Using insane settings with mp3
Reply #210 – 2006-04-30 12:57:38
(...)Dr. Xin once wrote: most difficult musical samples to electronic equipment is: piano, trumpet, and female voice. Well, harpsichord isn't piano, but it's very similar. (...) harpsichord has an attack characteristic similar to piano (a hammer hitting a string), (...) This is by far not true. Piano and harpsichord (also add organ and synthesiser) are all keyboard instruments but the mechanism (and therefore the sound generation) is completely different: - piano is a percussive instrument (cousin of xylophone!) - organ is a wind instrument (a monstruous cousin of flute, oboe, trumpet...) - harpsichord is a [I don't know the english word] pinched -bow instrument (close to guitar, lute,...) - synthesiser is an electronic instrument. Saying that piano and harspichord are similar is like saying that a tom-tom is close to the cithara There's no hammer on a harpsichord. Otherwise, it would be possible to create dynamical effects with harpsichord, but it's impossible (or very hard). In that aspect clavichord is closer to piano & pianoforte. If piano is considered as hard to reproduce on electronic device, it's I suppose a consequence of the wide dynamic range of this instrument - great performs are mastering this with a high degree of subtility. With harpsichord, the dynamic range is very poor.herding_calls of course isn't typical female voice. Which made me search for a typical female voice sample which is hard to encode. I tried hard, looking up the sample pages and my own collection (wich includes a lot of female singers), but it was only to end up with eight samples I classify as 'slightly annoying' with Lame 3.90.3 -b128. Going -b160 -h brought them to the non-annoying class. Not really very problematic samples. But I can confirm Dr. Xin: I checked several hundred spots in the encodings which were suspicious to me because they sounded distorted, but only to find out usually that the distortions are in the original as well. And it was only with the vocals, Instruments usually had a very good quality at the same time. I'm not sure to uderstand what you're saying. 1/ There's someone called Mr. Xin who said that female voice and piano are hard to reproduce on electronic equipment. 2/ You made a correspondence between this difficulty and lossy encoders issues 3/ You looked hard and deeply among hundreds samples of female voice and found nothing hard to encode; not one single piano sample is used in your test but only an harpsichord one you're considering as close enough to piano... 4/ But basing your opinion on this failure, you agree with Dr. Xin first theory? Did I understand correctly?