you tend to pay more attention on detecting on whether there are artifacts, you would have less attention on whether the music is lack of something.
Not true. Due to the nature of psychoacoustic audio compression, when you are listening for artifacts, you are listening for
any difference, whatever that may happen to be. You don't separate these two issues out as you would seem to imply.
So in closing, sure it's possible you are hearing something. Anything is possible. Certainly if there
is a problem it should be uncovered and publicized so that it can be addressed. However, when you refuse to participate in a listening test, provide any data, and instead just make wild claims, describing this "problem" so vaguely, it means absolutely nothing.
Originally posted by MiXP
If anything I would have considered mpc to sound slightly brighter in the high end frequencies than the original.
I found out that PsyTEL AAC has this problem too, for modes below -extreme (or -normal?). For test clips, please use real music (some minutes long), it is not difficult to find out the problem.
Typically I encoded in x-treme
Same here, I usually encode MPC using -xtreme.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
Good speakers would let you hear not only the increased of loudness, you could even get real ambience as well, and you wouldn't miss a single tone also as you'd mentioned.
First of all, you don't need sheer volume to hear differences in audio codecs. In fact, the masking effect is increased at higher volumes, so unless you are listening to an extremely quiet sample, it's even less likely you'd hear a difference at higher volumes. So then you have 2 things, you aren't going to hear the differences in detail as well on speakers, and if you are using speakers to get increased volume, you aren't going to hear further subtle differences which would normally be audible at lower volumes.
If headphones are really that good, then why you still go for live concerts?
I go to concerts to see bands perform. Most of the time the sound quality of their performances suck compared to some well produced studio content played back on a decent system.
I don't go to concerts because of the audio quality, I go to concerts for the experience of being there, in that it is a social experience.. the two are totally unrelated and have nothing to do with the "feeling" of the sound.
And with the real ambience, loudness, etc (I am lousy on describing and my English is not that good) there you could really feel the life of the music (YES, LIFE OF MUSIC!!!), unless you haven't been to live concerts before. Try to compare the audio formats with a pair of decent stereo speakers, at least not earphones. I do agree that headphones are pretty good to detect artifacts.
Anything which you say you can hear or "feel" you should be able to do so reliably, so there should be no problem for you to detect this "life of the music" in a blind listening test. If you are so sure you can hear all of this, then why are we arguing? Why the refusal to abx?
I am not here to say MPC is not good. In fact every audio format is great (they all try to achieve a good size/quality ratio for digital audio).
I personally don't feel they are all great, though the idea behind psychoacoustics and the fact that it works is pretty amazing I'll admit.
Evidence is yourself. You are the listener who decides what sounds better to your ears.
Exactly, but this is not a reason not to perform blind listening tests. Because you should be able to hear the difference reliably yourself at the very least.
If you want to "define" your own truth to yourself and convince yourself that everyone else is wrong (ignoring the fact that you may not even be able to reliably tell a difference yourself because you have not tested), that's fine. Everyone is entitled to do that, but it doesn't help anyone in a community working towards achieving higher quality audio compression.. if anything it only spreads misinformation and confusion.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
I found out that PsyTEL AAC has this problem too, for modes below -extreme (or -normal?). For test clips, please use real music (some minutes long), it is not difficult to find out the problem.
Since it is not difficult for you to find a piece of music which causes this problem apparently (now it sounds as in both PsyTEL and MPC) then please copy the relevant portions of a track, encode with LPAC, and upload it somewhere so we can all hear these alleged problems.
If you refuse to do that, then tell us the exact track on the exact album along with some timecodes so that someone who has this music can help us out instead.
Originally posted by Dibrom
Whoa... hold on there. You have some HUGE misconceptions man. I don't think I've ever seen JohnV say AAC or PsyTEL was crap, quite the contrary I'm almost positive he recognizes PsyTEL (as I do) as a very high quality encoder. For that matter he also liked Garf's tuned Vorbis encoder quite a bit. So please, try to get your story right here. JohnV's interest in MPC isn't psychological, its because MPC performs extremely well. JohnV actually has participated in helping tune PsyTEL (and many other codecs) to my knowledge, so before you go off saying that you think he is biased and has some psychological problems, you really need to check your facts. You are so far off it isn't even funny.
Thanks for the information. I would like to apologize for my misconceptions.
First of all, I don't buy this. Sure, audio quality is subjective, but psychoacoustic audio quality isn't nearly as subjective as some people would like to think. When I see arguments like "I prefer MP3 artifacts over MPC artifacts" then I have to ask... where are these MPC artifacts? Show me. Provide a clip for me, and prove that you can hear a difference. You don't like calling that difference an "artifact"? Fine, but you still claim you hear a problem.. so prove it.
By the way, I did not say "I prefer MP3 artifacts over MPC artifacts". Don't generalize me with others, please. I do agree that I can't find any artifacts for MPC yet (Why yet? God knows 1 day some people could manage to find other killer music).
Fine.. say I was to give you the benefit of the doubt -- to you it sounds lifeless. So you should have no problem hearing this "lifeless" quality in a blind listening test right? Because if you can't even on a clip of your own choosing, then you aren't hearing a difference.
Okay, I forget to mention that my listening tests that I did by myself is like using shuffle mode in Winamp and play all the encoded audio formats with the original in the same playlist without me looking on which format it is playing. I wonder whether you could call this as blind listening test.
And we never said that PsyTEL was bad. I'll be the first to admit, it's an awesome encoder. If there was no MPC, I'd use PsyTEL for my highest quality encodings.
I never say you guys said PsyTEL is bad. Maybe you have misread my words.
Another misconception. We are not trying to shoot you down on your statement that PsyTEL sounds good. I agree 100% with you there. What I don't agree with is your statement that MPC is lifeless. I'm inclined to believe people's claims normally, but when someone is so unwilling to provide a test clip or any listening test results, that means to me that what they say should be considered highly suspect.
The definition of "lifeless" of yours and mine are different. I think we have misunderstanding here. My test clips are just real musics. When you blast real musics on your decent stereo speakers, you would notice them. I do agree that the test samples for tuning psychoaccoustic models are real musics too but the thing is real music last for minutes and samples last for seconds. The length could tell a difference because our brain limitation.
You use your "feelings" to feel it? That sounds to me like you are convincing yourself you are hearing something that you are not. Somewhat ironic given the fact that you would portray JohnV who is absolutely willing to always back up his statements with hard data, as the one who is affected by a psychological issue in relation to perception.
Feeling to feel it does not mean I am trying to convince myself. I think you have misconceptions about this. Do you try to convince yourself if you feel that you like a girl??? No right?
Not true. Due to the nature of psychoacoustic audio compression, when you are listening for artifacts, you are listening for any difference, whatever that may happen to be. You don't separate these two issues out as you would seem to imply.
The "adding" means those things that the original wave doesn't have e.g. ringing, flanging, etc (artifacts).
So in closing, sure it's possible you are hearing something. Anything is possible. Certainly if there is a problem it should be uncovered and publicized so that it can be addressed. However, when you refuse to participate in a listening test, provide any data, and instead just make wild claims, describing this "problem" so vaguely, it means absolutely nothing.
To clarify, I am not making wild claims. Maybe we have lots of communication barriers for this (my English is not good).
Originally posted by Dibrom
First of all, you don't need sheer volume to hear differences in audio codecs. In fact, the masking effect is increased at higher volumes, so unless you are listening to an extremely quiet sample, it's even less likely you'd hear a difference at higher volumes. So then you have 2 things, you aren't going to hear the differences in detail as well on speakers, and if you are using speakers to get increased volume, you aren't going to hear further subtle differences which would normally be audible at lower volumes.
Not true. The audio reproduction of speakers and earphones are different. This is another factor of audio quality that we shouldn't miss out (other factors are like DAC converter of sound card, etc).
I go to concerts to see bands perform. Most of the time the sound quality of their performances suck compared to some well produced studio content played back on a decent system.
I don't go to concerts because of the audio quality, I go to concerts for the experience of being there, in that it is a social experience.. the two are totally unrelated and have nothing to do with the "feeling" of the sound.
It does have, argh. Anyway, I do not know how to describe to you (my limitation of using English to describe). I am not trying to convince you to follow me. I just want to hold my stand.
Anything which you say you can hear or "feel" you should be able to do so reliably, so there should be no problem for you to detect this "life of the music" in a blind listening test. If you are so sure you can hear all of this, then why are we arguing? Why the refusal to abx?
I had said how I do my listening tests in the previous posts.
I personally don't feel they are all great, though the idea behind psychoacoustics and the fact that it works is pretty amazing I'll admit.
Well, I agree that lossless compression at anytime is better than lossy compression because you would not get any bits lost during the encoding process. You would not need to bother the flaws of the psychoaccoustic model as well.
Exactly, but this is not a reason not to perform blind listening tests. Because you should be able to hear the difference reliably yourself at the very least.
If you want to "define" your own truth to yourself and convince yourself that everyone else is wrong (ignoring the fact that you may not even be able to reliably tell a difference yourself because you have not tested), that's fine. Everyone is entitled to do that, but it doesn't help anyone in a community working towards achieving higher quality audio compression.. if anything it only spreads misinformation and confusion.
I am not here to define my own truth and I am not to convince myself that everyone is wrong. I am here to discuss, to exchange and share knowledges. To clarify, I am not here to spread misinformation and confusion as well.
Originally posted by Dibrom
Since it is not difficult for you to find a piece of music which causes this problem apparently (now it sounds as in both PsyTEL and MPC) then please copy the relevant portions of a track, encode with LPAC, and upload it somewhere so we can all hear these alleged problems.
If you refuse to do that, then tell us the exact track on the exact album along with some timecodes so that someone who has this music can help us out instead.
The problem is that not everyone in the world is with a broadband connection.
For the musics, I listen to Chinese musics.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
By the way, I did not say "I prefer MP3 artifacts over MPC artifacts". Don't generalize me with others, please. I do agree that I can't find any artifacts for MPC yet (Why yet? God knows 1 day some people could manage to find other killer music).
The comment was made to illustrate my point that some people make up excuses why they prefer one format over another, aside from all logic or established data that exists.
You say that you prefer PsyTEL because MPC sounds lifeless. Show me a sample where it sounds lifeless, give me some evidence.
Okay, I forget to mention that my listening tests that I did by myself is like using shuffle mode in Winamp and play all the encoded audio formats with the original in the same playlist without me looking on which format it is playing. I wonder whether you could call this as blind listening test.
First of all that is not blind testing, and second it is rather convenient to say after the fact. It is very possible that you have done some sort of conclusive testing, however until you share your results in the form of a test clip or some provide some sort of reproducible evidence, or even a
desire to do so, then your claims hold no water.
I never say you guys said PsyTEL is bad. Maybe you have misread my words.
I didn't misread your words, though it appears you have missed the point that I was trying to make. You came across as if you thought we were attacking you for stating that you preferred PsyTEL. I explained that this was not the case, and instead our responses were related to your unsubstantiated claim that "MPC sounds lifeless".
The definition of "lifeless" of yours and mine are different. I think we have misunderstanding here.
There is no misunderstanding. The problem is that what you call "lifeless" you cannot (apparently) quantify, nor are you willing to provide a single bit of evidence that shows this behavior.
My test clips are just real musics.
So are all of mine. And for that matter castanets, fatboy, spahm, all the killer clips are "real music". They may not be indicative of the
majority of music, but rest assured that they are from
real music.
When you blast real musics on your decent stereo speakers, you would notice them.
Again I ask, what music? What track off of what album, and at what time?
I do agree that the test samples for tuning psychoaccoustic models are real musics too but the thing is real music last for minutes and samples last for seconds. The length could tell a difference because our brain limitation.
Would it be better then if I provided a sample harder to encode than fatboy, but that lasted nearly 10 minutes?
Feeling to feel it does not mean I am trying to convince myself.
If you only say you can "feel" something, but you can not quantify it, and you cannot reliably prove that you can detect it, then it cannot be considered that you are actually perceiving any difference. That's just the way things work from an objective approach.
I think you have misconceptions about this. Do you try to convince yourself if you feel that you like a girl??? No right?
First of all, the whole point of public listening tests is to gather
objective data. Something such as emotions are not objective at all. Furthermore, they are completely unrelated to the discussion at hand.
You can argue that you prefer the sound of PsyTEL because of its possible quirks and modifications it makes to the sound, but you run into problems when you try to imply that that somehow relates to encoding accuracy. It does not.
You can say you prefer the sound of vinyl for example, but that does
NOT mean that CD Audio is not accurate, it simply means you prefer the distortion that vinyl is subject to.
However.. I'd still like you to prove that you can actually hear the difference enough to reliably pick one as "feeling" better to you than the other. As it is, right now I do not believe you because you have not given any sort of data to validate this claim and it just looks like you are making excuses on why you shouldn't need to.
To clarify, I am not making wild claims. Maybe we have lots of communication barriers for this (my English is not good).
They are wild claims until they have been somewhat substantiated.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
The problem is that not everyone in the world is with a broadband connection.
Did you miss this:
If you refuse to do that, then tell us the exact track on the exact album along with some timecodes so that someone who has this music can help us out instead.
So give us some details already.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
Not true.
Not true? Would you like me to provide you with clips that exemplify the fact that the masking effect is greater at loud volumes? I'd be more than happy to.
It does have, argh. Anyway, I do not know how to describe to you (my limitation of using English to describe). I am not trying to convince you to follow me. I just want to hold my stand.
If you can't describe it, you can't quantify it, and you can't prove it... has it ever crossed your mind that it doesn't exist? Heh..
From an objective point of view, one simply cannot just "take things for granted" like that.
Anyway, I stick with my comments that concerts and psychoacoustic audio compression are two entirely different things. Taking the discussion off track doesn't change anything.
I had said how I do my listening tests in the previous posts.
And they are not blind, objective, or reproducible by anyone else so far.
I am not here to define my own truth and I am not to convince myself that everyone is wrong. I am here to discuss, to exchange and share knowledges.
Ok, then I'll ask again. Where is a clip that when encoded shows the behavior you described? If you cannot upload a clip then give use
exact details on where we can find this clip on a real album elsewhere.
If you are here to share and discuss as you imply, then why not share and discuss this with us?
To clarify, I am not here to spread misinformation and confusion as well.
Refer to the previous statement.
Just thought you'd like to hear my ABX results so far.
I started with a file I encoded with Liquifier Pro 5 at 128 & 192. I decoded them with Liquidy Split 1.06b. It was easy to tell them apart from the original wav, 11 for 11. Then I encoded the same file with mpc at radio which averaged at 145 and extreme which averaged 185, honestly I couldn't tell either of them from the original. The mpc even at 145 was FAR superior to the lqt at 192. I'm going to do some more testing with other encoders, I'm encoding the same file with PsyTel 1.2 right now, but I have to say that I found mpc even with just the radio preset to be VERY impressive.
layer3maniac:
Interesting results.. and could be possible depending on the clip. I think that a few people are going to want to have a reference of what you are encoding to try and reproduce test results though (standard procedure). Can you maybe provide a link?
Well, there must be a problem with the in_lqt plugin I'm using because the decoded PsyTEL file even at 114 sounds excellent compared to the decoded lqt at 192. I'll try earlier versions but I really wish ff123 had used PsyTEL for aac in his test now... Ivan sure knows how to make a 114 file sound good. This isn't fatboy.wav but I don't listen to fatboy slim that much anyway. Right about now... da funk soul brover
Sure thing Dibrom, but first I want to encode some more challenging files. Not really encoder busting files though, just some "busier" music. When I get some reliable results you will be the first to know. I'm anxious to test out some files encoded with Garth's tuned ogg encoder too.
Hmm... I have to join this interesting discussion
First, my comments on MPC - MPC is very high quality audio encoder, probably best in its range. Andree has done quite remarkable work on psychoacoustic model optimization and applying psychoacoustic model suitable for transform coders (such as AAC) to one subband-only coder, like MPC. I have learned many things from his work and his comments/advices of my psychoacoustic model implementation.
When I started my work on AAC psychoacoustic optimization, MPC was near in production state, so I had hard time to "catch-up" with the MPC quality. Final result is the AACEnc -archive sounds very similar to MPC -extreme.
MPC has less "problem" cases than PsyTEL AAC on -extreme and -normal presets, but most people would agree than in MOST cases they both are high quality. In some cases, AACEnc might generate small drop-outs (on -extreme and -normal values) that are not recognized by most listeners. This is due to some internal design trade-off in psytel AAC which I can't modify now, and AAC filterbank design, too (this is not fixable). However, -archive value is very good, as good as MPC.
Now, MPC certainly does not sound dull to me, at least I haven't found any clip that does sound "dull" or something like that to me.
Pros of MP+:
- Transparent quality at -extreme setting for 99.9% samples
- Low Decoder Complexity, lower than MP3 and AAC
- Excellent psychoacoustic tuning
Cons of MP+
- Not very flexible at lower bitrates
- No CBR support (can't be used for straming with small delay)
- Not a ISO standard
Pros of AAC:
- Transparent quality at -archive (psytel), very near at -extreme
- Good CBR support with high audio quality (better than MP3)
- ISO Standard
- Many sampling rates (8000-96000 Hz), up to 256 kbits/s per channel, up to 48 channels
Cons of AAC:
- Problem cases that trip out all transform codecs
- Dropouts sometimes possible (psytel aac)
- Very tight licensing schedule (ISO AAC is not for end-users)
- Increased complexity
Originally posted by VeryBlur
JohnV, I know you are 1 of the expert listeners and well trained to detect artifacts. But I think you side too much on MPC and feel that other formats are just craps (psychological problem).
No, I don't consider other formats craps. Well, Dibrom already have said pretty much everything, so I don't need to write long message...
In fact I am not a newbie. Very sorry to tell you so if you are trying to insult me as a newbie.
No, I'm not trying to insult you and I didn't say
you are a newbie. I was warning newbies not to believe everything they see is said. The sad thing is that the psychological factor is very great here, meaning if some people would do now non-blind testing, they would probably try to hear the "lifeless" sound of MPC, and because of the psychological factor they really think they hear something like this. Only proper blind testing reveals this may not be true.
Listening is very subjective and I am just voicing my opinion that MPC in my ears not as good as PsyTEL AAC in terms of life of the music.
Well, ABX testing is totally objective. After you have reliably verified you can hear a difference, then you can start to speculate what is it you hear. It's not always practical to do full ABX testings when tweaking codecs, then for example blind AB-test is often used, but the key point also here is repetition. You gotta get the same result many times.
You can download ABX comparator from here:
http://www.pcabx.com/program/ABX173_setup.exe (http://www.pcabx.com/program/ABX173_setup.exe)
I do agree that MPC gives no artifacts (-xtreme for my ears, have not able to find any music to kill it yet.
Just to point out that artifacts and life of music both are different, you could not say lifeless means there is artifact.
With blind testing the point is just to verify you can hear a difference. It doesn't matter what you call it; distortion,artifacts or what ever. The point is to verify you can hear a difference. The word "difference" here covers everything: single artifacts, constant distortion, excessive noisyness, even the effect you would call "lifeless", everything.
What I would suggest is that you would do ABX testings between both original vs MPC/Psytel and Psytel vs MPC. Also use fair comparable settings (bitrate) for both.
To be said clearly, lifeless means you always feel that there is lack of something in the music perhaps the psychoaccoustic model removes too many details e.g. masked too much
You should be able to ABX this difference then.
I hope you read also the experiences of Niktheblak:
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showth...s=&threadid=325 (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=325)
Lastly, I'm not saying it's impossible you are hearing this "lifeless" sound. But as long as there are no proofs (your ABX results, test clip), these opinions can't be taken very seriously and the developers have no chance to try to identify and correct the situation.
Originally posted by VeryBlur
clearly, lifeless means you always feel that there is lack of something in the music perhaps the psychoaccoustic model removes too many details e.g. masked too much, etc (e.g. NitTheBlak said it's on the mid frequencies, for my case I use my feelings to feel it). Artifacts means you have extra something
I see some similarities in our claims and I have to respond just out of the curiosity value of this issue. As a guitarist I pay very much attention to electric guitar sound and that (and that only) is where I thought that dropping might have happened. In a feeling-domain it could be described as a lack of PAIN with PAIN meaning that when listening to a distorted guitar at reasonably high volumes it sounds somewhat PAINful (the ear reacts to high-intensity mid-frequency sounds with a sensation of pain). My claim aroused from the experience that MPC version of the distorted guitar sounded less PAINful.
In frequency domain it might be seen as attenuation of some mid-range frequencies the ear is most sensitive to (or which trigger the painful sensation). Theoretically that could happen since the frequency spectrum of a distorted guitar is very wide and the encoder would have to dispense the limited amount of bits equally (according to the ATH, that is!) among different frequencies. Especially if plenty of other high-intensity mid-range sounds are present at the sample.
Theoretically high-intensity wide-frequency range sound consisting mostly of noise is rather difficult to encode and I also remember that most codecs indeed have problems with distorted material. That's why metal yields much higher bitrate than "easier" material with certain codecs.
But with MPC -standard everything is ~175 kb/s. Dibrom's standard preset encodes my metal with ~260 kb/s, GTuned2's 160 mode (-b 999) gives ~210kb/s while oggenc -b 256 gives ~300kb/s. But MPC -standard stubbornly encodes everything I feed it with at ~175kb/s. So either some high-order compromises are made or MPC's psymodel is truly superior. My ABX tests indicated the latter.
You have to remember that all I have said here is strictly hypothetical and it should not be viewed so much as a claim as rattlings of a frustrated sceptic.
Althought I am pretty sure of MPC's superiority I will remain a bit cautious with this matter. The instant I spot a decent test clip I will do a series of ABX's and perhaps present some nice frequency response curves hopefully showing that some dropping actually happens. Until then I would recommend happy MPC'ing
Originally posted by Ivan Dimkovic
MPC has less "problem" cases than PsyTEL AAC on -extreme and -normal presets, but most people would agree than in MOST cases they both are high quality. In some cases, AACEnc might generate small drop-outs (on -extreme and -normal values) that are not recognized by most listeners. This is due to some internal design trade-off in psytel AAC which I can't modify now, and AAC filterbank design, too (this is not fixable). However, -archive value is very good, as good as MPC.
I'd certainly agree with all of this. For the vast majority of situations, PsyTEL is very high quality indeed, transparent even.
One of the issues that I'm faced with (and I realize this doesn't apply to probably even 1/8th of the people) is that at least half of the "standard" music that I encode and listen to happens to be of the type that cause these very problems with transform codecs. However, I believe PsyTEL AAC handles them better than any other transform coder I've seen yet, which says a lot really. I also realize that (as Ivan says) many of these differences approach a level that most listeners will not recognize.
However, given that MPC does edge out AAC on these pathological cases, and that it is free, and it is very fast, it just makes sense for me to use that format. I'd really love to use AAC more (since it seems to be gaining hardware support), but the fact that it is difficult to use the format as an end user makes for a bad situation unfortunately..
Pros of MP+:
- Transparent quality at -extreme setting for 99.9% samples
- Low Decoder Complexity, lower than MP3 and AAC
- Excellent psychoacoustic tuning
I believe that encoder speed should be added to this list. AFAIK MPC is also the fastest encoder out there for the level of quality that it provides.
I pretty much agree with everything else in your post also.
Originally posted by niktheblak
I see some similarities in our claims and I have to respond just out of the curiosity value of this issue.
If you want my opinion on this matter, I suspect "similarities" between all these types of cases are nothing more than people reading there
may be a problem, then somehow convincing themselves there
is a problem and that they are actually hearing it. This effect is not really so uncommon..
I'm not saying this is what happened with you, or with VeryBlur or anyone in particular.. but the fact that claims keep popping up with no results and everyone is so unwilling to do tests or try to prove any of it, (except you, which was a nice change) I think supports this possibility.
Theoretically high-intensity wide-frequency range sound consisting mostly of noise is rather difficult to encode and I also remember that most codecs indeed have problems with distorted material. That's why metal yields much higher bitrate than "easier" material with certain codecs.
But with MPC -standard everything is ~175 kb/s. Dibrom's standard preset encodes my metal with ~260 kb/s, GTuned2's 160 mode (-b 999) gives ~210kb/s while oggenc -b 256 gives ~300kb/s. But MPC -standard stubbornly encodes everything I feed it with at ~175kb/s. So either some high-order compromises are made or MPC's psymodel is truly superior. My ABX tests indicated the latter.
Well as far as MP3 goes, the
only reason you are seeing bitrates that high is because of a
flaw in the format. It cannot encode content above 16khz efficiently at all. If you want proof of this effect, encode the file again with the -Y switch which disables noise shaping in this region, basically keeping vbr from trying to increase bitrate to compensate for the fact that it cannot encode this content accurately otherwise, because of a lack of a scalefactor for the last band.
If you encode with -Y you will see the bitrate drop significantly.
As for Garf's mode coming out at 210kbps, you can't compare that directly to MPC for a number of reasons. First of all MPC exploits more psychoacoustic effects than vorbis does (temporal masking for example) and I also believe that the lossless stage in MPC might be superior to that of Vorbis (I'm sure Garf will correctly me here if I'm wrong), so that saves even more bits. All of that and MPC has also had the benefit of being tuned "to the wire" much more than Vorbis has.. so you gain even more efficiency.
And as for -b256, you can't compare that to MPC standard because you are
forcing a higher bitrate in Vorbis on purpose. So to have any sort of valid comparison you need to force a higher mode in MPC as well.. try -insane for example, if you just want to see higher bitrates.
Originally posted by Dibrom
I also believe that the lossless stage in MPC might be superior to that of Vorbis (I'm sure Garf will correctly me here if I'm wrong), so that saves even more bits.
Lossless and saving bits are a bit contradictory arent they
If you're talking about the transform stage, Vorbis has the edge there because the MDCT is superior in terms of efficiency to subbanding (hence Vorbis will beat MPC at lot bitrates). The problem of the MDCT is that it's more susceptible to preecho, which then may cause a need for more accurate encoding in the lossy steps, causing MPC to win out in those situations.
Overall, I find it a bit hard and irrelevant to say what codec is better based on the internal steps it does. MP3 does both subbanding _and_ MDCT so it should easily beat Vorbis and MPC, right
Bitrate fluctuations on passages are a bad way to judge a codec on. Sometimes an encoder will use a very low bitrate on a hard passage and get away with it without problems. I often see that passages that I think are hard to encode really are not. It's hard to predict bitrates. You certainly should not assume that because a codec uses a low bitrate on a passage and others do not that there is a higher chances that it will artifact there. Quite the contrary: it indicates it can encode the passage well when the others cannot.
As for the rest of the thread, we've had a zillion of these already and they unvariably end up the same. I don't have the patience like Dibrom to explain everything for the umpteenth time, so I will be very short and blunt:
Either you provide a sample or point out the CD and track, or you shut the fuck up.--
GCP
Originally posted by Garf
Lossless and saving bits are a bit contradictory arent they
I believe Dibrom means MPC's lossless phase: huffman and differential coding and maybe some other lossless methods.
My choice of Liquid Audio for my 128 kbit/s comparisons was based on listening tests I had performed for myself using Psytel 1.0:
See:
http://ff123.net/peaceful.html (http://ff123.net/peaceful.html)
http://ff123.net/duel.html (http://ff123.net/duel.html)
I believe psytel sounded better on duel.wav, but was quite bad on peaceful.wav.
Also, back then, bAdDuDeX complained of ringing in psytel at 128 (which he cured for himself by lowering the ATH, I believe). Liquid Audio 128VBR was actually his choice of best low-bitrate encoder, even though that setting is not really low bitrate (can go up to 160 kbit/s on some music).
Psytel 1.0 is an older version, though, and Ivan has improved CBR 128 since then. Ivan's tests of castanets.wav (see results of 128 test here: http://ff123.net/export/aac128log.txt (http://ff123.net/export/aac128log.txt)) appears to show that Psytel is very close to Liquifier quality. I participated in that test, and my personal results was that FhG (Liquid Audio) was clear and away the best on castanets.wav at 128.
ff123
Originally posted by Garf
Overall, I find it a bit hard and irrelevant to say what codec is better based on the internal steps it does. MP3 does both subbanding _and_ MDCT so it should easily beat Vorbis and MPC, right
Not quite - MP3 is using subbanding and MDCT because MPEG commitee needed to keep some degree of filterbank compatibility with MP2, don't ask me why - I don't know And, at the time MP3 was standardized pure MDCT codecs were not yet superior to subband ones at low bitrates, and important companies were "pushing' subband design.
Originally posted by JohnV
I believe Dibrom means MPC's lossless phase: huffman and differential coding and maybe some other lossless methods.
In that case, I would expect Oggs VQ to do better than MPC's quantization+huffman.
But I have no idea, really. (looks like apples and oranges to me)
--
GCP
Originally posted by Ivan Dimkovic
Not quite
Of course not. I was being ironic. Maybe you missed the ?
My point was that the actual transform method does not provide any guarantee whatsoever for audio quality.
--
GCP
Originally posted by JohnV
I believe Dibrom means MPC's lossless phase: huffman and differential coding and maybe some other lossless methods.
Yes, this is what I was talking about.
Originally posted by Garf
In that case, I would expect Oggs VQ to do better than MPC's quantization+huffman.
But I have no idea, really. (looks like apples and oranges to me)
Could be. I was just trying to find ways to explain why MPC would still outperform Vorbis at a lower bitrate, even with the GT modes being used. I know that the lossless stage in MPC is really very efficient (and I assume Vorbis' is as well)and it might be a way that MPC could saving a few more bits. Of course most of the other stuff mentioned is probably more likely, temporal masking, more fine grained tuning, etc.
I'll just wade into this little debate. I've been a recording engineer for 25 years and an audiophile for a bit longer than that with an extremely high end system. Currently testing Musepack, AAC and FAAC. At this point in time they are truly the only ones that would be in the running for discerning listeners. LAME unfortunately destroys the music to the point where it could not be used for any critical listening. Currently comparing using an Al Stewart track that I was present for the recording of so I know what it should sound like. If anyone's interested I'll let you know my findings once I'm done. I certainly wouldn't, at this early point, consider any of the formats suitable for archiving.
Originally posted by Beatles
Currently testing Musepack, AAC and FAAC. At this point in time they are truly the only ones that would be in the running for discerning listeners.
Ehm, FAAC for discerning listener??? Well, anyway, what kind of settings and bitrates you use for testing?
Many of us are interested in your findings, so please share when you are done.
Originally posted by Beatles:LAME unfortunately destroys the music to the point where it could not be used for any critical listening.
I am very interested in what you think of lame's quality if you use
the following commandline:
--alt-preset normal
and this version of the lame encoder, namely lame_dm_rev6.zip:
http://static.hydrogenaudio.org/extra/lame_dm_rev6.zip (http://static.hydrogenaudio.org/extra/lame_dm_rev6.zip)
What part of the music do you feel is destroyed? Content above 16 Kilohertz? Transients?
At this early point, consider any of the formats suitable for archiving.
Not even MPC musepak/mpegplus at the -insane setting?
Originally posted by JohnV
Ehm, FAAC for discerning listener??? Well, anyway, what kind of settings and bitrates you use for testing?
Many of us are interested in your findings, so please share when you are done.
No no FAAC is clearly not an alternative, that was QUICKLY obvious. I am only interested John in absolutely the highest quality settings. Smaller bitrates are not any concern to me although it may be fun to tweak some to see just how low acceptable results can found. I've been playing with many different settings and really don't want to report what I think until I've fully tested everything. I see too many people shooting from the hip without being able to back up their findings. Two little tidbits I find interesting:
Listen to the rhythmic propulsion of a track known in Linn talk as the "foot tapping" ability of each encoder. I do find differences between AAC and Musepack with one clearly better but this is just preliminary.
Also in decay and overtones which allows one to hear soundstage cues and to hear into the music and discern the back and side walls I can hear a difference.
MP3 is clearly not in the same category as Musepack and AAC.
As I'm new here is the IRC channel a good place to discuss things?
Thanks.
I am using REV6 but don't consider MP3 as a suitable medium for anything other than sharing or casual background listening but that's just MY opinion.
What part of the music do you feel is destroyed? Content above 16 Kilohertz? Transients?
Mainly overtones, decay, sense of space and propulsion. I suppose obviously palpability could be added to that list.
Not even MPC musepak/mpegplus at the -insane setting?
No not for archiving. But archiving to me means would I save my masters in a certain format and no I personally wouldn't even consider it. But both Musepack and AAC are eminently listenable formats. I found Muse to be very good but I was was using an absolutely ludicrous commandline that gave an extremely large filesize and bitrate but sounded quite good in most areas. Overtones and soundstage flattening excepted.
Dear Beatles,
Thanks for your comments.
However, for us non-engineers can you explain (briefly) in layman's terms what you mean by some of the jargon?
For example,
overtones, decay, sense of space and propulsion, palpability
Here are some guesses (probably incorrect):
1. overtones: as guitarists know when you hit an e note there is also an overtone (b note) that is present though in much much less volume...
2. decay: rate at which notes fade out?
3. space: stereo image and its characteristics, perhps an mp3 can take a cathedral sound stereo image and dampen it so it sounds more like a medium room?
4. propulsion?? no idea...
5. palpability?? no idea
Originally posted by Beatles
No not for archiving. But archiving to me means would I save my masters in a certain format and no I personally wouldn't even consider it. But both Musepack and AAC are eminently listenable formats. I found Muse to be very good but I was was using an absolutely ludicrous commandline that gave an extremely large filesize and bitrate but sounded quite good in most areas. Overtones and soundstage flattening excepted.
Interesting. Btw what kind of commandlines you used for MPC, I guess you also disabled mid/side-stereo? I could give you some hints for very high bitrate/quality commandline.
I don't think there's much use to go over 600-700kbps because then lossless coding becomes a viable choise.
Yeah, I wouldn't save masters in lossy format either...
Originally posted by RD
Dear Beatles,
Thanks for your comments.
However, for us non-engineers can you explain (briefly) in layman's terms what you mean by some of the jargon?
For example,
overtones, decay, sense of space and propulsion, palpability
Here are some guesses (probably incorrect):
1. overtones: as guitarists know when you hit an e note there is also an overtone (b note) that is present though in much much less volume...
Hi Rd,
Yes this is correct but a much more valuable tool is acoustic rather than electric instruments....although I play guitar too.
2. decay: rate at which notes fade out?
Yes exactly. This is one are where lossy compression falls quite short. However so far I would rate one method as a fair bit better than the other one.
3. space: stereo image and its characteristics, perhps an mp3 can take a cathedral sound stereo image and dampen it so it sounds more like a medium room?
Yes your characterization of the imaging and soundstage is correct. I'm testing one particular track I recorded with a 24/96 Nagra in a cathedral as a matter of fact. It doesn't "change" the room sound into a medium room, it fundamentally changes all soundstage cues, that is I can no longer hear the back or side walls. I'm continuing to play with different settings however.
4. propulsion?? no idea...
What rhythmically moves the track forward. For instance if the bassist is playing fast 8ths can all notes be distinguished or does it blur into low frequency noise. This is an often overlooked sound fundamental. In testing people can't put there finger on what's wrong BUT they're aware something isn't quite right.
5. palpability?? no idea
Palpability is the sense of the vocalist for example "being in your room". In a good recording you'll get a credible sense of the musicians being in your room...a palpable presence if you will.
Thanks for your excellent replies, Beatles!
Its nice to talk to an audio engineer...
Could you recommend some songs that really show off propulsion and palpability so i can do some tests?
Also have you ever tried --alt-preset insane with lame_dm_rev6?
I know there are problems with the mp3 format in general, but I'm curious to seek if you notice that --alt-preset insane is considerably better than -alt-preset normal... if you find that insane is not much better then it seems to me that normal is the way to go if someone is going to use mp3 at all....
Thanks,
AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE...
Originally posted by RD
Thanks for your excellent replies, Beatles!
Its nice to talk to an audio engineer...
Could you recommend some songs that really show off propulsion and palpability so i can do some tests?
Hi Rd,
For propulsion I HIGHLY recommend Ginger Baker Trio's- Going Back Home , Atlantic 82652-2- Superb interplay between the bass and drums.
For palpability and soundstaging try Janis Ian- Breaking Silence which also has superb bass reproduction.
Also Steve Earle- Train A Coming a superb mostly live in the studio recording in which the musicians AND Steve should be right in the room with you. ESPECIALLY try the tracks Goodbye and Tecumseh Valley. A truly superb mostly acoustic recording that I wish I was responsible for.
One more I can't recommend highly enough to give your system an all around great workout is Sally Oldfield- Water Bearer preferrably vinyl or the domestic CD. The Japanese mastering is nothing short of music killing.
Also have you ever tried --alt-preset insane with lame_dm_rev6?
I have but my comments are VERY preliminary and should not be relied on at this point. So far in limited testing the presets do odd things to acoustic recordings. I intend to investigate further so I may be off on this but it is my first impression.
I know there are problems with the mp3 format in general, but I'm curious to seek if you notice that --alt-preset insane is considerably better than -alt-preset normal... if you find that insane is not much better then it seems to me that normal is the way to go if someone is going to use mp3 at all....
I have not tried normal yet.
Thanks,
AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE...
Beatles
If bitrate is of no concern to you why are you looking at lossy as opposed to lossless formats? Or, is it just an academic exercise to evaluate the current state of the art?
john33
Originally posted by john33
Beatles
If bitrate is of no concern to you why are you looking at lossy as opposed to lossless formats? Or, is it just an academic exercise to evaluate the current state of the art?
john33
Exactly. Become a bit of a hobby. Always enjoyed tweaking which I used to spend hours doing to my turntables. I also suspect one can get fairly decent sound.
Originally posted by JohnV
Interesting. Btw what kind of commandlines you used for MPC, I guess you also disabled mid/side-stereo? I could give you some hints for very high bitrate/quality commandline.
I don't think there's much use to go over 600-700kbps because then lossless coding becomes a viable choise.
Yeah, I wouldn't save masters in lossy format either...
Certainly I did disable mid/side. The latest I played with was this commandline but it needs tuning. Yields bitrates in the mid 500s.
-nmt 18 -tmn 54 -ms 0 -tmpMask 0
My suspicion is that raising the nmt and lowering the tmn will yield better results. But it's very early in testing Musepack but so far it and AAC seem the only viable ones.
Beatles,
While it is possible that you hear the differences that you describe, and that you say -insane with MPC is "not good enough" so to speak (I assume you mean non-transparent), of course people are going to want abx test results and specific clips to back this up. Just as VeryBlur's comment about "lifelessness".
In general I tend to find these sorts of comments usually do not lead to anything absolute or objective because they are never proven, and often the person making the claims has no desire from the beginning to make any attempt to even try to prove them. However, if this is not the case with what you are testing, then it would be a nice surprise...
About your MPC lines, if you find that mid-side stereo and temporal masking are failing, I would like very specific examples of this.
Forgive me for my skepticism, but I do find it a bit hard to believe that even being an audio engineer, you would find a format so non-transparent... one that has been tuned so highly by people with some of the most sensitive ears around already..
So again, as with VeryBlur, I'd ask for both abx results and test clips for all claims regarding something not being adequate, especially in regards to MPC. Anything is possible, but without this information it does the discussion little good IMO.
Perhaps you can understand, but in discussions such as these, just stating that you are an audiophile or that you are a recording engineer and that you claim a certain thing, without having established some sort of credibility beforehand or providing some sort of reference (in the form of a test clip), well.. we can't just take things for granted.
No offense of course with any of this, it's just standard operating procedure.
Oh, and yes the IRC channel is a good place to discuss things.
Originally posted by Dibrom
Beatles,
While it is possible that you hear the differences that you describe, and that you say -insane with MPC is "not good enough" so to speak (I assume you mean non-transparent), of course people are going to want abx test results and specific clips to back this up. Just as VeryBlur's comment about "lifelessness".
No it is not "possible" it is what I hear. Now it sounds fine on my computer with Klipsch speakers but on my home rig which is let's just say insanely expensive the shortcomings can be heard. And I KNOW what they're supposed to sound like because I did the majority of the sessions and I know what was put on tape...I did it.
For the shortcomings I find please see my other post. I think transparency is an overused term here.
In general I tend to find these sorts of comments usually do not lead to anything absolute or objective because they are never proven, and often the person making the claims has no desire from the beginning to make any attempt to even try to prove them. However, if this is not the case with what you are testing, then it would be a nice surprise...
Firstly I have not made any concrete statements just very preliminary findings which will be more fully tested. And should I come up with what I think I will I'll be more than pleased to share even though you and I listen to decidedly different music. My testing is based exclusively on acoustic instruments recorded in real space.
About your MPC lines, if you find that mid-side stereo and temporal masking are failing, I would like very specific examples of this.
This I will do. I am as yet unsure about the temporal masking but the mid/side I have no doubts about. Further testing is required.
Forgive me for my skepticism, but I do find it a bit hard to believe that even being an audio engineer, you would find a format so non-transparent... one that has been tuned so highly by people with some of the most sensitive ears around all ready..
Skepticism is healthy. My ears are how I earn my living and have never let me down yet.
So again, as with VeryBlur, I'd ask for both abx results and test clips for all claims regarding something not being adequate, especially in regards to MPC. Anything is possible, but without this information it does the discussion little good IMO.
Let me get further on and I will send samples as I suspect the music I'm using will be a little hard to find. MPC is quite a good format yards beyong MP3, of this there is no doubt but AAC has tremendous potential and I am focusing moreso on it right now.
Oh, and yes the IRC channel is a good place to discuss things.
Look forward to seeing you there.
I think an experienced sound recording engineer of course uses blind iterative ABX, ABC or AB to verify his results especially when testing lossy codecs at very high bitrates.
Psychological factor affects all of us, no matter who you are or how much experince you have, how good hearing you have. It of course depends on a person how large this factor is.
And to answer your question about nmt/tmn, yes you should use higher nmt values, I believe tmn is already very very high.
My ears constantly let me down although I have quite much experience from listening testings - or it's not the ears, it the ear-mind combination. That's why blind iterative testing is absolutely necessary, and more important the higher quality you test.
No it is not "possible" it is what I hear.
Understandably you may be
sure this is the case for you, but try to realize that in attempting to keep discussions objective for the sake of definite progress, we cannot just assume that you
are hearing these things yet.
Now it sounds fine on my computer with Klipsch speakers but on my home rig which is let's just say insanely expensive the shortcomings can be heard.
Er.. Ok, well with that I have a feeling these are claims that are not too likely to be proven if "they can only be heard on an insanely expensive system". Of course, maybe I'm wrong about this..
For the shortcomings I find please see my other post. I think transparency is an overused term here.
Is it? Transparency is used to describe when you can no longer hear a difference, usually as in you cannot abx a difference any longer (which should be considered as not hearing a difference).
Subjective comments about the "feel" of music, which cannot be proven by the person making them, should not be taken account when describing "transparency" because, I believe to the individual listener, it is an objective term.
Firstly I have not made any concrete statements just very preliminary findings which will be more fully tested.
Yes, I know. But the fact that you are using MPC in the 500kbps range implies you believe there are some rather large flaws I'd say. Especially considering the format is designed for the 192-256kbps range.
And should I come up with what I think I will I'll be more than pleased to share even though you and I listen to decidedly different music.
I'd very much appreciate it
My testing is based exclusively on acoustic instruments recorded in real space.
That's fine. I'm not sure if you are implying that synthesized music is inadequate or not though.. that's a whole other argument I don't wish to get into again
This I will do. I am as yet unsure about the temporal masking but the mid/side I have no doubts about. Further testing is required.
Well... see, there is one claim there So bring on the test clips.. Of course, I'll wait for you to come to more of a conclusion first.
MPC is quite a good format yards beyong MP3, of this there is no doubt but AAC has tremendous potential and I am focusing moreso on it right now.
Well I'm very interested in what you find there then.. I can tell you right now that AAC isn't as transparent as MPC with the same level of confidence that you are stating you hear these differences. I can provide examples where this is the case as well, however since most of the music I listen to is synthesized I'm not sure you'd be interested. However, since you feel that temporal masking needs to be disabled in MPC (which would in effect increase temporal resolution even more although it is already better than AAC), I'd be
very surprised if you thought AAC was better, because it is exactly this temporal area which AAC fails in compared to MPC.
As you discuss decay, one of the most common (and ugly) artifacts with transform coders such as MP3, and to a much less extent AAC, is the pre/post-echo issues, or the temporal smearing. So I'd be interested to see how you perceive this given the circumstances..
And just out of curiosity, which AAC encoder/build are you using?
Look forward to seeing you there.
Indeed
Hi Beatles,
this is great, I'm enjoying your posts very much! A recording engineer has always been missing on these boards
Originally posted by Beatles
One more I can't recommend highly enough to give your system an all around great workout is Sally Oldfield- Water Bearer preferrably vinyl or the domestic CD. The Japanese mastering is nothing short of music killing.
Hmm, I just dug that out of my CD collection - it sounds quite ordinary to me, but maybe I have got the wrong recording (it's from the "The Sun In My Eyes" Best Of album, released in Germany in 1997 by Delta Music - never heard of them).
I like very much for "richness" of sound (and therefore for testing codecs or speakers): Maggie Reilly's "Follow The Midnight Sun" ("commercial pop" with hardly intelligent lyrics, but IMO great music) and Dire Straits' "On Every Street". If you could get your hands on either of them (especially the first one), could you tell me if you would also consider these good for testing?
(If this request is maybe a bit cheeky and over the top, then sorry )
I'll certainly try to get hold of those other 3 songs that you mentioned.
Thanks again for your interesting posts!
CU
Dominic
i]Originally posted by Dibrom
Er.. Ok, well with that I have a feeling these are claims that are not too likely to be proven if "they can only be heard on an insanely expensive system". Of course, maybe I'm wrong about this.
No they can be reproduced on a much more real world system I have. Hafler Power/Pre, Pro Ac speakers.
Is it? Transparency is used to describe when you can no longer hear a difference, usually as in you cannot abx a difference any longer (which should be considered as not hearing a difference).
Subjective comments about the "feel" of music, which cannot be proven by the person making them, should not be taken account when describing "transparency" because, I believe to the individual listener, it is an objective term.
This depends on what system you are A-Bing through. If it's incapable of proper resolution or producing a credible soundstage then people will of course say there's no difference at a much lower level of resolution....doesn't mean it wouldn't be heard on a better system. The threshold tends to be limited by the resolving power of the sound chain. As to feel the points I make above are VERY valid in music reproduction.
Yes, I know. But the fact that you are using MPC in the 500kbps range implies you believe there are some rather large flaws I'd say. Especially considering the format is designed for the 192-256kbps range.
Yes I hear flaws and remember I know INTIMATELY what was layed down at the sessions I engineered. I know every sound on those sessions...sometimes too well.
That's fine. I'm not sure if you are implying that synthesized music is inadequate or not though.. that's a whole other argument I don't wish to get into again
No I don't wish to get into that...I've done many electronic sessions and then spent many hours recreating an ARTIFICIAL soundstage. Electronic instruments certainly have "sounds" that must be reproduced accurately. It CANNOT be used however for imaging or soundstage testing.
Well I'm very interested in what you find there then.. I can tell you right now that AAC isn't as transparent as MPC with the same level of confidence that you are stating you hear these differences. I can provide examples where this is the case as well, however since most of the music I listen to is synthesized I'm not sure you'd be interested. However, since you feel that temporal masking needs to be disabled in MPC (which would in effect increase temporal resolution even more although it is already better than AAC), I'd be very surprised if you thought AAC was better, because it is exactly this temporal area which AAC fails in compared to MPC.
I have not stated a preference for one format over the other yet...you might be surprised what a high resolution system might reveal. As of this point I'd say AAC has much POTENTIAL.
Originally posted by Volcano
Hi Beatles,
this is great, I'm enjoying your posts very much! A recording engineer has always been missing on these boards
Hmm, I just dug that out of my CD collection - it sounds quite ordinary to me, but maybe I have got the wrong recording (it's from the "The Sun In My Eyes" Best Of album, released in Germany in 1997 by Delta Music - never heard of them).
I like very much for "richness" of sound (and therefore for testing codecs or speakers): Maggie Reilly's "Follow The Midnight Sun" ("commercial pop" with hardly intelligent lyrics, but IMO great music) and Dire Straits' "On Every Street". If you could get your hands on either of them (especially the first one), could you tell me if you would also consider these good for testing?
(If this request is maybe a bit cheeky and over the top, then sorry )
I'll certainly try to get hold of those other 3 songs that you mentioned.
Thanks again for your interesting posts!
Hi Dominic,
Thanks for the kind words. I'm not familiar with that particular album but beware of any Best of collections. A lot of times the master tapes aren't even used.
On Every Street is deservedly known as an extremely good dynamic recording. Not familiar with that Maggie track but will hunt it down. Loved her vocals on Moonlight Shadows which is a horrible recording BTW.
Beatles, I would be insterested what do you think about Ogg Vorbis GT2 350kbps (RC2 Garf tuned 2).
http://sjeng.sourceforge.net/ftp/vorbis/oggdropgt2.exe (http://sjeng.sourceforge.net/ftp/vorbis/oggdropgt2.exe)
Originally posted by JohnV
Beatles, I would be insterested what do you think about Ogg Vorbis GT2 350kbps (RC2 Garf tuned 2).
http://sjeng.sourceforge.net/ftp/vorbis/oggdropgt2.exe (http://sjeng.sourceforge.net/ftp/vorbis/oggdropgt2.exe)
Hi John,
Just downloaded and will play around with it. Haven't tried OGG in a while.
Originally posted by Beatles
This depends on what system you are A-Bing through. If it's incapable of proper resolution or producing a credible soundstage then people will of course say there's no difference at a much lower level of resolution....doesn't mean it wouldn't be heard on a better system. The threshold tends to be limited by the resolving power of the sound chain. As to feel the points I make above are VERY valid in music reproduction.
One thing to keep in mind, is that many of the people who have been advocating and testing various codecs, and whom use "transparent" to describe the sound, usually have tested on at least a somewhat decent system, but what is more important is that they usually have excellent hearing and certainly have a feel for the sound and how it will behave across many situations (both in encoding and the resulting quality).
Listening on a higher end system may be more revealing, but I don't believe that it will be so much so that the sound would go from being transparent, to completely non-transparent (as in only decent now).
As an example, I've been in many different situations as far as the quality of equipment I have access to is concerned, and the differences (or lack of) that I hear in one situation on a higher end system do not disappear at all on lower end equipment. In fact, at the moment at least half of the time I'm on a computer right now I only have access to a laptop.. with an utterly horrible soundcard and not the greatest headphones, but the differences I hear on a much better system are surely still there on this lower end system as well.
In my experience, psychoacoustic audio compression quality is not so much like "standard" audio quality in that slight differences become more apparent in different situations (such as the differences noted between vinyl and CD).
Yes I hear flaws and remember I know INTIMATELY what was layed down at the sessions I engineered. I know every sound on those sessions...sometimes too well.
So is this something that anyone else here is going to be able to reproduce at all? I'm just curious. The general tone of this discussion seems to be moving into the realm where proving any of this is going to be difficult to near impossible. First you have the extraordinarily expensive equipment factor (which the majority wont), and second a recording that you seem to know very well, but I assume others won't. Add that to the fact that you are talking about encoding MPC at 500kbps and it just seems like this will be a case of "I can hear it, even if you can't" and that you will be the only one able to say that. Again I could be wrong.. but the fact that I don't know anyone who seriously encodes MPC to 500kbps really makes me wonder...
No I don't wish to get into that...I've done many electronic sessions and then spent many hours recreating an ARTIFICIAL soundstage. Electronic instruments certainly have "sounds" that must be reproduced accurately. It CANNOT be used however for imaging or soundstage testing.
I agree with this partially, but not entirely. Yes, acoustic instruments recorded with natural reverb and the like will create nuances that synthesized music may not have but the issue is more whether or not a codec will reproduce the soundstage, whatever it may be, period. This includes an artificial soundstage or any imaging effects created from synthesized music. In short, what applies to one should apply to the other though perhaps not in the same obvious manner. I also believe that what you are listening for in the soundstage plays just as much of a role. There certainly is a different effect in this regard from non-synthetic music.
I have not stated a preference for one format over the other yet...you might be surprised what a high resolution system might reveal. As of this point I'd say AAC has much POTENTIAL.
The temporal resolution factor is a result of the fundamental encoding methodologies of the encoders themselves. AAC uses a method which favors higher frequency domain resolution, MPC uses a method which favors higher temporal resolution. This is a fact, and is not going to change no matter how expensive a system you listen on.. That's just the way it is.
Both of these use different methods to compensate for the other however. AAC uses block size switching (it switches to smaller window sizes if it thinks higher temporal resolution is needed) to compensate for a lack of temporal resolution in certain cases. In practice I believe that MPC's method works better because even with block switching AAC's temporal resolution is not as high as MPC, and I believe most who have done extensive listening tests, experiments, and research in this matter would agree -- MPC is much more often transparent (or near transparent if you'd prefer) than AAC.
So basically, the temporal resolution matter is not going to change, and if you favor that (as would seem the case by further increasing this by turning off temporal masking, and discussing blurring of the sounds and decays.. both of which are temporal matters), then I cannot see how you might come to the conclusion that AAC was as good or possibly better.
I realize you haven't made your decision yet at any rate, and I'm also not implying that AAC isn't also a very fine format, because it definitely is, I'm just stating some points.
Whilst all this is extremely interesting with many comments and opinions on all sides being expressed which I can agree with, aren't we getting a little away from certain truths here?
Surely by its very nature, a lossy codec contains an implicit admission that elements that were present in the original recording are being omitted. The point then is whether a particular codec can achieve a level of 'transparency' at a sensible bitrate. If certain negative characteristics of a particular codec are only evident using studio, or near studio equipment, are they relevant in the context of normal use?
By using a lossy codec in the first place it must necessarily be the case that one is willing, for whatever reason, to suffer some degradation, however small, in the quality of the reproduction. If such is not the case, then don't use a lossy format.
The real question is not whether there will be some measurable degradation, it is whether that level of degradation is acceptable when the compressed recording is reproduced.
It is really 'horses for courses'. High quality sound source for high quality sound reproducing equipment, lossy format for all sorts of reasons of convenience BUT surely NOT for reproduction on the best equipment that money can buy.
Right, now I've had my 2 cents worth, do please continue this fascinating discussion!
john33,
While some of us accept that lossy codecs aren't 100% transparent, others claim that mpc is exactly this.
We'll ignore the torture clips which are artificially generated, since nothing lossy can code these (as yet), so let's just talk about "real" music (whatever that may be). In fact let's narrow it down even further - let's limit ourselves to sounds than can be captured by a microphone in an environment where no electrically powered things are producing sound - i.e. a purely acoustic event, captured by two microphones - this is as basic as recording gets!
Dibrom believes that mpc can code such a recording transparently - that no one will be able to detect the effect of mpc encoding/decoding reliably in a blind ABX or ABC test. Am I right, or am I putting words into your mouth Dibrom?
Beatles clearly disagrees - he hears a difference. His recordings are probably not so basic as I've described, but they're not so artificial or special or whatever that they're codec killers. They're just acoustic recordings, and mpc audibly changes them.
This topic fascinates me, because I have had a hunch for several years now that people such as Beatles are right - but I've never found one who can prove that they are right. The reason I think that there are people who can detect mpc encoding is because I know of people who can detect when a recording has been re-dithered. That's a change to the last bit. mpc (and every other lossy codec) is doing a LOT more than this, so surely someone must be able to detect it? Even in the absence of (what we conventionally call) artefacts.
Beatles,
So, do you have the patience (and time!) to do a blind test? Can you try to burn the original .wav back to a CD-R with the decoded mpc version as well. (Make sure you didn't use -scale on the encoder, because that would ruin things.) You just need the two files on your hard drive, but you need to create maybe 9 or 12 tracks on your CD-R, in groups of three.
In each group of three tracks, you include the mpc version once, and the original version twice. You (or preferably someone else!) randomise the position of the mpc version within the three.
Your task: play the CD-R, and pick the odd one out from each group of three. Give your answers to the person who radnmoised the tracks in the first place, and collect your score.
If you get them all correct, Dibrom will eat his hat (now I'm putting words into your mouth!). If you find the differences suddenly vanish, and you can't hear any difference between the three tracks, then you've been victim to the placeabo effect.
I hope you can find the time to do this test. The results will be fascinating.
Cheers,
David.
http://www.David.Robinson.org/ (http://www.David.Robinson.org/)
Originally posted by 2Bdecided
john33,
While some of us accept that lossy codecs aren't 100% transparent, others claim that mpc is exactly this.
We'll ignore the torture clips which are artificially generated, since nothing lossy can code these (as yet), so let's just talk about "real" music (whatever that may be). In fact let's narrow it down even further - let's limit ourselves to sounds than can be captured by a microphone in an environment where no electrically powered things are producing sound - i.e. a purely acoustic event, captured by two microphones - this is as basic as recording gets!
This is the only way to properly discern the damaging effects of lossy encoding in my opinion. The only criterion MUST be real instruments in real space. It is truly the "absolute sound".
Dibrom believes that mpc can code such a recording transparently - that no one will be able to detect the effect of mpc encoding/decoding reliably in a blind ABX or ABC test. Am I right, or am I putting words into your mouth Dibrom?
Beatles clearly disagrees - he hears a difference. His recordings are probably not so basic as I've described, but they're not so artificial or special or whatever that they're codec killers. They're just acoustic recordings, and mpc audibly changes them.
I do have some recordings of acoustic performances in churches and halls with exceptional sound but due to copyright and ethics I cannot share them. Yes MPC audibly changes these recordings. As I've said to Dibrom there is obvious soundstage truncation and some changes in fundamentals ie. the woody sound of a properly recorded cello.
This topic fascinates me, because I have had a hunch for several years now that people such as Beatles are right - but I've never found one who can prove that they are right. The reason I think that there are people who can detect mpc encoding is because I know of people who can detect when a recording has been re-dithered. That's a change to the last bit. mpc (and every other lossy codec) is doing a LOT more than this, so surely someone must be able to detect it? Even in the absence of (what we conventionally call) artefacts.
It depends what the definition of artifacts is.........
Beatles,
So, do you have the patience (and time!) to do a blind test? Can you try to burn the original .wav back to a CD-R with the decoded mpc version as well. (Make sure you didn't use -scale on the encoder, because that would ruin things.) You just need the two files on your hard drive, but you need to create maybe 9 or 12 tracks on your CD-R, in groups of three.
In each group of three tracks, you include the mpc version once, and the original version twice. You (or preferably someone else!) randomise the position of the mpc version within the three.
Your task: play the CD-R, and pick the odd one out from each group of three. Give your answers to the person who radnmoised the tracks in the first place, and collect your score.
If you get them all correct, Dibrom will eat his hat (now I'm putting words into your mouth!). If you find the differences suddenly vanish, and you can't hear any difference between the three tracks, then you've been victim to the placeabo effect.
I hope you can find the time to do this test. The results will be fascinating.
I do intend to do further testing but not for the purpose of making Dibrom eat his words...I have found him to be quite agreeable even if we do disagree..........
http://www.David.Robinson.org/ (http://www.David.Robinson.org/)
Don't get me wrong - the purpose isn't to get Dibrom to eat his words. My reason for asking you is to satisfy my own curiosity!
I hope your planned tests are blind.
Cheers,
David.
P.S. I assume you know much more about copyright than me, but it appears that you can distribute a 30 second extract of any recording for educational use under the 10% rule. 30 seconds may not be enough for us to soak up the atmosphere and acoustics, but it might help.
Originally posted by Dibrom
One thing to keep in mind, is that many of the people who have been advocating and testing various codecs, and whom use "transparent" to describe the sound, usually have tested on at least a somewhat decent system, but what is more important is that they usually have excellent hearing and certainly have a feel for the sound and how it will behave across many situations (both in encoding and the resulting quality).
Listening on a higher end system may be more revealing, but I don't believe that it will be so much so that the sound would go from being transparent, to completely non-transparent (as in only decent now).
Here's my point. The main differences I hear are in soundstaging and in certain fundamentals. Now if the system which is being used for auditioning is incapable of rendering the soundstage or the fundamentals properly then you won't be able to hear a difference because the system is the limiting factor ergo it will sound perfectly fine.
So is this something that anyone else here is going to be able to reproduce at all? I'm just curious. The general tone of this discussion seems to be moving into the realm where proving any of this is going to be difficult to near impossible. First you have the extraordinarily expensive equipment factor (which the majority wont), and second a recording that you seem to know very well, but I assume others won't. Add that to the fact that you are talking about encoding MPC at 500kbps and it just seems like this will be a case of "I can hear it, even if you can't" and that you will be the only one able to say that. Again I could be wrong.. but the fact that I don't know anyone who seriously encodes MPC to 500kbps really makes me wonder...
I t can be heard on my real world system as well as recordings I didn't do but am intimately familiar with after years of using them for auditioning purposes. Even at 500BR there are differences. Such is the nature of lossy compression.
I agree with this partially, but not entirely. Yes, acoustic instruments recorded with natural reverb and the like will create nuances that synthesized music may not have but the issue is more whether or not a codec will reproduce the soundstage, whatever it may be, period. This includes an artificial soundstage or any imaging effects created from synthesized music. In short, what applies to one should apply to the other though perhaps not in the same obvious manner. I also believe that what you are listening for in the soundstage plays just as much of a role. There certainly is a different effect in this regard from non-synthetic music.
While I feel that acoustic instruments in a natural setting is far more appropriate your point is well taken. As well please see my above comments regarding the auditioning equipment.
So basically, the temporal resolution matter is not going to change, and if you favor that (as would seem the case by further increasing this by turning off temporal masking, and discussing blurring of the sounds and decays.. both of which are temporal matters), then I cannot see how you might come to the conclusion that AAC was as good or possibly better.
Turning off temporal masking was merely part of the testing procedure. That happened to be the last command line I had used. At this point I prefer to listen rather than possibly be swayed by any technical arguments. Prefer to remain as open as possible.
I realize you haven't made your decision yet at any rate, and I'm also not implying that AAC isn't also a very fine format, because it definitely is, I'm just stating some points.
Beatles,
could you please use the quotes properly? It is very hard to read you replies with quotes, because one can't distinguish what you say from what the person you are replying to said.
It's easy (note that the < and > have to be replaced with square brackets, [ and ]):
<quote>The person you are replying to said this.</quote>
This is what you are replying.
You must not include your reply within the <quote>...</quote>, if you want to quote multiple passages, you have to use the <quote>...</quote> manually.
Sorry for being off topic.
CU
Dominic
Originally posted by 2Bdecided
Don't get me wrong - the purpose isn't to get Dibrom to eat his words. My reason for asking you is to satisfy my own curiosity!
I hope your planned tests are blind.
Cheers,
David.
P.S. I assume you know much more about copyright than me, but it appears that you can distribute a 30 second extract of any recording for educational use under the 10% rule. 30 seconds may not be enough for us to soak up the atmosphere and acoustics, but it might help.
No I understand that wasn't your purpose David. As to the clips it's more a sense of ethics. Without express permission from the artists I won't share even 30 seconds of their work. This policy has allowed me to work many times with many well known artists. They know I can be trusted. For instance Paul McCartney's latest album was sabotaged and available on the internet 2 months before last weeks release. My word is my bond on these issues.
Originally posted by Volcano
Beatles,
could you please use the quotes properly? It is very hard to read you replies with quotes, because one can't distinguish what you say from what the person you are replying to said.
It's easy (note that the < and > have to be replaced with square brackets, [ and ]):
<quote>The person you are replying to said this.</quote>
This is what you are replying.
You must not include your reply within the <quote>...</quote>, if you want to quote multiple passages, you have to use the <quote>...</quote> manually.
Sorry for being off topic.
CU
Dominic
Hi Dominic,
Just can't seem to nail that.
Originally posted by 2Bdecided
While some of us accept that lossy codecs aren't 100% transparent, others claim that mpc is exactly this.
[/b]
Which others claim that MPC is 100% transparent? If you are speaking of a few people in particular, perhaps references where they made these claims would also be in order.
We'll ignore the torture clips which are artificially generated, since nothing lossy can code these (as yet), so let's just talk about "real" music (whatever that may be).
Which torture clips? And what do you mean "nothing lossy can code these"? A little bit more specific of a definition would help here.
Dibrom believes that mpc can code such a recording transparently - that no one will be able to detect the effect of mpc encoding/decoding reliably in a blind ABX or ABC test. Am I right, or am I putting words into your mouth Dibrom?
This is a total misconception, and an annoying one at that. I have not said that MPC is
absolutely transparent,
ever. If you can find an example of me stating that this is the case (as in no other person on this planet can hear a difference) then please clue me in, because I sure cannot recall making such claims.
Beatles clearly disagrees - he hears a difference.
Correction. He
claims he hears a difference. A claim which as of yet is just as unsubstantiated as VeryBlurs comments (of course no offense to anyone with that). Are we to disregard all manners of objectivity here and simply take for granted that someone is able to hear the difference between the original and a 500kbps MPC just because they say they can?
I'm a little bit disappointed David that you would first of all totally misinterpret my stance on this (which I think you actually probably understood anyway), and are so quick to defend something which for all intents and purposes is a little bit unbelievable. One has to wonder what circumstances would bring about such an approach as this..
They're just acoustic recordings, and mpc audibly changes them.
Again you have
absolutely no basis for this. You have not seen any proof, just as I have not. So why are you so certain that this is the case? Why are you so eager to come to this conclusion?
That's a change to the last bit. mpc (and every other lossy codec) is doing a LOT more than this, so surely someone must be able to detect it? Even in the absence of (what we conventionally call) artefacts.
Sure, it is possible, and even likely that someone will hear a difference somewhere. If you got the impression from someone that MPC is as absolutely perfect as lossless encoding, then you seriously got the wrong idea. However, the likelyhood of this happening in the circumstances given (distinguishing 500+kbps MPC with high reliability) is going to be
extremely rare.
If you get them all correct, Dibrom will eat his hat (now I'm putting words into your mouth!).
Lol.. ok David. I'm sorry but I'm only skeptical, as you all should be. The fact that you are so willing to believe these incredible claims on word alone is in my opinion a little questionable, where as in other cases you would be taking the opposite stance totally. Trying to turn this all back around on me somehow with the comments made here and above is simply laughable.
What I am interested in is working with something that can be measured and can be proven. Something tangible which is actually meaningful from a developers point of view. There is nothing useful in claims which are never substantiated in one form or another.
So far, both of the claims in this thread made in regards to MPC have not been proven and chance favors that they probably won't be (though I am not ignoring the possibility that they still might), and until they have been I will retain my high degree of skepticism. This doesn't mean I have something personal with this issue or that I am fundamentally against anyone who makes these types of claims as apparently some are mistakenly assuming, it simply means that I favor the evidence... and so far I'm still waiting on that.
Beatles,
Here is another example of the quote system.
[quote ]This is a quote[/quote ]
(remove the spaces in the quote bracket to activate the tag)
Would come out looking:
This is a quote
If you want the bold effect you just do it like this:
[quote ][B ]This is a quote[/B ][/quote ]
(Of course without the spaces again)
And it will come out:
This is a quote
Hope that helps
Dibrom,
I was not wishing to state indisputable facts. I was merely wishing to prepare the playing field upon which Beatles will report what he hears (hopefully in blind tests). To do this in a convenient amount of time, I made generalisations.
Has anyone claimed that MPC is 100% transparent? I don't know! But to paraphrase you: "please provide ABX proof that you are really hearing a difference with MPC - no one has managed this yet". This gives the impression that MPC is near transparent, doesn't it?
The obvious argument against this is that some intentionally difficult signals (I was thinking of that string of impulses someone came up with the other week) can't be encoded by anything yet. I mentioned such signals specifically to exclude them. If they exist, then we're not talking about them here. If they don't exist, then we're still not talking about them here! Good enough?
Beatles clearly disagrees - he hears a difference.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Correction. He claims he hears a difference.
No, he hears a difference! That's how the placeabo effect works. Hearing is subjective, and currently he hears a subjective difference. Will this perceived difference vanish in a blind test? I don't know. But for now, he hears a difference.
Whether the perception is of something real or imagined, he still perceives it.
Sorry - that was unfair - that wasn't what I originally meant.
Anyway, whilst that's my rebuttal to your argument (and I'm not here to argue btw - I'm here in this thread to find out what Beatles is really hearing) it's not the reason I wrote "he hears a difference". I wrote it like that to give Beatles the benefit of the doubt. He's much more likely to come back and give us the results of any test he does if we approach him like that, rather that saying "you're probably wrong, but go and prove it anyway".
And for the record, I think he probably does hear a difference (in the sense YOU mean) - but can he ABX it reliably? We'll see (I hope!).
Finally, Dibrom, if I believed 100% that he heard a difference in the way you seem to think I was implying it, why would I be asking him to blind test? And if I seem a little more inclined to believe him, it's because I've found it's amazing what tiny difference people working in studios can detect in their own work. Some people working in recording studios are complete idiots, and shouldn't be let near half decent music. But some are passionate about what they do, and create pure magic. And (like the princess and the pea - which was brought up in another thread) they can detect seemingly infintesimally small changes to their sound. So, I wait with an open mind - what did that blind test show Beatles?
Cheers,
David.
Originally posted by 2Bdecided
I wrote it like that to give Beatles the benefit of the doubt. He's much more likely to come back and give us the results of any test he does if we approach him like that, rather that saying "you're probably wrong, but go and prove it anyway".
Well, both I and Dibrom have had very nice interesting long talk at #project_mayhem irc-channel with Beatles. We were all in perfect understanding regarding the need for ABX results, so I don't think there are any problems.
Right, Beatles?
Beatles: This must be already obvious to you but just to make 100% sure. If you're using WinAmp to play MPC-files, make sure both "clipping prevention" and "EQ controlled by winamp" are NOT enabled (from the input plug-in configuration). Those should be disabled.
Although I'm almost 100% sure you knew this already...
Originally posted by 2Bdecided
But to paraphrase you: "please provide ABX proof that you are really hearing a difference with MPC - no one has managed this yet". This gives the impression that MPC is near transparent, doesn't it?
Yes it does. And if you are being realistic, statistics seems to show this as well. How many people do you know which can actually
prove they hear a difference with MPC vs how many can do the same for MP3 or many other formats?
As has already been stated we are dealing with lossy compression here, so nothing is going to be perfect, that's a given. But you seem to not want to give credit where credit is due here. I will continue to believe that MPC is near transparent for most people until I see most people start to ABX otherwise. I don't think that is unreasonable at all.
The obvious argument against this is that some intentionally difficult signals (I was thinking of that string of impulses someone came up with the other week) can't be encoded by anything yet. I mentioned such signals specifically to exclude them. If they exist, then we're not talking about them here. If they don't exist, then we're still not talking about them here! Good enough?
Ok. These signals are also hardly relevant here unless you really just want to try and push the point that MPC or other lossy formats are not
absolutely transparent. But we already knew that anyway (or should have). However, as for that last signal I know PsyTEL supposedly handled it fairly well, and MPC should have also, I didn't try either though.. of course they weren't able to do this at low bitrates, but does that matter?
Anyway, whilst that's my rebuttal to your argument (and I'm not here to argue btw - I'm here in this thread to find out what Beatles is really hearing) it's not the reason I wrote "he hears a difference". I wrote it like that to give Beatles the benefit of the doubt. He's much more likely to come back and give us the results of any test he does if we approach him like that, rather that saying "you're probably wrong, but go and prove it anyway".
Admittedly, I'm probably being a little bit too cynical and/or skeptical here, but really.. as Garf said earlier, we have seen many threads like this before. So far they have almost all ended up the same way -- a lot of talk and no results. Because of that I start to wonder the worth of having these long and drawn out discussions
before seeing results. After all, there is no point in arguing over something that doesn't exist. So because of all that, I'll naturally assume there isn't a difference until I can see something a bit more conclusive.
Finally, Dibrom, if I believed 100% that he heard a difference in the way you seem to think I was implying it, why would I be asking him to blind test?
From the general tone of your post it seemed reasonable to assume that you already believed all of the claims (generalizations or not), especially when taking into account the comments geared towards "proving Dibrom wrong", etc.
And if I seem a little more inclined to believe him, it's because I've found it's amazing what tiny difference people working in studios can detect in their own work. Some people working in recording studios are complete idiots, and shouldn't be let near half decent music. But some are passionate about what they do, and create pure magic. And (like the princess and the pea - which was brought up in another thread) they can detect seemingly infintesimally small changes to their sound. So, I wait with an open mind - what did that blind test show Beatles?
I do agree with this, and personally I'd be a little more inclined to believe if we hadn't seen many of these situations already which turned out to be nothing more than talk.
At any rate, I'd like to add something here. I think anyone who can actually claim to hear the differences here that they do, they should take ff123's MAD challenge also (http://www.ff123.net/madchallenge.html (http://www.ff123.net/madchallenge.html)). It would seem a relatively easy task given the circumstances.
Finally...
Beatles,
If you can actually hear these differences and prove them, then great. I would be very interested in seeing this. Just understand (and I believe you do from our earlier discussions) that I am naturally a bit skeptical in these situations due to past experience. That does
NOT mean that I'm not interested in your results though, I certainly am. In short, don't let me scare you off or anything like that, that certainly isn't my intention
Well, I've talked pretty much with Beatles already. This "case" just seems different than all the other "I hear this and that" cases. He is willing to provide ABXes and testclips. He was willing to give his time to tweak MPC highbitrate (low bitrate for him) for better quality. He's not going away like all the other "I hear this and that"- people.
He's truely an audiophile with access to electrostatic speakers and heaphones, and of course uses at least 24/96 high quality soundcards, knows the people in professional audiophile/HiFi world and has 25 years experience.
He also estimated he's among the top 5% of all professional audiophiles. His ears are his living.
All the things suggest that this is different case than all the others..
I'm starting to believe...
Unfortunately he has bad news for all the people using MP3, no matter Lame or FhG, no matter what bitrate or settings...
Originally posted by JohnV
Unfortunately he has bad news for all the people using MP3, no matter Lame or FhG, no matter what bitrate or settings...
Let's not lose total perspective here though. Beatles is now also talking about 700kbps MPC. In my opinion this is totally useless from any sort of practical standpoint. If bitrates near this are needed to acheive a "satisfactory" (I gather still not transparent?) level of quality for him, then he should be using lossless in the first place and not lossy. Lossy compression is used for its convenience factor. It is used because with a good encoder,
most of time it can be of sufficient quality (or even transparent) enough to where the accepted degradation in quality (audible or not) is worth it for the benefits you get.
For me personally, 400kbps average is the threshold that I am not really willing to go beyond for lossy compression. There just isn't much point after that IMO.
Also I think it's a fairly safe bet that even if Beatles hears all of this, and he can somehow prove it, most of what he is discussing will not apply to the rest of us. Most of the rest of us are not "in the top 5% of audiophiles" (how do you substantiate this claim also? ) And certainly most of us don't have "insanely expensive" equipment in the form of electrostatic speakers and the like. And even if the rest of that is a given, most of us probably just plain couldn't hear the difference at that level period.
So all of this becomes interesting from a research point of view (I'm certainly still interested in seeing one hear the difference at this level), and tuning of high bitrates (300-400kbps) could be useful but I just think all of this is spiraling far out of the realm of practicality for
most people at this point.
Sure, I'm interested in quality, and
mostly I'm not concerned about bitrate, but when the bitrate begins to match that of lossless compression and it still isn't "perfect" then I really have to wonder the point behind that.
This is just my take... perhaps I'm alone in this sentiment.
Originally posted by Dibrom
Let's not lose total perspective here though. Beatles is now also talking about 700kbps MPC. In my opinion this is totally useless from any sort of practical standpoint. If bitrates near this are needed to acheive a "satisfactory" (I gather still not transparent?) level of quality for him, then he should be using lossless in the first place and not lossy. Lossy compression is used for its convenience factor. It is used because with a good encoder, most of time it can be of sufficient quality (or even transparent) enough to where the accepted degradation in quality (audible or not) is worth it for the benefits you get.
We managed to achieve some very excellent results with minimal tweaking at a BR of 500 and I'm willing to bet that can be further reduced. As it is 500 results in very manageable file sizes and very good sound quality. Lossless is fine but it's the tweakability of lossy that has me intrigued.
Also I think it's a fairly safe bet that even if Beatles hears all of this, and he can somehow prove it, most of what he is discussing will not apply to the rest of us. Most of the rest of us are not "in the top 5% of audiophiles" (how do you substantiate this claim also? ) And certainly most of us don't have "insanely expensive" equipment in the form of electrostatic speakers and the like. And even if the rest of that is a given, most of us probably just plain couldn't hear the difference at that level period.
Some comments are made with tongue FIRMLY in cheek Dibrom. I'm willing to bet that many people can hear the difference. Most differences were audible on my computer which only uses a Midiman 24/96 and Klipsch Promedias although much more audible on a higher resolving system.
So all of this becomes interesting from a research point of view (I'm certainly still interested in seeing one hear the difference at this level), and tuning of high bitrates (300-400kbps) could be useful but I just think all of this is spiraling far out of the realm of practicality for most people at this point...
I don't fully understand the psychological barrier of 300 - 400...I assume it's because the masses are used to 320 being the ULTIMATE in quality. Of course many people believe that CDs provide "perfect sound" as well. I think it's well possible with tweaking to get EXTREMELY good sound at a 400 or possibly a bit lower BR and still have a very manageable average file size of around 10 megs or even lower. That's quite a bit less than an .ape file and I don't think people would be coming to this site if good sound wasn't important to them.
Originally posted by Dibrom
Sure, I'm interested in quality, and mostly I'm not concerned about bitrate, but when the bitrate begins to match that of lossless compression and it still isn't "perfect" then I really have to wonder the point behind that.
One thing more to consider at this level of audio reproduction is the sound producing equipment. Probably only true HQ environment would be live studio sessions, followed by SACD medium followed by $10,000 CD-player/DAC system.
For what I have heard an audiophile would not even consider listening music through computer environment. Computer is far from ideal electric environment with its strong electric field disturbances, voltage fluctuations or in short, motherboard noise. Not even the best sound card in market could be fully protected from this.
Naturally this matter does not apply for us pathetic non-professional "mundanes" but at this level of audiophilia I would imagine it would be of grave importance.
Just my 0.02 €
Going back to Beatles original trio of codecs for evaluation, MPC, PsyTEL AAC and FAAC he, rightly, discounted FAAC early on because, as Menno himself concedes, FAAC currently exists as a reference Mpeg2/4 AAC codec; it is not tuned at all in terms of quality.
Bearing in mind that both MPC and PsyTEL AAC are 'closed' codecs, at least from the encoder standpoint, and that PsyTEL, unless I am mistaken is not even meant to be in 'free' circulation, wouldn't there be some mileage in some of the brains involved in the tuning of Lame diverting the attention to FAAC?
I realise that binary distribution of FAAC is 'verboten' in the patent context, but the source is freely available and compiles very readily with MinGW32 and other free compilers.
Are there any points I am missing here other than the lack of binary distrubtions? Although, that does not seem to preclude other patent/copyright bound codecs finding there way into distribution through the back door!!
Anybody any views on this? I applaud all the efforts in relation to Lame improvements, it would just be nice to see similar efforts being put into emerging technologies. Before anyone asks, I don't have either the degree of programming skills required, nor the knowledge of audio compression techniques, otherwise I'd be there.
Originally posted by john33
Bearing in mind that both MPC and PsyTEL AAC are 'closed' codecs, at least from the encoder standpoint, and that PsyTEL, unless I am mistaken is not even meant to be in 'free' circulation, wouldn't there be some mileage in some of the brains involved in the tuning of Lame diverting the attention to FAAC?
I don't know why? Psytel is allready so much ahead.
And there's already very good totally open, free alternative codec, Ogg Vorbis.
Originally posted by Beatles
We managed to achieve some very excellent results with minimal tweaking at a BR of 500 and I'm willing to bet that can be further reduced. As it is 500 results in very manageable file sizes and very good sound quality. Lossless is fine but it's the tweakability of lossy that has me intrigued.
That's fine, and I can understand it to an extent. I just want to state however that this level of quality you are talking about is not going to be relevant to a vast majority of people. If you categorize yourself as being at the top 5% of audiophiles and you admit you have some of the best equipment money can buy, then you just have to accept this fact as a given.
The reason I made this statement above however is because JohnV basically said "there is no hope for MP3, etc". This isn't exactly true. It may not be good enough for you, but that doesn't mean that for a large amount of people it won't be sufficient or at the least fairly high quality. I'm just trying to bring a little of this back into reality
Some comments are made with tongue FIRMLY in cheek Dibrom. I'm willing to bet that many people can hear the difference. Most differences were audible on my computer which only uses a Midiman 24/96 and Klipsch Promedias although much more audible on a higher resolving system.
You may be willing to bet this, but time and experience so far shows this not to be the case. For one, there are
very few people on
very few clips that I have ever seen say MPC was not transparent at lower bitrates, and usually in the worst case they become transparent around 200-300kbps. You are talking about 700kbps, though I guess maybe 500kbps now. At any rate, you are the only one so far who has been making these claims. I think it's fair to say that there will not be
many people which would hear the same thing.. not if you have the hearing ability you claim to have or the equipment, etc.
I don't fully understand the psychological barrier of 300 - 400...I assume it's because the masses are used to 320 being the ULTIMATE in quality.
The barrier of 400kbps is there because once you go beyond that it doesn't make sense to use lossy over lossless anymore. The benefits IMO no longer outweigh the downsides.
Keep in mind that lossy was created to save space. Thus it lends itself nicely to burning multiple albums to a cd-r or sharing/streaming music online. That's just the fact of it. When you start to create files that are so huge because of 700kbps and they are still lossy, then you lose those benefits, you have a huge file, and it's still not perfect no matter what.
Of course many people believe that CDs provide "perfect sound" as well. I think it's well possible with tweaking to get EXTREMELY good sound at a 400 or possibly a bit lower BR and still have a very manageable average file size of around 10 megs or even lower.
Maybe, but I wonder if going from 700kbps (which isn't perfect still) to 400kbps is going to be possible (thinking in terms of possible necessary modification to the code). And for all intents and purpose, most people here already think that 400kbps
is extremely good. If you hear problems with it and believe it can be made better, then that's great. The only thing I worry about is that nobody else will be able to hear these differences you speak of (to validate it), so it'd be you alone tuning all of this.
That's quite a bit less than an .ape file and I don't think people would be coming to this site if good sound wasn't important to them.
Yes people come to this site because sound quality is important to them. You have to realize though that most people do not require MPC at 700kbps for "good" sound. Most people don't even require above 200kbps for that matter.
Tuned modes for 400-500kbps would be great, but I'm not sure I can see them being very practical to most people. As it is, many of the people that use my presets in LAME complain about bitrates over 200kbps... how do you think you will convince them to use 400-500kbps for their files, when they likely won't even hear the difference over 200kbps or worst case 300kbps?
At any rate, all of this makes for some interesting theory, and if somehow a benefit can be had (tuning very high bitrate MPC), then that'd be really nice.. I just can't see all of this applying to the average user on this board or even some of the more really demanding people is all. I think it should be viewed with an appropriate amount of perspective. I mean no disrespect to you buy any of this, I'm just a little concerned with the direction much of this seems to be going in and that people will get the wrong idea (imagine, "300kbps?? that's not good enough, you should be using a higher bitrate because Beatles says so" ), especially given the comment that JohnV had made about MP3.
Originally posted by niktheblak
For what I have heard an audiophile would not even consider listening music through computer environment. Computer is far from ideal electric environment with its strong electric field disturbances, voltage fluctuations or in short, motherboard noise. Not even the best sound card in market could be fully protected from this.
This isn't necessarily true. The majority of digitally oriented studios are based around systems including high end sound cards for hd recording and the like. Take a look at some of the cards like the Delta1010, Layla, some of Creamware's cards, the LynxTwo, etc... not to mention all the Pro Tools stuff. These are the types of cards/hardware in use in many of those places and it's all based around computers at some point.
Originally posted by Dibrom
The reason I made this statement above however is because JohnV basically said "there is no hope for MP3, etc". This isn't exactly true.
My comment?
I have said?? Where?
Beatles has said "there is no hope for MP3". He said this when he told his personal opinions about codecs, not in a way like:
everybody must ditch mp3 right now because there is no hope for it, and it will be my life mission to preach against MP3. Actually Beatles has some MP3 music in his hard disk...
I haven't said anything that people should start using ultra high bitrates. I haven't said anywhere that there's no hope for MP3. All I might have said is some quotings of Beatles' opinions about MP3, and made it clear those are his opinions. I have said I'm starting to believe he actually hears a difference, I have my reasons for this which originated for example from the tweaking of MPC. His comments about quality differencies made sense, regarding the settings tweaked/changed.
I persuaded Beatles to help tweak the best average 340-350kbps mode so far for MPC. He says it sounds very good. Vorbis has also 350kbps profile, so I see no problem here.
People will get the wrong idea (imagine, "300kbps?? that's not good enough, you should be using a higher bitrate because Beatles says so" ), especially given the comment that JohnV had made about MP3.
I don't remember saying any personal opinions about MP3 in this thread or anywhere else for that matter since meeting Beatles. I haven't said in this thread or anywhere else that people should start using something or some settings because Beatles says or hears something.
Originally posted by JohnV
My comment? I have said?? Where?
Beatles has said "there is no hope for MP3". He said this when he told his personal opinions about codecs, not in the way that everybody must ditch mp3 right now because there is no hope for it, and it will be my life mission to preach against MP3. Actually Beatles has some MP3 music in his hard disk...
OK, to be strictly correct it was a comment that you relayed I think you and most others knew what I meant though.
I persuaded Beatles to help tweak the best average 340-350kbps mode so far for MPC. He says it sounds very good. Vorbis has also 350kbps profile, so I see no problem here.
Well as I said, I think it's OK up to a 400kbps point. But most of the discussion I've seen has been oriented around 500-700kbps MPC. That's pretty far from the 350-400kbps range IMO.
That is what I question the worth of, 350kbps is fine really. I've encoded MPC's in this range myself quite often in the past.
I don't remember saying any personal opinions about MP3 in this thread or anywhere else for that matter since meeting Beatles. I haven't said in this thread or anywhere else that people should start using something or some settings because Beatles says or hears something.
I know you didn't say this. Please don't take my comment to mean that I thought you were implying that MP3 was worthless, I was only discussing the comment that you made in regards to what Beatles said. I know this doesn't necessarily reflect your personal opinion, and I know most others realize this as well. It was simply an easy way for me to describe the point I was trying to make, nothing more.
As for the comment about what people should use because of what Beatles says, I didn't even imply that you would be the one saying that, however I'm just saying that I could easily see such a thing happening if this whole issue is blown so much out of proportion.
My comments regarding FAAC were, to a large extent, inspired by the idea that in the face of expected commercial push in AAC, it would be good to have a free alternative of acceptable quality. Clearly, the potential of FAAC must exceed that of Lame.
Layer3maniac - just to set the record straight, I believe I saw Menno acknowledge Ivan somewhere for his assistance with respect to the psy model (I think). So there has been assistance, but obviously Ivan does not want to promote FAAC above his own encoder. Although currently he does rely upon FAAD as a decoder and the Winamp plugins for playback!
On the legal front, I think Menno has made it clear that source code distribution is outside of the control of Dolby, etc. That is certainly the indication of the notices at the beginning of the 'borrowed' programs.
The idea of assistance also arose from a comment Menno made in his own forum indicating he would welcome it in respect of tuning, in particular.
Dibrom's and JohnV's comments regarding Vorbis are well taken, I just like to see as many options available as possible. Also, doesn't Vorbis borrow some ideas, at least, from Mpeg2/4?
john33
Originally posted by john33
My comments regarding FAAC were, to a large extent, inspired by the idea that in the face of expected commercial push in AAC, it would be good to have a free alternative of acceptable quality.
The problem is that AAC is never probably going to catch on as "AAC" itself. It will likely be used as the format behind many other technologies which hide the bare audio format itself from the users. Considering that and that no two AAC systems will probably be compatible because of customized encryption or securities, I'm don't think a free AAC ISO encoder would really make much of a difference, especially considering the hefty legal ramifications.
Clearly, the potential of FAAC must exceed that of Lame.
From a technological point of view, sure. But so does Vorbis, and it doesn't have many of the downsides that a freeware ISO AAC implementation does.
Also, doesn't Vorbis borrow some ideas, at least, from Mpeg2/4?
Not in the form of patented ideas.
Originally posted by Dibrom
This isn't necessarily true. The majority of digitally oriented studios are based around systems including high end sound cards for hd recording and the like.
Well, if your expression "not necessarily true" includes serious tweaking to the PC system in question then maybe. Naturals as usage of confirmed, reliable hardware, ultra-high quality UPS and some bit more exotic protection means as properly earthed electric isolation layers or structures at critical parts like around hard drive, sound card, power supply... For reproduction, it still isn't as good as the ,000 CD-spinner/DAC-set I mentioned.
Do studios actually use computers for analog recording? Just when I thought that high end DAT systems (and the likes of them) would provide much more stabler and very high quality medium for analog recording phase.
Of course if the signal is
digitally recorded from DAT using the top-notch equipment you mentioned, there is absolutely no problem.
Pro Tools stuff. These are the types of cards/hardware in use in many of those places and it's all based around computers at some point.
Would that "at some point" mean digital recording and sound processing? Naturally computers are perfect for that.
This is getting rather off-topic. Sorry.
Originally posted by niktheblak
Well, if your expression "not necessarily true" includes serious tweaking to the PC system in question then maybe. Naturals as usage of confirmed, reliable hardware, ultra-high quality UPS and some bit more exotic protection means as properly earthed electric isolation layers or structures at critical parts like around hard drive, sound card, power supply... For reproduction, it still isn't as good as the ,000 CD-spinner/DAC-set I mentioned.
Depends on the studio in question. Naturally the more advanced, the more of that type of thing you will see..
Do studios actually use computers for analog recording?
Yes.
Just when I thought that high end DAT systems (and the likes of them) would provide much more stabler and very high quality medium for analog recording phase.
One of the advantages to many of these high end sound cards are the higher sampling rates they support over DAT, 96khz or 192khz, vs just 48khz.
Would that "at some point" mean digital recording and sound processing? Naturally computers are perfect for that.
At some point could include many different areas
niktheblak
CD's used to be produced indicating the recording, editing/mixing and transcription methods:
DDD, ADD, AAD.
I think these are probably self-explanatory (A=analogue, D=digital). I guess that since all new material is probably produced DDD they don't seem to bother any more.
john33
Thread unlocked again. (Any remnants of the former AAC discussion that shows up here will be subsequently moved to the off-topic section)
Beatles, I was just wondering how you would rate Psytel AAC with the -ultra setting for quality? If you have tested it, how well would you say it compares to MPC quality? So far, all you have mentioned is MPC for high bitrate quality and I'm wondering how AAC compares to it. Thanks ahead of time,
Jordan
Also, don't forget that AACEnc also has two switches:
-no_temporal (diable temporal masking)
-no_ath (disable ATH, CD floor)
These switches could be used in conjuction with -ultra switch
aacenc -ultra -no_ath -no_temporal -if input.wav
While I do not recommend them (I stronlgly recommend -extreme and -ultra switches alone), they could be used for compare with MPC -insane, etc...
Also, AACEnc has -TMN, -TMN_s, -NMT and -NMT_s (_s is the for short blocks) switches, too!
My opinion is that PsyTEL 1.2 is hands down the best lossy encoder there is, PERIOD.
At average bitrates of 128, I'd disagree with that opinion. Certainly it is not a hands-down winner given its showing in the castanets.wav test. But perhaps with other samples it makes a better showing. At 128 kbit/s, I would argue for Ogg Vorbis pre-RC3 as being the least offensive codec, even though it still has a bit of transient smearing.
At higher bitrates, it would be very interesting to pit all the contenders against each other. A believable test can be performed even by just one person, but to be believable, that person must demonstrate credibility in the form of blind tests which mitigate the element of chance (ABX repeated trials) on a wide variety of samples.
ff123
At average bitrates of 128, I'd disagree with that opinion. Certainly it is not a hands-down winner given its showing in the castanets.wav test. But perhaps with other samples it makes a better showing. At 128 kbit/s, I would argue for Ogg Vorbis pre-RC3 as being the least offensive codec, even though it still has a bit of transient smearing.
At higher bitrates, it would be very interesting to pit all the contenders against each other. A believable test can be performed even by just one person, but to be believable, that person must demonstrate credibility in the form of blind tests which mitigate the element of chance (ABX repeated trials) on a wide variety of samples.
Hey, that's why they call them opinions. I wish Vorbis would get RC3 out so they can start working with wavelets. Nobody I know really uses 128 for high quality encodes anyway except for deluded wma people,so a test at higher bitrates would be very interesting indeed. So Vorbis at 128 outperformed FhG? Interesting, that's great news for Monty.
Originally posted by layer3maniac
My opinion is that PsyTEL 1.2 is hands down the best lossy encoder there is, PERIOD.
Hehe, have you thought of nickname change then . Well anyway Psytel is very good, and Ivan certainly a very talented guy.
We did some tests with Beatles at very high bitrates comparing tweaked MPC 340-350kbps (with adaptive noise shaping disabled&tweaked settings, it's not currently possible to disable ans in the latest encoders, but Frank will probably put the switch back for the next build), Vorbis GT2 350kbps profile and Psytel AAC about 450kbps (not very well tweaked). According to Beatles, MPC was clearly the best.
Originally posted by JohnV
Hehe, have you thought of nickname change then . Well anyway Psytel is very good, and Ivan certainly a very talented guy.
We did some tests with Beatles at very high bitrates comparing tweaked MPC 340-350kbps (with adaptive noise shaping disabled&tweaked settings, it's not currently possible to disable ans in the latest encoders, but Frank will probably put the switch back for the next build), Vorbis GT2 350kbps profile and Psytel AAC about 450kbps (not very well tweaked). According to Beatles, MPC was clearly the best.
I am unable to try the switches Ivan suggested with my current version. I'm waiting to hear back from him in regards to further testing.
Beatles,
Please contact me at: () - I will supply you with the latest build of AACEnc
-- Ivan
Ivan, have many improvements been made quality-wise since the september build of aac-enc? I'm just interested to know how its coming along. And another question, how much quality do you think can be brought out of aac as a format for archiving? Do you think it would be possible to improve quality much more at the top end? Also, Beatles, do you mind sharing your tweaked mpc command line that you have created?
Jordan
There were some changes related to ATH and presets, but they do not affect quality too much (except some rare cases with ATH overmasking)
AAC has great potential for archival-like encoding, however it is under question what is the exact legal status and situation with AAC, since patent holders are not interested in making another general-purpose format.
Currently using this commandline. Gives nice results with a BR in the low 500s.
-nmt 16 -tmn 32 -ms 0 -minSMR 30 -cvd 0 -ans 0 -tmpMASK 0
With this type of bitrate, you might do better with Matt's lossy (not lossless) Monkey's Audio (which he has declined to develop). Contact me if you would like to play around with this. I believe I still have it saved on my hard drive. If not, several other people should have it.
ff123 (miyaguch@eskimo.com)
Originally posted by ff123
With this type of bitrate, you might do better with Matt's lossy (not lossless) Monkey's Audio (which he has declined to develop). Contact me if you would like to play around with this. I believe I still have it saved on my hard drive. If not, several other people should have it.
ff123 (miyaguch@eskimo.com)
Hi there,
Yes I have been trying it out.
How does the quality of the lossy monkey encoder compare to the equivalent bitrate mpc file? Doesn't that encoder use a similar method to ADPCM? Have you tried Rkau's lossy encoder? I think I recall that these types of codecs don't have artifacts, but have a sort of harmonic distortion. Is this correct? And would this type of distortion be audible? A 1:4 ratio for encoding to these formats would be quite acceptable, if there is no audible distortion.
I was never able to hear a difference from the original when using lossy Monkey's. Neither was Hans or David Robinson. However, the Monkey himself (Matt) claimed to hear a difference, and halted work on this shortly thereafter. I would expect that an audible difference might be similar to the type of difference one hears between undithered and dithered 16-bit audio. I know I certainly can't hear that, although some people apparently can.
ff123
Originally posted by ff123
I was never able to hear a difference from the original when using lossy Monkey's. Neither was Hans or David Robinson.
Nor myself. I tried to get Matt to continue with it but what can you do? I still have it if anyone wants to check it out.
Does anybody know how Rkau's VRQ lossy mode compares to lossy monkeys audio. I use the -v2 setting and end up with files about 1/4 the size of a normal wave.
I remember both RKAU and Wavpack performing worse than lossy ape, on a few tough artificial samples, at 400+ bitrates.
In the newest WavPack (3.92) lossless compression is much improved (faster and better compression). I don't know about lossy, but because of the imrovements in the lossless routines, maybe lossy has also improved.
On the Wavpack website, it said that lossy compression has about 1 dB less noise than in the previous versions.
Jordan
Beatles,
<rant=on>
I now see why you are so skeptical about re-mastered stuff. As you said,
Originally posted by Beatles
On Every Street is deservedly known as an extremely good dynamic recording.
I have borrowed the 1996 remastered version of that album from a friend of mine (it's part of a complete series of "Dire Straits Remastered" CDs released in 1996):
"Remastered by Bob Ludwig at Gateway Mastering".
Right, and guess what: The bass is now at full level on many of the tracks, but the nice dynamics on "On Every Street" (the original 1991 release really sounded beautiful) are, like, gone.
Some of the other tracks sound better than before, though.
What do these people do when they remaster an album, for heaven's sake? I don't get it (Besides: Since the original 1991 release already was a fully digital recording, why is there any need to remaster that album? )
</rant>
Volcano,
You're right, I thought, obviously stupidly, that the main idea of digital re-mastering was to 'repair' old analogue recordings, not to mess with something already in digital form and, what's more, in the form that the original artists wanted it to be! :confused:
john33
Beatles, I think most of the people are interested in ABX tests with mpc -xtreme -insane and/or psytel -extreme or -archiving. Tell us your results (are you willing to do it?), if you ear any difference comparing with original. The bitrates your talking about (400-500) aren´t the objective of lossy formats, so I think it´s not practical and interesting for the majority of the users.
What happened to Beatles?
Was I dreaming, or did he supply ABX results with Madonna's "Frozen"? If he did, I can't find them with the search facility.
Can someone please paraphrase (or link to) what happened (if anything!).
Cheers,
David.
http://www.David.Robinson.org/ (http://www.David.Robinson.org/)
Beatles did not post ABX results, but Garf did. A difference was heard, according to the ABX results, but it apparently is quite subtle, taking many trials to achieve significance. The difference was described as a spreading out of the sibilance in MPC xtreme.
ff123
<OT>
Originally posted by Volcano
<rant=on>
[...]
</rant>
I take that back, it's nothing like a bad remaster, it's a damn good one, in fact. I have listened to the album on _real_ equipment, which brought to light things that my own stereo system didn't. Jeeez
</OT>
hi
i had read all posts of the thread last night.
1.Although there is not a result, the discussion is interesting;
as if we all can't get same decision about a specific codec.
2. how about the recording engineer?
is he doing ABX testing to MPC and AAC?
(about a month passed)
is it another unsettled question?
regards.
P.S. : I also wish to read testing result of him.