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if you look into it properly, you'll find higher frequency degradation only occurs at a noticeable level when you're talking about mp3 =< 192cbr.

out of interest, how high in the mix do you place your hi hats?

I'm speaking about any commercially release toon. I have pretty significant hearing damage in the hi freqs, and I can still hear it.

nowaysj wrote:The fact that you can't hear the difference is preposterous. If there is a hi hat, you can hear the difference between wav and mp3.

Between a WAV and a 320?

Alright, I've always been squarely in the "you can't hear the difference" camp, even with bitrates lower than 320, but I've never actually done a blind test. And fair is fair. Name your samples and I'll rig up a test and post it.

tomm wrote: mp3s (or files in general) don't degrade over a period of time.

they do, maybe not in a tradditional sense but they do

Running out for a hair cut. But how would you do this? Listening over the web?

You pick the track, anything that is hi hatty, encode it 224.

isn't it attributed to physical disc degradation though?

there haven't been many studies into why mp3s tend to sound a bit pish after 10 years of playing but i was of the opinion it was tag information (not audio data) and physical disc problems that result in glitches and errors?

tomm wrote:isn't it attributed to physical disc degradation though?

there haven't been many studies into why mp3s tend to sound a bit pish after 10 years of playing but i was of the opinion it was tag information (not audio data) and physical disc problems that result in glitches and errors?

physical degradation is a part of it but there are much more subtle forms of degradation that can fuck with it

nowaysj wrote:Running out for a hair cut. But how would you do this? Listening over the web?

You pick the track, anything that is hi hatty, encode it 224.

I'd pick a 5-second segment, decode the mp3 back to wav, and make a 10-second wav by stringing together the original followed by the decoded mp3. Or the mp3 followed by the original. Obviously I wouldn't say which it was (if I wanted to be super thorough I could probably rig up MATLAB to do it so even *I* wouldn't know until the end, but I doubt I could be arsed). Then I'd upload the 10-second wav to yousendit and set up a poll on here I guess.

Could do wav vs 320, wav vs 224 and wav vs 192 on a variety of samples. I'd offer to do a variety of encoders as well, but I can't be arsed, so iTunes will have to do (to be honest I suspect the difference in encoders is more pronounced for lower bitrates and for 320 there's not much between them, but I don't know for sure).

Seriously willing to eat my words on this one, but only if a blind test sez it's true.

back2onett wrote:

tomm wrote:isn't it attributed to physical disc degradation though?

there haven't been many studies into why mp3s tend to sound a bit pish after 10 years of playing but i was of the opinion it was tag information (not audio data) and physical disc problems that result in glitches and errors?

physical degradation is a part of it but there are much more subtle forms of degradation that can fuck with it

Ok, sure, hard disks degrade and you get errors, but an error in an mp3 is a glitch or a hiccup, not "sounding bad". Unless that's what you meant.

for the sake of fairness, if you're testing please use EAC (windows) or XLD (OSX) for encoding and compare wav with LAME v0, v2, CBR 320, CBR 192 and CBR 128. there are a few guides to set up both correctly. that would provide the optimum test subjects to use

also, lol at matlab chat. engineering yo

static_cast wrote:

back2onett wrote:

tomm wrote:isn't it attributed to physical disc degradation though?

there haven't been many studies into why mp3s tend to sound a bit pish after 10 years of playing but i was of the opinion it was tag information (not audio data) and physical disc problems that result in glitches and errors?

physical degradation is a part of it but there are much more subtle forms of degradation that can fuck with it

Ok, sure, hard disks degrade and you get errors, but an error in an mp3 is a glitch or a hiccup, not "sounding bad". Unless that's what you meant.

yeah it's usually a short glitch in the music it doesn't all suddenly crumble away or anything but it can happen without a dodgy hard disks, As far as I'm aware the only way MP3s can lose quality is through encoding errors where the pyschoacoustic profiles get a bit screwy and everything ends up getting compressed

TBH - I don't know what is worse...

That kids are being taught such fallacies about how MP3's can degrade with time.. or that in the day & age of Google, that said kids are believing such crap.


** please note... I left out the "no difference between 320 and full res WAV" comment out on purpose... as that type of ear-reliability depends on many factors... all of which would be lost on the OP **

static_cast wrote:

nowaysj wrote:Running out for a hair cut. But how would you do this? Listening over the web?

You pick the track, anything that is hi hatty, encode it 224.

I'd pick a 5-second segment, decode the mp3 back to wav, and make a 10-second wav by stringing together the original followed by the decoded mp3. Or the mp3 followed by the original. Obviously I wouldn't say which it was (if I wanted to be super thorough I could probably rig up MATLAB to do it so even *I* wouldn't know until the end, but I doubt I could be arsed). Then I'd upload the 10-second wav to yousendit and set up a poll on here I guess.

Could do wav vs 320, wav vs 224 and wav vs 192 on a variety of samples. I'd offer to do a variety of encoders as well, but I can't be arsed, so iTunes will have to do (to be honest I suspect the difference in encoders is more pronounced for lower bitrates and for 320 there's not much between them, but I don't know for sure).

Seriously willing to eat my words on this one, but only if a blind test sez it's true.

Have you done this yet? If not, make them 10 second segments and make them separate files!