I work as a DJ and since I store a lot of music at my HDD and use to burn my own compilations to CDs and play it for wide range of people with different ears, my own ABX results have no use for that. Therefore I want to know how much of you can ABX MPC files at different qualities, so I can decide on which quality setting schould be enought to use. Thanks for voting.

Because of TOS#8, no one could rightfully vote (or discuss their vote) without posting their ABX results.

Just thought that should be added, since it wasn't mentioned in the original post.

With the multiformat listening test this week, I have no time for testing anything else at the moment. Null vote.


Edit: I suppose anonymous votes (with no accompanying post) wouldn't violate the rule, since it reflects no specific claim by a specific person. But once someone's name is beside a claim, that's when the rule would have to be satisfied.

hrm... any anonymous claims requiring proof/support should be discarded/deleted just like spam/troll/etc

also, i think this thread is useless as a poll function, and would serve better in being a thread to discuss situations where a sample failed at any quality


later

hmm, i once tried to ABX MPC @ Q4 and failed miserably, probably because of my old shitty noname headphones. since then i'm using Q5 and never had a problem with hearing artifacts

-andy-

I may be wrong. But I am sure that this depends on the sample used...

Yes. If you're talking about typical music, I'd need to go down to Q3 to ABX it. "Tough" music I can sometimes ABX Q4, if I concentrate long and hard. For those one-in-a-million killer samples, I can ABX Q5, if I have a lot of time on my hands and particularly sensitive ears that day.

You ought to use Q5. This is MPC's default for a reason--it's pretty much always transparent.

What kind of music are you auditioning? I find that deficiencies in the CD recording, mastering, and mixing of rock/pop/electronic CD's are often much more detrimental to the music than any artifact ever found with MPC. For example, I've never been able to ABX any of my music in MPC, but I have several albums where the Antares Auto-Tune is cranked too high and the vocals are irritating and warbly. And, of course, the hyper-compression on all my new CD's does 10 times more damage to the music than any MPC artifact could.

Just putting things in perspective.

This has got to be the most useless post in a long time - I vote recyclebin - and you good sir, write a new post.

sure, I only write posts that are useless for me

LOL @ your cat

you're not wrong, but since I believe that nobody use to encode killer test samples and listen to them whole day joyfuly just for for pleasure or artistic experience... understand, I know that every sample used will lead to different ABX results, what information I am trying to get is, what quality are poeple usually able to ABX listening to "common" music ripped from CDs.. and for sure I don't even expect any "accurate and precise" results whcih are even impossible in this case.. and don't even want this poll lead to any inspiration, and dramatic progress in MPC development or whatever..

I will try to post as neutral as possible and with no sarkasm:

ABX is a very powerful method and if it used properly (which is not difficult), it brings a very reliable result..... but something making me wonder is:

Everybody is using headphones (even some good ones from time to time) here to check the quality of specific codecs, what is a very good idea, because headphones can act as a lens for artifacts... but: What is about the dimenesional soundstage and the resolution and temperature of different instruments??

Even my high-price quality-brand-headphone does not even come close to the audio-system in my kitchen (which is much worse to my real stereo) when it comes to these kind of qualities, which are actually most important to me (I can even live with artifacts, see LPs).

I don´t want to give critics, it´s just a hint for the future.

cheers l01

PS Sorry for the offtopic