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Poll

Are "sound color" of codecs important for you?

I just prefer quality and fidelity, sound color is not important for me.
Sound color is important for me but I still prefer higher quality. (Please specify: which codecs/encoders are good and which ones are bad for you?)
Sound color is very important for me and I prefer a good sound color over higher quality. (Please specify: which codecs/encoders are good and which ones are bad for you?)
Topic: Sound colors of codecs (Read 1999 times) previous topic - next topic
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Re: Sound colors of codecs

Reply #25 –
Am I the only person who prefers a good MP3 over Vorbis, Opus, and most of other modern codecs for music for all and especially low bitrates? (Yes, for example I prefer a 32kbps MP3 over 32kbps Opus, even with sinc interpolation. MP3's artifacts don't annoy me if it's encoded by a good encoder, but a 32kbps Opus is almost not listenable for me.)

Re: Sound colors of codecs

Reply #26 –
Why would anyone want to destroy the intention of the musicians by replacing most of the musical content with ugly coding artefacts? We no longer use modems over analogue phone lines to transmit and 1.4MB floppy disks to store music  ;)

Re: Sound colors of codecs

Reply #27 –
@Sunhillow They are not ugly artifacts for me. Have you ever listened a FhG MP3Enc encoded 16kbps or 20kbps MP3 with linear interpolation or played a flash game that contains a music in this format? If not, I understand you, because most of the MP3 encoders are ugly. I make some musics too, and I export my musics as 11025Hz MP3's.
 

Re: Sound colors of codecs

Reply #28 –
Top: Original resampled to 44Khz
Mid: MP3 resampled to 44Khz
Bottom: MP3 resampled to 44Khz with alisased frequencies.

And the OP says that he likes the most the third one.

Obviously, it is the worst of the three in terms of audio quality, but aliasing causes a strange effect on low bandwith samples: Our ears perceive an increased frequency bandwidth, and given the bad quality in general, that aliasing fills a missing gap.

It reminds me of some tricks that existed in the beginning of MP3. There was a Soundblaster  (Live MP3?) that had a special algorithm to try to reconstruct part of the bandwith, which was something in between of an exciter and a non-parametric high frequency expander.

But the truth is that aliasing can produce more unpleasant distortion than pleasant one most of the time.
The reason it sounds sort of better in this example is because the music itself is already FM like and with many harmonics.

And then, the difficulty of having a player that actually does this badly resampled output, or a very bad soundcard that resamples itself like this.   Current Windows version (using the oldest audio API) is not even this bad.

So two things: 
- MP3 has no role in what the OP asks. It just happens to have a player that can cause this distortion.
- The op seems to want an exciter/expander, not knowing, or ignoring that using a better codec at a higher bandwith would be much better.


Addenum: One detail that low quality MP3 have that also can be perceived as improving audio is that when there isn't enough bitrate, like in this case, the background noise is almost killed.  So when the original is generated with low bit depth, or when the original is recorded from a noisy tape, the MP3 removes that noise.
But of course, if the MP3 is removing the noise, it is because it is not having enough bits, and most probably it will have artifacts, so the overall quality would also suffer.