.mp3 hate thread

[Areweeffingserious]

Ever since discovering lossless codecs I've been in ecstasy. I know the idea behind an .mp3 is to save disk space, but ffs, at what cost? I don't know if this is a saying yet, but it will be - 'Once you go .flac you never go back' lol

[Resistance_2012]

MP3 is used as the main audio format because MP3 players and consoles use it so its more of the preferred format.

Other then that who needs to save storage space when you can buy a 5TB HDD for $219 then tax?

[Sitwon]

CD audio is already compressed, so if you're ripping from CDs it's not really lossless. You're gonna have to go full hipster and rip your FLAC tracks from vinyl.

[Areweeffingserious]

Sitwon

CD audio is already compressed, so if you're ripping from CDs it's not really lossless. You're gonna have to go full hipster and rip your FLAC tracks from vinyl.

Though then you have the argument of stereo vs analog, and from my lack of experience with analog I can't quick say which I prefer. Investing in a turntable shortly though. Vinyl is expensive as ********.

[Areweeffingserious]

Resistance_2012

MP3 is used as the main audio format because MP3 players and consoles use it so its more of the preferred format.

Other then that who needs to save storage space when you can buy a 5TB HDD for $219 then tax?

Pretty sure you can play a .wav on most devices too whee

[Resistance_2012]

Areweeffingserious

Resistance_2012

MP3 is used as the main audio format because MP3 players and consoles use it so its more of the preferred format.

Other then that who needs to save storage space when you can buy a 5TB HDD for $219 then tax?

Pretty sure you can play a .wav on most devices too whee

Yes but how many people would LOVE to have 24 songs that take up almost 700MB of space when the average MP3 player from what I've seen that people I know use on their 8GB MP3 player?

[Areweeffingserious]

Resistance_2012

Areweeffingserious

Resistance_2012

MP3 is used as the main audio format because MP3 players and consoles use it so its more of the preferred format.

Other then that who needs to save storage space when you can buy a 5TB HDD for $219 then tax?

Pretty sure you can play a .wav on most devices too whee

Yes but how many people would LOVE to have 24 songs that take up almost 700MB of space when the average MP3 player from what I've seen that people I know use on their 8GB MP3 player?

Quality vs quantity I suppose - If you have garbage headphones then enjoy the .mp3s whee

[Sitwon]

Areweeffingserious

Resistance_2012

Areweeffingserious

Resistance_2012

MP3 is used as the main audio format because MP3 players and consoles use it so its more of the preferred format.

Other then that who needs to save storage space when you can buy a 5TB HDD for $219 then tax?

Pretty sure you can play a .wav on most devices too whee

Yes but how many people would LOVE to have 24 songs that take up almost 700MB of space when the average MP3 player from what I've seen that people I know use on their 8GB MP3 player?

Quality vs quantity I suppose - If you have garbage headphones then enjoy the .mp3s whee

Garbage headphones, or average human hearing.

The fact is that relatively few people hear the difference between FLAC and high-bitrate MP3s, without training. Even with training, some people just can't hear the difference because human hearing isn't perfectly lossless itself.

Being trained to hear the difference between lossless and high-bitrate compressed audio is like being trained to recognize video compression artifacts and incorrect aspect ratios. Most people, until they've been trained, never notice these things and blissfully ignore them. The human brain is wonderful at filling in the gaps for you, if you let it. But if you want to torture yourself, go ahead and fixate on those minor compression artifacts.

[Areweeffingserious]

Sitwon

Areweeffingserious

Resistance_2012

Areweeffingserious

Resistance_2012

MP3 is used as the main audio format because MP3 players and consoles use it so its more of the preferred format.

Other then that who needs to save storage space when you can buy a 5TB HDD for $219 then tax?

Pretty sure you can play a .wav on most devices too whee

Yes but how many people would LOVE to have 24 songs that take up almost 700MB of space when the average MP3 player from what I've seen that people I know use on their 8GB MP3 player?

Quality vs quantity I suppose - If you have garbage headphones then enjoy the .mp3s whee

Garbage headphones, or average human hearing.

The fact is that relatively few people hear the difference between FLAC and high-bitrate MP3s, without training. Even with training, some people just can't hear the difference because human hearing isn't perfectly lossless itself.

Being trained to hear the difference between lossless and high-bitrate compressed audio is like being trained to recognize video compression artifacts and incorrect aspect ratios. Most people, until they've been trained, never notice these things and blissfully ignore them. The human brain is wonderful at filling in the gaps for you, if you let it. But if you want to torture yourself, go ahead and fixate on those minor compression artifacts.

I wanna try some tests because I've never had any training and there's clearly a difference.

[Sitwon]

Areweeffingserious

I wanna try some tests because I've never had any training and there's clearly a difference.

By "training" I don't necessarily mean explicit "this is how you distinguish FLAC from MP3" classes, but rather just learning more than the average about the science of sound, music, and sound engineering.

If you let people listen to top-20 music as FLAC vs as MP3 with some decent studio cans, and then asked them to identify which was which, for a lot of people their guesses would be little better than 50/50 guessing. There will be some people who (through nature or implicit training) will be much more accurate, and a few outliers who will be much worse. But most people just don't hear enough of a difference to care. (Remember, tons of people still listen to their music through analog radio, which is inherently lower fidelity than MP3s.


People are also very vulnerable to suggestion. Most of the cost of audiophile gear and modern turn tables is just marketing. If you suggest to someone that vinyl is "truer sound" than CDs, but you need $600 headphones to hear the difference, they will spend hundreds of dollars to have it. Then they will convince themselves that they can hear the minute difference as clearly as a car crash, to justify to themselves all the money they wasted.

Some people do have super-human hearing and perception of sound to the point that they can distinguish between different brands of tubes in their amplifiers. But not nearly as many as would be suggested by the amount of grossly over-priced audiophile gear that is sold every day. A lot of that is just people with disposable income who want to convince themselves (and their friends) that they're special.

[Gharbad]

Each format has it's own pros and cons.

I don't believe CD audio is compressed, unless the recording studios do some weird stuff nowadays.
It's just sampled and quantized -- this is not compression, it's analog to digital conversion.
I don't see why it would be compressed because CD's have more than enough space to hold an hour+ of 16-bits at 44,100 samples per second, which is sufficient for the majority of popular music anyway.
Compression would be there only if the recording studio manipulated the recordings in a compressed format prior to putting it onto the CD, which to me sounds crazy but what do I know.

Ripping vinyl would have to undergo the same analog to digital conversion, though not being limited by CD space I guess you could sample at higher resolution (24-bit?) if you really wanted... that probably wouldn't add much to it. I guess if artists chose to do purely digital distribution they could do that as well for all music.

Vinyl may be analog but lossiness and flaws are not limited to digital. Aside from the fact that all electronics add noise and distortion, vinyl introduces mechanical imperfections, the most obvious being dust.
This can definitely be quantified. Think of the physical size of the vinyl features -- physical length per second, average height of depression per dB of audio, average manufacturing tolerance, physical warping of the disc, dust size/amount, whatever.
Record a perfect sinusoid onto a vinyl and you can very easily get noise and distortion figures.
I think the hissing and popping is pretty obvious to everyone.
Maybe a very well kept vinyl would be better but in the best case all you're avoiding is quantization, and at 16-bits that's about 0.001% error. You can lose a few bits from noise, but 13-bit is still 0.01% error.
The 44.1 kHz sampling frequency is more than good enough to capture it perfectly assuming the analog-to-digital converter isn't horribly designed.

Anyway, the key is what Sitwon keeps mentioning -- high bit rate.
Personally I feel like I can notice 192kbps MP3's (on good speakers anyway) but anything lower I think it becomes clear. Often I'm convinced the radio plays poorly compressed audio which is very distinct from general radio noise (i.e. analog stuff).
It's all about noticeable compression artifacts.
I don't know how to describe it but it's a very unique sound. If you listen to an MP3 with less than 96 kbps or recompress an mp3 several times you'll definitely hear the problem.
A low quality JPEG shows the visual equivalent of compression artifacts.
In general the artifacts are worst at rapid transitions like clapping in audio or black/white transitions in an image.

On the topic of audiophile gear I do think that comes down to preference and subjective opinion. I think it's pretty well documented that in a well designed amplifiers tubes present absolutely awful distortion (< 3%) compared to solid state (< 0.01%) but some people prefer the sound of tube distortion and it's as simple as that. Distortion from transistors, tubes, capacitors, cables or whatever comes down to the design of the amplifier so the bottom line is that no specific technology is good or bad. In any case I think it's pretty clear that modern amplifiers can be superior to the human ear's capabilities. Also notice that these amplifier distortion numbers are worse than the quantization from analog-to-digital conversion...
Check out this site:
http://sound.westhost.com/absw.htm
It's a very good audio electronics design site, and that page I linked is pretty interesting.

At the end of the day I buy CD's and rip them into MP3's at 192 kbps.
If I had a proper sound system with good speakers I would listen to the CD's or rip them at a higher bit rate. Of course I would first listen to my 192-kbps to see whether I actually cared enough to spend that effort.

[Resistance_2012]

The biggest problem is that the "Avrage" user isn't going to notice a difference because they aren't going to spend hundreds of dollars ($200+) on speakers just to possibly get a noticeable difference.

There are a lot of factors that you have to take into account that can compromise the sound quality of audio. Speakers, Speaker wires, amp, making sure you get no static and such from devices close to it and more. All this can cost a lot of money to make sure you get the best sound possible.

When it comes to MP3s I don't go any lower then 128kbps. I prefer 192kbps since storage space is not a problem.

[WhiteHatCat]

.ogg is a much better lossy codec than .mp3 fwiw.

[psychic stalker]

Gharbad

I don't believe CD audio is compressed, unless the recording studios do some weird stuff nowadays.
It's just sampled and quantized -- this is not compression, it's analog to digital conversion.

It's usually sampled at a very high rate - 96k or higher - before it's mixed and then downsampled to 44.1k for the CD master. I think that's what Sitwon meant when he said it's "compressed."

Gharbad

Compression would be there only if the recording studio manipulated the recordings in a compressed format prior to putting it onto the CD, which to me sounds crazy but what do I know.

I don't know if they still do this, but I've heard some studios store their masters in Wavpack format, which is compressed. Not that it matters.

Gharbad

Ripping vinyl would have to undergo the same analog to digital conversion, though not being limited by CD space I guess you could sample at higher resolution (24-bit?) if you really wanted... that probably wouldn't add much to it. I guess if artists chose to do purely digital distribution they could do that as well for all music.

As easy as it is for vinyl to degrade, I don't think sampling at higher than 48k 16-bit would do any good except to preserve the audio imperfections. Either way, human hearing stops at 20kHz, and the Shannon limit of 44.1k PCM is 22.05kHz; and except for mixing purposes, there's no value in sampling at anything other than 16 bits.

Gharbad

I don't know how to describe it but it's a very unique sound.

I describe it as a misophonia trigger.

The sound itself I describe as water crashing over a microphone. Like what you hear when a diver's camera plunges into the sea.

Gharbad

At the end of the day I buy CD's and rip them into MP3's at 192 kbps.

I rip them to 96kbps Ogg Vorbis if I merely like it (and it'll still sound better than 128kbps MP3), Q6 Vorbis if I care about it, and FLAC if I really care about it or if I expect to transcode it to other formats. I never encode to MP3 unless it's for someone else, because I hate how MP3 and MP4 compression artifacts sound - Vorbis artifacts are very often indiscernible or at worst tolerable.

Either way, FLAC is a sizeable chunk of my collection:

$ (du -sch /media/music/**/*.flac; du -sch /media/music/) | grep total
68G total
216G total

[Areweeffingserious]

psychic stalker

Gharbad

I don't believe CD audio is compressed, unless the recording studios do some weird stuff nowadays.
It's just sampled and quantized -- this is not compression, it's analog to digital conversion.

It's usually sampled at a very high rate - 96k or higher - before it's mixed and then downsampled to 44.1k for the CD master. I think that's what Sitwon meant when he said it's "compressed."

Gharbad

Compression would be there only if the recording studio manipulated the recordings in a compressed format prior to putting it onto the CD, which to me sounds crazy but what do I know.

I don't know if they still do this, but I've heard some studios store their masters in Wavpack format, which is compressed. Not that it matters.

Gharbad

Ripping vinyl would have to undergo the same analog to digital conversion, though not being limited by CD space I guess you could sample at higher resolution (24-bit?) if you really wanted... that probably wouldn't add much to it. I guess if artists chose to do purely digital distribution they could do that as well for all music.

As easy as it is for vinyl to degrade, I don't think sampling at higher than 48k 16-bit would do any good except to preserve the audio imperfections. Either way, human hearing stops at 20kHz, and the Shannon limit of 44.1k PCM is 22.05kHz; and except for mixing purposes, there's no value in sampling at anything other than 16 bits.

Gharbad

I don't know how to describe it but it's a very unique sound.

I describe it as a misophonia trigger.

The sound itself I describe as water crashing over a microphone. Like what you hear when a diver's camera plunges into the sea.

Gharbad

At the end of the day I buy CD's and rip them into MP3's at 192 kbps.

I rip them to 96kbps Ogg Vorbis if I merely like it (and it'll still sound better than 128kbps MP3), Q6 Vorbis if I care about it, and FLAC if I really care about it or if I expect to transcode it to other formats. I never encode to MP3 unless it's for someone else, because I hate how MP3 and MP4 compression artifacts sound - Vorbis artifacts are very often indiscernible or at worst tolerable.

Either way, FLAC is a sizeable chunk of my collection:

$ (du -sch /media/music/**/*.flac; du -sch /media/music/) | grep total
68G total
216G total

I love you more and more with each post