Kenwood Tries To Improve MP3 Sound

Wister285 writes: "Although MP3 quality is pretty damn good, the people over a Kenwood thought that it still doesn't have the edge that CDs do. MP3s don't support high frequency that regular CDs do because of the data compression. Kenwood's format, which is called 'Supreme Drive' (another dumb name for a good product ...), is boasting good results. Catch the story over at Excite." While it's cool that research is going on to improve the quality of compressed audio, it's hard to tell from this article just what is actually going on. Does it even make sense to say that this program "takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental' -- and mathematically re-processes the data through a sound generator" to achieve a more natural sound? Where does it 'take' that information from exactly?

Comments

LAME and cdparanoia

[pwhysall]

LAME is the best encoder, (see r3mix.net for examples) and cdparanoia is the best ripper.

You can hang it all together nicely with grip, too.

LAME Home Page

Grip home page

CDparanoia home page
--

Re:Explanation of harmonics and "fundamental"

[CausticPuppy]

I wouldn't say the fundamental the only note you hear though.
Many instruments have very pronounced harmonics. If you primarily heard the fundamental it would just be a sine wave.
In fact, percussion instruments like marimba and xylophone have to have their harmonics tuned. This means the bars are cut and shaved not only to bring the fundamental into tune, but the pronounced 4th harmonic as well. If the fundamental is in tune and the 4th harmonic is out, it sounds like crap.
Other instruments (like strings) are closer to an ideal physical system, so the harmonics will be in tune with the fundamental no matter what (assuming the string is uniform thickness and density, and not played too loudly).
Then you have something like a harpsichord, in which the harmonics are actually louder than the fundamental.

Goodie more standards.

[1DeepThought]

Just what we need another "standard" that is incompatible with everything else. When will they learn?

Re:Goodie more standards.

[ChadN]

I think the idea is that the technology will work with EXISTING MP3s (as a playback enhancement)...

Marketing Smoke

[intrico]

Supreme Drive takes the missing harmonics -- known as "fundamental" -- and mathematically re-processes the data through a sound generator. When finished, music then has a more natural sound, according to Kenwood.
-- This definitely smells like "marketing smoke" (catchy prose concocted by some articulate marketing person who probably does not understand anything about the technonlogy) Therefore, it's probably best to not even get excited over such a statement, and just wait and hear for yourself how it sounds.

CD/MP3 Player...

[Cheerio Boy]

I don't have a link for this but in the new Crutchfield catalog Kenwood also has produced an in-dash CD player that also plays CD's with MP3s on them.



The Tick - "Spoon!"

Explanation of harmonics and "fundamental"

[Mad Quacker]

Every instrument that makes a noise, including the human voice vibrates at many different frequencies. The fundamental frequency is the lowest of them all, so low that you can't hear it and it's not what you percieve the over frequency as being. This is not the part of the sound that characterizes what it is. The "overtones" are. They are notes produces simultaneously with the the note you hear, and the overtones's respective amplitudes give any note it's particular tone, or "timbre". Mp3's cut alot of these out as it is theorized that they are sufficiently small in comparison they are "masked" by the main note, and you cannot hear them. If you cut all of them out, what you will hear is a pure sinewave, no matter what instrument. The garbling sound mp3's produce is when the bitstream cannot support enough overtones, so all what we hear is a bunch of notes mushed together, this happenes easily with applause or white noise because there are ALOT of frequencies, just like if you consider a note from an instrument and all of it overtones.

quel jip

[gunner800]

This isn't about improving sound quality. Even if their technique actually does make the sound mathematically more perfect, nobody will be able to tell the difference without an oscilliscope.

This is just a way to leverage existing technology (MP3) and make it proprietary by adding something trivial to it. Kenwood will have players that can use standard MP3 or this new stuff, but nobody else will be able to use the new format without paying $$.

Suddenly I experience a mysterious shafting sensation in my ass...


My mom is not a Karma whore!

Harmonics

[Perdo]

When you play certain combinations of notes on a piano or other instrument you can hear some high frequency harmonics accompanying the chord. Play a simple chord on the piano by hitting any three keys on the keyboard but leave a space between your fingers (10101). Try this on the lower (left half) of the keyboard so the resulting harmonics are not outside of your hearing range. You will hear a much higher note that could not possibly be produced by any of the three keys you hit by themselves. Part of what makes chords sound good or bad are their accompanying harmonics. Since MP3 does not record the high frequency harmonics, most users can hear, but not identify a difference. Harmonic frequencies produced by a given chord are predictable. This Kenwood setup apparently "listens ahead" and reproduces the appropriate harmonic for a given chord.

Re:MP3 can sound as good as CD

[jonnythan]

Aiwa's got one for around $300. And with that Kenwood (Z919 I believe?), it isn't like you're buying a $200 cd receiver and paying $450 for the mp3 capability. The Z919 is, from what I hear and see at least, a damn fine in-dash CD receiver. $650 does seem a bit steep though..I could pick up a good Sony Mobile ES receiver, a decent 4-way amplifier (75-100 watts), and maybe a pair of Infinity Kappa 6x9's for my back deck for all that :)

Technobabble

[jfortier]

This sounds like a bunch of technobabble to me. I'm not a professional on this stuff, but here's what I understand about harmonics:

When a not is played, you get a pitch which corresponds to the name of the note, called the fundamental. Because of the acoustic characteristics of the instrument, you also get a bunch of overtones, which are pitches higher than the note in intervals such as fourths, fifths, and octaves to the fundamental. Different instruments produce different overtones, which causes its characteristic timbre.

Now I'm not entirely sure about the terminology I used above, but I think part of the point is that if it's going though and adding overtones, you aren't going to get a very natural sound, because everything is go to sound more similar. It might sound lusher, but it won't sound exactly right.

There's also the problem with a lot of music such as sacred music, which frequently employs high vocals, especially "castrati", now usually counter-tenors (men singing high), or boys who haven't hit puberty. I've converted some of that music to MP3, and although the high stuff sounds thinner than on CD, I don't think I want Kenwood lushening that sound -- part of the beauty of those voices is their purity.

Re:ok...but CD quality???

[swordgeek]

Ah, the joys of brainless audiophilia.

Learn something about the Nyquist criterion. Learn why (and how) an analog wavelength of a certain frequency is mathematically equivalent to a sampled waveform at twice the frequency.

There are problems with CDs; The frequency they chose for sampling (44.1kHz) gives a cutoff of 22050Hz, rather close to the 20kHz that is the _approximate_ top range of human hearing. Also, 16 bits of data turns out to be fairly borderline as well, and low-level jitter is a pretty tough nut to really crack.

At the same time, crosstalk is unheard of. The absolute noise floor is incredibly low. Tape stretch, surface noise, and so forth are nonexistent.

A casually thrown together CD will outperform an equally casually thrown together tape or record any day of the week. A very carefully created tape or record will beat that CD. (Mind you, the tape will only do so for a while--tape is an inherently unstable medium.) However, a very carefully recorded CD, even within the 44.1kHz/16bit limitations, will reproduce sound more accurately than any consumer format going.

Sorry for the long rant, but don't blame CDs for bad engineering, and DON'T blame the "evils" of digital sampling for bad CDs.

Some links:

A good definition

Another one, this time with more maths.

understanding the terminology

[operagost]

As others have stated, this article could certainly have benefitted from the skills of a tech writer instead of a hack. In a sound, there is usually a "base" called a fundamental. This is the sounds your ear perceives as the actual pitch, say, middle C. Above that, there are higher frequencies called harmonics. The number and intervals of these harmonics vary by the instrument, and have a large influence on the tone of an instrument. That's why a clarinet and a trumpet sound different. When I was 12 I had an ear infection which affected my ear's frequency response and made my trumpet sound nasal. Naturally I didn't enjoy playing in that condition. If you were to strip an instrument of ALL its harmonics, you would hear a pure tone, like that from an oscillator, or feedback.

Actually, what has a greater effect on the way something sounds is the attack. MP3 already handles this quite well for all but the most demanding tasks, when the amplitude of a sound is too high to fit in the selected bitrate and modulates ("shoves aside") the other material. Stravinsky probably sounds poor in anything below 256.

Anyway, what Kenwood seems to be doing here is our good old friend "interpolation". They've developed an algorithm like that used to enlarge photographs and applied it to sound. In order for this to work, they're going to have to create a device which can actually identify different instruments and supply the missing harmonics. The initial results, like when engineers attempted to create "stereo" from old mono recordings by channel equalization, is likely to be flawed, but I'm sure it will result in a commercially acceptable result. As for me, I'll be listening to Super CD or DVD Audio, whichever wins. I don't want Miles Davis' trumpet to sound like Maynard Ferguson's.

Re:MP3 is here to stay.

[Dr. Evil]

The real beauty of Minidiscs is the ability to record near perfect digital audio from a relatively inexpensive and very portable device.

Nothing on the market challenges this niche yet.

Re:A few thoughts

[adolf]

Moreover, it sounds like a BBE unit. The folks at Barcus-Berry Electronics have been making magic boxes which claim to replace missing harmonics for years (if not decades). They're everywhere, these days, including inside Sony Wega TVs, and some JVC car stereos (which explains Kenwood's interest).

I actually own one of their older units. It has three buttons, a knob, and a power switch. To use it, you send a signal through it, twist the knob until things sound bright and shiney, and back down a bit. Sound non-technical? It is.

There isn't much to be seen *inside* the box, either. Aside from stuff which is standard fare in just about all audio processing equipment (trim pots, a couple op-amps, power supply, some relays...), there's only two devices which stand out. These are really large-looking devices in a bastardized DIP package, emblazoned with the BBE logo. Just looking at them, they seem to radiate magic.

But this is all off-topic, and pointless unless I give some subjective evaluation of what the magic does for music.
So, here goes. The effect on music is that it tends to sound a little livelier. Cymbols tend to have a little more detail, snares tend to jump out a little more. Bass sounds fatter, with more percieved string noise. It seems to have very little effect on a clean electric guitar, but can make a distorted guitar almost overbearing.

The effects are dynamic, and this can be heard when listening to a slightly noisey FM radio station. The noise will tend to breath (get louder/softer, and/or change in character) along with the dynamics of what's going on. This is most noticable (and annoying, once it is noticed) on spoken word.

That all said, I use it somewhat frequently. I've got a number of recordings which seem to lack life, and the BBE seems to provide some (even if it's a creative, or even destructive, process instead of restorative). It also does a bang-up job of fixing vocals that are turned to mud by a poor PA system, in a live enviroment, and has some usefulness in the studio.

I tend not to use it on MP3s that are heavily artifacted, as it just tends to enhance the artifacts more than the missing high-frequency components.

Given the apparent lack of details about the Kenwood Supreme Drive thing, one can only be lead to assume that they use a similar process to the BBE to "restore" (ie, create) lost harmonic information. If so, it'll be a useful thing. But, it will not be all things to all people, and no signal processor (no matter how many buzzwords you associate it with) will ever be.

(as an aside: Most FM radio stations process everything until it's just gelatinous muck, lacking absolutely any dynamic content, and with the spectral content smoothed out so that no song sounds and better or worse than any other - instead, they all sound bad. The MBAs who play general manager say it's good thing, because a) it makes their signal as loud as (or louder than) the competitor across town and b) they think the consistantly-mediocre quality will entice listeners to stick around longer than they would if they could hear the true nature of a recording. Frankly, it just makes me flip the dial to NPR or one of the local college stations, as they suffer from none of the hideous all-things-to-all-people processing that the 50,000-Watt buggers do.
It's unfortunate that people feel the need to have "digital" radio, when standard analog FM could sound almost perfect (and certainly better than MP3) if they'd just stop fucking with it.).

Like detail textures?

[Spire]

Anyway, what Kenwood seems to be doing here is our good old friend "interpolation".

I would guess that it's actually closer in concept to the "detail textures" feature that some of the 3D game engines (e.g. Unreal Tournament) are employing nowadays.

What you get is a lot of apparent detail, which looks "good" because it effectively masks extreme pixelation (as well as the blurring caused by filtering); however, it has virtually no resemblance to the "real" detail that would have existed had the textures been created/sampled at higher resolution in the first place.

Re:It's the encoder that counts

[petros]

Now, I'm reaching the point where I can tell the difference between 160k and 192K on some songs. Add to that what I've learned about encoding (and the fact that it's constantly evolviong) and the questions of what to do arises. Should I re-rip my CD's with LAME? (I did that once to go from 128K to 160K and MusicMatch). Should I Wait? Should I just go on?

This is just my personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth... I've been using Xing myself (on Linux) for some time now. I was quite satisfied by the quality, and I'm encoding using VBR (at 75-85). I'm not an audiophile, but I'm not one of the people who can't notice a difference between mp3 and CD either. Before Xing, I was using bladeenc (which as I understand is quite poor), and I was suffering when listening to music encoded at 160kbps. I read the comparison at r3mix.net carefully, and I tried LAME right away to see what I was missing. What I found out was that, for me, there wasn't much noticeable difference. I don't have a reason to doubt the results on r3mix.net, but maybe Xing is just good enough for casual use, but not for archival. I encode my CDs for convenience, so archival quality is not important for me. I just want to be able to listen to my music with my headphones and not notice obvious artifacts.

Of course this has to do with my ears, equipment and the kind of music I listen to. LAME was considerably slower than Xing on my machine (K6-2/450), so I decided against using it. Xing gives me half or better of real time, and LAME was considerably more than real time. I don't know if this is true generally, or maybe LAME is not optimized for K6-2s at all. In any case, I say that if you encode the same music with both encoders and you prefer the sound of one to the other, and you don't have a problem with the speed, go with the one you prefer... Ultimately, you are the only one to decide which sound you find better. Whichever one you choose, I suggest that you use VBR, which uses a different bit rate for each frame depending on the complexity of the music at that point... This way you get a lot of data on complex music, and less data on simple music... Good quality and small file size.

Re:high frequency

[FFFish]

er, no. My range, up to at least five years ago, allows me to hear ultrasonic burglar detectors.

Most annoying. I think I'm finally, in my early thirties, losing my ability to hear them. Drove me nuts as a kid...

--

Re:Is this really necessary?

[TheReverand]

As a person who spends a lot of time in his car, I can see the value in this. Maybe I am an audiophile, but I can hardly listen to tapes in my car. When I burn a bunch of MP3's that I downloaded off of Napster on to a disc, You can definitely hear the difference. Even at high bitrates. The reason for this is that since you have more background noise, you tend to turn things up louder, and at high volumes is when you really hear the difference between lossy MP3 and CD audio.

A good analogy would be JPG to an uncompressed image. From a distance they look the same. But as you zoom in it looks like crap.

Re:high frequency

[Tairan]

Umm... no? The average human ear can only hear up to 16,000 hertz. At that level, the sounds are extremly faint. Even the best hearing is only at 20,000 hertz Two web sites about it: http://www.sfu.ca/sca/Manuals/ZAAPf/r/range.html http://www.ktsw.swt.edu/mc3309/hearing.html

It's the encoder that counts

[The Optimizer]

I'm not an expert on MP3 encoding, but I am in the midst of learning what I can in the interest of archiving my personal CD collection with the highest practical quality.

Take a look at this link:

http://www.r3mix.net/

Basically the author encodes various songs and test .wav sounds with different encoders/bitrates and analyzes the playback as compared to a 44khz .wav file of the original.

The results show a range of differences between encoders. The most popular encoders (xing), which I had been using myself in Music Match (latest version replaced it w/ Fraunhofer I think), just whack off all the frequencies above 16K hertz, no matter how high the encoding bitrate. As I understand it, that is just an arbitrary decision made by whoever implemented the encoder. If you encoder goes to 22Khz, is the Kenwood technique really necessary?

Another very interesting surprise was the finding of a bug in the latest Fraunhofer encoder as used by MusicMatch. Using the "Very High" quality setting (most people don't - it drops encoding to about 0.2x speed) the results were much worse than low bit rates at lower qualty.

What we have is no real consistancy in MP3 encoding between different sources. Different people use different rippers, encoders, and bitrates. I can download the same song 5 different times from the net, and I'll bet the files won't be identical.

And therein lies the problem as I see it -- this processing approach that Kenwood is working is on is going to vary in effectivness depeding on the encoding of the MP3 in question.

One thing I wish was done, was for there to be fields in the MP3 ID3 header for:

1) Encoder/Software Name

2) Encoder/Codec version #

3) Encoder setting (Bitrate + options)

These would be a great use in determining quality at a glance, as bitrate alone doesn't tell me that much.

The truth is most people I know use MusicMatch at about 160Kbps on Fast mode. It's a matter of convience - being able to just stick the CD in the drive, and in 10 minutes it's ripped using digital extraction from the CD. I've done it myself on about 1600 songs from my personal collection of 1200 cd's.

Now, I'm reaching the point where I can tell the difference between 160k and 192K on some songs. Add to that what I've learned about encoding (and the fact that it's constantly evolviong) and the questions of what to do arises. Should I re-rip my CD's with LAME? (I did that once to go from 128K to 160K and MusicMatch). Should I Wait? Should I just go on?

And finally, I still have this question: What about playback? Is there any difference between playback engines? I've got a RIO 300 w/64 Mb and I use it all the time. If I buy a newer device will it sound better? When I did a JPEG decoder years ago, I put in two options for the IDCT - faster vs higher quality. Not much difference between the two, but some.

You're right; it's not free. 5742735 5455833 ...

[yerricde]

... 5579430 5559834 5703999 5706309 5736943 4942607 5701346 5214742 5227990 4821260 5321729 ...

MPEG audio layer 3 is patented (see the subject line) and all uses (except for free(beer) distribution of decoders) require a patent license, which has $15,000 minimum annual royalties. Commercial decoders (including without limitation anything that comes on a commercial GNU/Linux distro such as Red Hat) cost USD0.50 per unit. Encoder licenses cost USD5.00 a piece for the Fraunhofer encoder (patent and object code) or USD2.50 a piece for something like LAME (patent license only).

MP3 can sound as good as CD

[linuxonceleron]

While this might somehow help make those Xing encoded 128kbit mp3s you get off napster sound a bit better, what is it going to do for people who already know what quality sounds like? All the mp3s off my CDs are encoded at 224kbit with GoGo, they are impossible to tell from the original CDs, even on good sound systems. Also, isn't this technology going to end up in one of Kenwood's $650 MP3/CD car decks. The kind of people who would pay $650 for a car deck obviously know what to encode their MP3s with (or they *should*) This all just sounds like hype to me BTW.

Re:MP3 can sound as good as CD

[chegosaurus]

I've always thought the expression "CD quality" was pretty stupid. Is that equivalent sound quality to a 1992 Saisho CD walkman or 12,000ukp worth of Linn CD12?

IMHO anyone who says MP3s are indistinguishable from CDs has never heard a good CD player. (But what do I know? I buy all my music on vinyl!)

Rob

Re:MP3 can sound as good as CD

[rperson]

Bah, the only way to encode mp3s is with Xing's encoder with VBR set at normal/high. Bits used only when needed, what could be better? I personaly CDs that i encoded that do not sound good unless encoded at 320 kbit. The VBR takes gives those parts enough bits but saves on the rest. Xing's audiocatylist offers VBR at any level desired. The only drawback is that file size varies on the complexity of the track.

Re:MP3 can sound as good as CD

[DarkMan]

I've always thought the expression "CD quality" was pretty stupid. Is that equivalent sound quality to a 1992 Saisho CD walkman or 12,000ukp worth of Linn CD12?

The latter one, if you can tell the difference.

When people say "CD quality", they are reffering to the full 22.05 khz frequency response, and the 96 DB dynamic range. A 'proper' CD player will output that. However, due to problems with the digitisation (aliasing etc), most CD's do not use the full range available, and top out at 20 khz (because it's a _lot_ cheaper). Thus a cheaper CD player may not bother doing it all properly, or use crappy analoge amps for thr final stage, because no one can tell.

Also, most CD pressing plants do _not_ press CD's to be good, they press them to be cheap. This means that the error rate on the disk is pushed to the maximum, before people complain, because that means faster pressing, which is cheaper.

Generally, classical CD's are pressed better, because you get people with better ears listening to them, who can tell the difference between partial interpolation, and real sound. [this is one reason the classical CD's are more expensive - they do actually cost (slightly) more to produce].

Is this really necessary?

[DeepThaw]

They cite the possible uses as car systems and portable audio, but these aren't perfect listening environments. In either situation, background noise is going to effect the sound quality anyway. They don't tell what bitrate they're improving the quality at, either. This may just be a way of trying to fill in the gaps at 128kbps or some other low bitrate, where a higher bitrate MP3 would still sound better.

Re:Is this really necessary?

[Cuthalion]

I guarantee you will hear the difference.

You seem very sure, and I would have felt similarly until this last week.. One of the users of our mp3 player software sent us some mail saying "Hey, I found you can make a 4 MB mp3 into a 240K uncompressed audio file, if you reduce it to 8khz 1 bit audio! Check it out, this sounds pretty good!" with a file attached.

Just goes to show.

I where they get the missing harmonics...

[jeroenb]

...you probably need to insert the original CD when you want to listen to Supreme Drive MP3s. This also solves the piracy issue.

Brilliant eh?

Re:ok...but CD quality???

[swordgeek]

Same thing, I'm afraid.

44100kHz means 44,100 samples per second. 16bit
means each one of those (44,100) samples is 16
bits long. Classical music may be more revealing
than (most) metal, and is often better recorded,
but there's nothing particularly magic about it.
Actually, if you want good 'revealing' music, find
a minimally-processed recording of solo piano
works. Chopin and Beethoven work very well for
finding faults in audio recording/playback
equipment.

I suspect, now that I think about it, that you're
thinking of the jitter problem that plagued early
CD players. When you got down to quiet passages
(which you're more likely to find in, for
instance, solo piano), then you've only got a few
effective bits of amplitude; thirteen of those
bits may be full off, squeezing the useful
information into the remaining three bits. This
problem was exacerbated by the fact that most
early CD players under $1000 actually only used
14-bit DACs.

Curiously, the best way around this turned out to
be to _add_ some digital jitter to the signal.
There have been other methods and refinements,
but the bottom line is that it's long since a
decent player will suffer from this effect.

Colin
(who loves his vinyl and turntable just as much
as his CDs, for the record)

Re:Snake oil

[DarkMan]

range. Now take the original, subtract the MP3 output and you get the error. Now encode the error using a different format. You now have a (still lossy) compressed version of the sound with less error than the MP3

It's a nice idea, but...

With a psycho acoustic lossy format, such as MP3 (Or Ogg Vorbis), taking the diff, and encoding that is pretty pointless. You've gone to all the trouble of working out what part of the signal you can throw away, as part of the psych acoustic compression, and then you just encode it all back in again?

The _only_ time I can see that being useful is for streaming applications, where, when the data rate drops low, you stop sending the diff, and automatically drop to a lower quality. However, that implies you can get a bandwidth of the order of CD rates. Hardly mass market.

On the point of encoders, if they've added anything to the MP3 file, then it's either an improved encoder engine (compare LAME with early MP3 encoders), or will require a new pair of encoder / decoder. So much for still being MP3.

Re:Snake oil

[Cuthalion]

I can think of a context in which this vaguely defined technology may make sense...

MP3 encoding relies upon a psycho-acoustic model of sound which is employed to decide which components to throw out. This is what Fraunhoffer has a patent on, and is why LAME is legal while BladeEnc is borderline at best.

Perhaps Kenwood has done something similar the the LAME team and cooked up an alternative psychoacoustic model for hearing which makes for better sounds than Fraunhoffer's.

Or perhaps it is indeed a load of crap.

Re:Snake oil

[Cuthalion]

Adding noise can REDUCE the percieved errors of quantitization. It's called dithering, and is common with images, and works (and is often done) with audio too.

Where it 'takes' that information from exactly

[gtx]

Where does it 'take' that information from exactly? Having studied harmonics and data compression, and played with mixing both, I can tell you exactly where it comes from. I've narrowed it down to a few possible sources:

1) int(rnd * 255) + 1
2) "drop your shorts, bend over... this is going to feel a bit snug, but we have to get those missing harmonics."
3) in case you didn't pick it up that was a reference to OUT OF THEIR ASS!
4) (telephone ringing) "hello?" "yes, we were just wondering if you've seen any missing harmonics recently, or if you have any you could donate." "Oh, sure! I've got a box of those in my garage!" "Thanks! We'll send somebody over to pick them up. Please leave them in a box outside of your house."
5) int random_harmonics(); (sorry if this doesn't look right, it's been 3 years since i've coded c)
6) maybe they're LYING! do you honestly think that you'd be able to tell the difference?

A few thoughts

[seizer]

Does this new Supreme Drive work on other sound formats? If not, Ogg/Vorbis is on its way - maybe Kenwood should focus on that instead.

Is this new tech actually just guessing the new high frequencies based on the sound it "hears"? If so, that's adding to the music in ways that might not actually work. And this has been done already - see Wowthing, which although being pretty cool, can murder some songs (I'm thinking Bon Jovi, here ;-)

People who really really really *really* care about enhanced quality are probably going to buy the original CDs anyway, and won't be interested in buying (I'm assuming buying) Kenwood's Drive.

MP3 is still proprietry. This is not a good state of affairs. Kenwood developing for this is not what I want to see =)

--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

In answer to Timothy's questions

[ChadN]

My guess is that the software computes a spectrum (using short-time FT or Wavelets, or some other method), looks for harmonic patterns in the lower frequencies (which tend to be attenuated less by lossy compression techniques), and thus regenerates high frequency data to fill in the attenuated harmonics. Audiophiles are probably NOT going to like the results (as well as being philosphically opposed; by its nature it trades one type of harmonic distortion for another), and non-audiophiles will be mostly indifferent, IMHO.

Still, I'd like to listen to the results on some good monitors...

Snake oil

[clarkma]

I'm afraid the only way to deal with this is to be harsh. It's utter rubbish. The whole point of lossy compression is that it removes elements bof the audio signal that are 'masked' by others, such that their absence is minimally noticeable. Once these elements are gone, they're gone for good.

Apart from the fact that the Excite article is embarassingly technically inaccurate, e.g. "Supreme Drive takes the missing harmonics -- known as 'fundamental'", it's obviously just a rehashed press release.

All they can do is add distortion - now that distorion may in fact have a 'natural' or pleasing sound to it, just ask anyone who prefers valve (vacuum tube in the US) hi-fi amplifiers, by virtue of being mostly even order, but it's distortion none the less.

Ugh, I hate technobabble, especially of the purposefully misleading kind. Anyone who understands the technology and claims this is meaningful is media whoring.

Told you it would be harsh.

Re:Snake oil

[slashdot-me]

> Hell, I'm willing to bet that in ten years,
> people are going to start talking about file
> formats that produce better than CD quality.

Sure, just sample 22 bits at 96kHz and compress with a psychoacoustical lossy codec. For any given bitrate a decent lossy codec will have higher apparent quality than a 'lossless' encoding. The term 'lossless' is actually a bit of a misnomer since plenty of information is lost in the analog to digital conversion.

'Lossless' compression is really just lossy compression with a particularly stupid method of determining which bits to discard.

BTW, video compression is where it's at :)

Ryan

What's the best MP3 encoder?

[alexhmit01]

I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee for a good one, especially a hardware one that would go quickly. I'm building a computer for my car, it'll play MP3s, have a GPS system, possible one or two systems that I'm prototyping for work, and mostly, to see what I can do with it.

My two home machines are a K6-3 (Win2K) and K6-2 (RedHat Linux), but at work I use an Athlon 700. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for a decent encoder, with hardware being preferable. I was hoping to rip my CDs and my girlfriend's CDs so that we can listen to them in the car on road trips without flipping through CDs. Right now, I buy CDs that I was for driving, but the ones I like seems to acquire scratches relatively commonly, only busting out the actual CD when I ride with a friend or visit my folks would be a nice improvement.

If anyone can help me out here, I'd appreciate it.

Alex

Re:MP3 is here to stay.

[linuxonceleron]

Now if I could only figure out how to dub my beta movies onto miniDisc. :)

MiniDisc is far from dead, it might not be popular for pre-recorded stuff (at least in the US), but as a format for putting music onto its great. For $2 I get a disc holding 74min of audio, how much does 60MB of flash cost for a Diamond Rio? The players aren't much larger than the discs themselves and there are many to choose from from a whole bunch of manufacturers. I wouldn't put MD in the same boat as Beta.