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Topic: HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison) (Read 68017 times) previous topic - next topic
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HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #175 –
budgie:

Quote
Problem is - and this is no elusion/excuse - I don't know anything about correct and proper abx tests.


There's nothing particularly important that you have to "know" in order to perform ABX tests. Just grab ff123's tool, it was linked to more than once in previous replies. You'll get the hang of how it works in a matter of seconds.

The test itself takes probably no longer than 10 minutes per sample. Probably the exact amount of time you spent writing your last reply.

If you don't want to perform the test on a computer, then you can have somebody burn a CD for you, following the ("secure") instructions I posted earlier.


Quote
I don't want to use any lossy compression until it's near perfection, not even in my car, and as we all live in not so perfect world, it may take years to achieve this goal.


How the hell can you say that? You haven't even bothered to look at the subject thoroughly (=via blind tests), meaning you can't even make a remotely correct judgement about it.

You were beaten by lossy compression once already in JohnV's small test (yeah I know, you were cheated etc., blah), which makes statements like the one quoted above look even more silly.

I have never tried MiniDisc, but if Kblood is really correct in saying that it's inferior to LAME --aps... well... this is starting to get really funny.

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #176 –
Quote
There's nothing particularly important that you have to "know" in order to perform ABX tests. Just grab ff123's tool, it was linked to more than once in previous replies. You'll get the hang of how it works in a matter of seconds.

Actually, I think KikeG's WinABX is even quicker to start using:
http://www.kikeg.arrakis.es/winabx/

He also has ABA version, which I like.
Juha Laaksonheimo

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #177 –
Quote
As mad if it sounds - PIO i invite you to me to listen even the differences between the different CDR medias.
There is no joke around the High Enders - it IS real.

Wombat

Yamaha CDX 860 CD Player
HiSpace Gold 80, burned 16x on Yamaha CRW3200 vs original
RG179bu cables
Arcam Diva A85 Ampli
Senheiser HD 600 Headphones

If there is a difference, I can't hear it.

You don't have ABX results, do you ?

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #178 –
Seems like a lot of posts for something that's fundamentally a waste of time.  The OP's proposed test doesn't seem to avoid the statistical risk that you will get one answer or the other just by chance.  Not to mention that this issue has already been settled, by trained listeners.

The truth is most of the people who bash mp3 made up their minds couple years ago, when the encoders really weren't as good, and often by listening to 128 kpbs.

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #179 –
Quote
P.S. I forgot... I use a lossy compression   MiniDisc, of course! I am well satisfied with it... And this MD player is excellent, even by this level of compression.

MD (ATRAC) compression sucks in comparison with LAME --aps. Confirmed (by me) via ABX 

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #180 –
There are many versions of ATRAC, isn't the one used in hardware different from the one available in download ?
Can the bitrate be chosen ? What's the bitrate of minidisc ?

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #181 –
Well, I guess this goes to confirm what were the results of the sooo misterious Part 3 we shall never see, woe is me

Hasta luego! / See ya!

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #182 –
Quote
There are many versions of ATRAC, isn't the one used in hardware different from the one available in download ?
Can the bitrate be chosen ?

Standard hardware ATRAC is 292 Kbps. More info, including my tests, at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....t=3373&hl=atrac

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #183 –
So after all this - any closure on the original wager?  Sorry if I missed it in this very long (now longer) thread....
Was that a 1 or a 0?

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #184 –
Quote
So after all this - any closure on the original wager?  Sorry if I missed it in this very long (now longer) thread....

would be nice to see the results i agree. 
PANIC: CPU 1: Cache Error (unrecoverable - dcache data) Eframe = 0x90000000208cf3b8
NOTICE - cpu 0 didn't dump TLB, may be hung

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #185 –
19 KHz for me... (I'm 21).

I noticed, that my speakers (JBL MK1000) go faaar higher than my headphones for mobile use (Pro.2 PH-B333).
I tested by burning sweep.wav to CD and played it with my CD player. When I played it on the PC using SB Audigy (1), there where weird sounds starting at 17 KHz or so... I'm nearly sure that all people who voted higher 20 KHz only noticed these wrong sounds that their equipment added. Only children could really hear higher tones than 20 KHz, as far as I know.

Regards, fileman.

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #186 –
Quote
3.93 isn't recommended.  Use 3.90.2 or 3.92.

Isn't their a small possible rounding error in 3.92 and therefore not recommended? I thought 3.91 was the official release of 3.90.2. Damn gotta go re-read everything for mixing up all these versions...
No inspiration

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #187 –
Despite the supposed rounding errors in Dibrom's compile of 3.90.2 (because of the switches used), they have been tested extensively to not cause problems

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #188 –
Quote
Despite the supposed rounding errors in Dibrom's compile of 3.90.2 (because of the switches used), they have been tested extensively to not cause problems

uuuhhh, 3.90.2 doesn't have the rounding error i think. It's 3.92 that has the *possible* rounding error. That's why 3.90.2 is recommended and 3.92 isn't. Anyone?
No inspiration

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #189 –
I might seems strange but it's 3.90.2 which has the rounding error. But it was tuned using this error.

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #190 –
Where is "part 3"?

What were the results of this listening test?

Please tell!

Thanks,
David.

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #191 –
Please close this madness (funny to about page 6) and open a new thread.
Example: Waiting for Budgie first real ABX test

Thank you.
I've changed only because of myself.
Remember, when you quote me, you're quoting AstralStorm.
(read: this account is dead)

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #192 –
1) I read through this entire thread, yes it did take long, but it was worth reading through, just as a disclaimer.

2) This is pure BS.

Even if there is a hard to notice artifact on a $200 soundcard, and headphones when listening really hard over and over and over, who cares?   

I listened to music outside on my boombox, Sony S2 Sports BoomBox, the pic is somewhere on bestbuy.com. Even at 128k, it sounded just like the CD. People don't focus constantly on these things. I use MPC xtreme, Ogg Vorbis -q7, and --alt preset extreme to listen to stuff, simply to make the stuff sound good though...

If you have to concentrate extremely hard on such a huge audio system that few people have, and know the exact place where there are artifacts and play them over and over and over again on %0.01 of all sound, what's the point? When people say "I heard a difference in that test sample after concentrating real hard",  who cares? You're, going to, hear artifacts like that even less than %0.01 in real music.

Also, in the %0.00000001 chance you will hear artifacts in your normal listening to music, not doing all that, what's the chance, that without switching back between the WAV and the Ogg/MPC/MP3 file, you'll even know that you heard an artifact?

When I sat down to use ABX, on a clip that to me causes the most distortion, the C44 clip Garf had posted a link to, it sounded ther same as the original for over a minute, I had to concentrate, and get into the "mood" to start focusing on the artifacts, and it took awhile.

Huge speaker systems like what DJs use, they should use lossless or something like that, but for this, come on. 

And it'd be nice to see the actual results of this bet 

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #193 –
You say that 128 kbps sounds just like the CD and you encode with alt-preset extreme ?
I don't get it ?!

Edit : by the way, if you consider BS the presence of artifacts in a lossy file, there is no need to post in these forums.

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #194 –
No, I said under circumstances.

On a few clips I downloaded, I can get minimum 13/16 on ABX tests, using --alt preset extreme.

Yet when I'm doing anything else and listening to audio, or did not make myself "relaxed" while getting ready to listen to it, I couldn't hear a difference in the 128k MP3 and the WAV.

It's all how you listen to it, and no one ever listens to music as hard as people listen to it to be able to ABX it.

What I'm saying, is that small artifacts under those circumstances do not matter as much, due to all you have to go through to hear them.

I bet most people here, if they were having a low conversation with a friend, and thinking a lot about what they were going to say, in their car, even a 112k-128k MP3 would satisfy them.

I consider the presents of artifacts in a lossy file something; yet at 320k CBR, unless you're using DJ speakers, there is no way you're going to be able to say "Hey something's wrong here" unless you're superman on a normal song, with casual listening.

Just a point...  B)

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #195 –
Ok, I prefer this.

Well, I care... I rarely listen to music doing anything else. It's just a personal thing. When I listen to music, I relax and let the sound overcome anything else. The fact is that I listen to some kinds of music suited for this. None of my CDs are suited for background listening.

But I must admit that you're right to recall that the artifacts in alt-preset standard (and people say MP3 sucks compared to MPC because of them) are exagerated. I just started encoding in MPC yesterday (I never encoded anything so far), and heard many things wrong in the sound (HD600 headphones are very revealing), but each time I compared with the original, the defects were there too (clipping, clicks, noise...). So after all, MP3 does little harm to the sound compared to the quality of CDs.

On the other hand, MP3 artifacts are rare, but strong. And problem samples may be not so uncommon. I had no difficulty to find Amnesia, and Badvilbel knowing what to look for in my CDs... I think I could find a dozen more samples if I browsed all my electronic music (Autechre, Aphex Twin, Illusion of Safety, Pete Namlook, Lustmord etc), not to mention all that may appear where we don't expect them, in pop music...

I'd be annoyed to find them in my files, if they are as strong as Badvilbel (I maybe wouldn't care about an artifact like Amnesia).
The problem is that, although artifacts like ravebase, or amnesia are not that much annoying, I find Badvilbel, for example, unlistenable on headphones, once in APS MP3 (well, it's listenable, but it realy sounds like someone chew the tape and spit it back into the cassette. Oh well, the original already sounds like someone chew the tape and... oh well, get some headphones and listen to it...  )

I'm not saying that APS is crap, I'm just fearing to find other badvilbels in my CDs... This one especially annoys me, because I don't need the original to spot the artifact, I can immediately say, listening to it for the first time "there's a problem in the sound : the analog master tape was dead" without knowing it's in fact an MP3 artifact.
Oh well, you're gonna tell me that there is already a big problem with the original... but well... Still...

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #196 –
Quote
But I must admit that you're right to recall that the artifacts in alt-preset standard (and people say MP3 sucks compared to MPC because of them) are exagerated. I just started encoding in MPC yesterday (I never encoded anything so far), and heard many things wrong in the sound (HD600 headphones are very revealing), but each time I compared with the original, the defects were there too (clipping, clicks, noise...). So after all, MP3 does little harm to the sound compared to the quality of CDs.


Are you saying MPC had a lot of artifacts?

What encoder did you use? You most probably already know this, but this version is the one that shouldn't screw up. If you did use mpcenc 1.14, and MPC screwed up... my head hurts 

HELP! Please URGENT (mp3 vs cd-audio comparison)

Reply #197 –
Nono, I said that all the artifacts I heard were in the original, MPC added none until I tried Amnesia ( see MPC tech section)