The Petra Zone

p-freak wrote:You are amazing, Boray. Thanks for proving that there is no difference whatsoever between flac and wav/CD. Could you make something like this to compare CD to several different .mp3 encodings? I'm curious to see how much gets lost when you convert to 320 and then to 192.

Thanks! Good idea! Here it comes:

Did you do the null test? There is a great video of George Massenburg discussing out crazy stupid MP3s are, and demonstrating the distortion alone. It is quite funny...yet not.

Again, Reaper, the DAW Boray is using, makes the digital audio appear in a way it is not. It looks much nicer than it really is. I don't know why companies do not show it accurately, aside from making it easier to edit.

brent wrote:Did you do the null test?

Not now, I have done it with mp3s before.

brent wrote:Again, Reaper, the DAW Boray is using, makes the digital audio appear in a way it is not. It looks much nicer than it really is. I don't know why companies do not show it accurately, aside from making it easier to edit.

That depends. If you have an oversampling DAC, the output wave should look something like this if I'm not mistaking.

The 320 kbps mp3 looks better than I expected.

But, if you could look compare spectra/phase and coherency you would find more nastiness. Again, when I get some time back in the studio, I will pass on a little goodie. Busy with three churches, a civic amphitheater and Harley Davidson for the next couple of days.

320 does look nice! It looks like 320 doesn't have lots of distortion. On these graphs 192 (which I always use) looks bad... Maybe I need to re-encode stuff. I'll just have to create a couple of different ones and then compare them. The problem with me is that if I compare different samples, I'll hear there's a difference, but if I hear just one single sample, I can't tell if it's flac, 320 or 192. I would probably recognize 96 and 112 as being of low quality, but that's it. So for me personally 192 or 320 or flac isn't that big of a deal. Thanks, Boray!

The quest continues: Foobar+LAME VS Windows Media Player Ripper

So this time I wanted to compare Foobar+LAME to the mp3/wma encoder built into Windows Media Player. So I ripped the same song with Foobar and with Windows Media player, I then played all of them back with both Windows Media Player and Foobar and captured the output in Reaper. Then I made the phase inversion test and later also compared the waveforms.

My #1 conclusion: The output from Foobar and Windows Media Player (with all extras such as EQ turned off) is IDENTICAL! So the decoders in both produce exactly the same sound.

My #2 conclusion: I've used foobar for listening and Windows Media Player for ripping until now. But from now on I will probably use Foobar for both. LAME seems to encode better mp3s. Look at the following pictures of the distortion:







The last picture is the highest lossy WMA setting encoded with Windows Media Player.

Boray wrote:My #1 conclusion: The output from Foobar and Windows Media Player (with all extras such as EQ turned off) is IDENTICAL! So the decoders in both produce exactly the same sound.

This was a surprise for me. I thought there would be different quality decoders just as well or that for example Windows Media Player would do a better job decoding it's own encoded mp3s, but nope...