HI,
My ears are not so good nowadays....they've been stuck on the side of my head for 59 years now so I need some advice from you chaps with young ears.

I'm archiving loads of stuff using mpc at quality 7 (insane). I think it sounds teriffic but is perhaps a bit of overkill.
If you were archiving (personal stuff....from band days, vinyl, tapes and CD's) what mpc setting would you use?

Also, as I'm no longer able to hear clipping (unless it's really bad), what advice would you give about decoding back to wave prior to burning bearing in mind that some young ears may be listening.

Advice would be gratefully received.

Thanks,
auldyin

I wouldn't be using anything but --standard for any purpose whatsoever no matter how good your ears.

As you said, your ears should be quite "forgiving" now, so you should be perfectly safe with --standard (--quality 5).

We're not all young here, I dont know about the others but I'm 32 next week
Unfortunately my ears have been hammered by too many live gigs in my past, in fact I get a regular ringing in my ears after an hours headphone listening.

I'm 30 and I think I'm too much young, man.
--standard is good enough for me, too.

I only use MPC --standard to archive. I'm going on 24 and already cannot detect anything past 17Khz....too much rock 'n roll, perhaps? (though hearing problems do run in my family ). If your encodings sound transparent to you now, chances are they will later as well.

23 years young here.. I've tested my ears to about 18khz give or take. I attribute the loss to a few years gigging and practicing without ear plugs (in fact i think one ear may be worse, which was closest to the drummer's cymbals )

Now when I go to shows, or with any future band I gig with, plugs are a MUST.

Vladimir Horowitz died at the age of 80, still able to listen well enough.

Wombat

Edit: He was even 86!!

Age *can* produce hearing loss though... it varies. My father is in his mid-late 60's (I'm 38) and he can barely hear the midrange anymore (wears a hearing aid). Even with the hearing aid, you have to talk loud around him. Also, his native language is not English, so try to imagine communicating...

Regarding archiving, even for younger persons or people who have listened never to loud to anything....


7 is not really overkill.
7.5 is around 256 kbit/s.
If you use 200 kbit or 250, is unimportant nowadays, where CD-R and even DVD-R (-RW, +RW and so on) is cheap.

Perhaps or PROBABLY you do a transcode from mpc to mp3, ogg, or what ever format will be there in future on home players for high quality.

Perhaps here most people do listening tests by headphones.
This results to exact hearing regarding sound.
But with headphones you cannot test all stereo resolution and finenesses.
There you need high quality stereo speakers, stand-alone player , or a PC which does not make noise.
Or you decode mpc's/mp3's for testing and listening to wave and burn it to CDDA for listening on stereo-Hifi, without PC-noise.