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What Sounds Better, MP3 or Ogg?
I've never been able to make a clear decision on the subject. These days I rip all my CDs to MP3 at 160kbs which means about 80 megs for a longer album. With a 100g drive on order ($220. I remember paying more then that for .1% of that space) disk space isn't really the defining issue, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna rip everything at 300kbs just because I can. I'm curious what people think sounds better, and what bit rates they find to be acceptable for both casual listening, and more picky listening. Don't forget to mention what sort of equipment your listening on so we know where you are
coming from.
I think oggs sound great but i am still ripping mp3s at 192 bits or better because they also sound great and everything i have is geared towards running them, (WinAmp, SoundBlaster Live, Creative Nomad Jukebox, nothing flashy) I think that ogg has what it takes to supplant mp3s in the future (better sounding compression and smaller filesize) and all that it lacks is maturity.
IMHO, more often than not, ogg sounds better at 128k than mp3 does at 160k. ogg still has some issues with some songs however. Monty and the gang are working on that though.
Nonetheless, I'd opt for ogg any day of the week for quality reasons (not because of the open source angle).
Seeing that oggenc is currently at RC2, quality should improve even more before the final release. It's supposed to be on par with 160k mp3s at 80k.
I don't know much about ogg, as I use mp3 for most of my music encoding. I've played around with various bit rates and finaly settled on what I felt was the best for me in terms of quality vs size.
I now encode all of my music at a variable bit rate 64-256kbps with lame. Lame 3.70 does a really good job of this and produces files (at least for the types of music I listen to) that sound very good. For the most part, they encode smaller than a 192kbps, as the average bit rate used is less. As a check, peeking at John Coletrane's Giant Steps, the average bit rate is right around 150. The bulk of my music averages between 160 and 192kbps.
The cool thing about vbr is that if the file needs more than that, is can use up to 256kbps to help make the harder to encode spots sound better. So I guess the worst case size you could get would be a song completely encoded at 256kbps (but I can't say that has ever happened).
I have a hard time telling these vbr 64-256kbps files apart from the orignal cd. Sometimes I can tell, but it is rare and difficult. However, IANAA (I am not an audiophile), so doing your own tests should help.
All of your standard tools should support vbr files. Xmms does a fine job. I did need to upgrade mpg123 to pre0.59s, however.
Anyway, consider vbr before you go straight to 300kbps.
This sig is false.
But if you do care about the actual sound, rip some tracks you like from different types of albums. Then, cut out one part of the .WAV file and encode it using different MP3 encoders and different bitrates. (Or, if you want to save time, use only LAME for MP3, because there's a near-consensus that it gets the best sound. Don't forget to try VBR.) Then encode it in OGG format, also at various bitrates.
Now, the important step:
Decode the OGGs/MP3s back to a .WAV file, and make sure you name your files so you know which is which. Now, ask your roommate to burn all these .WAV files on a CD in an order that will not be revealed to you. Also burn the WAV that never went through compression/decompression (see if you can identify it by sound). Now, get your best pair of headphones, go to your stereo with a pad of paper, play the tracks over and over, and take notes on which track sounds the best.
Only after you've decided which tracks sound the best can you ask your roommate which tracks were encoded with which method.
This is not hard to do, and absolutely necessary if you want anyone to take your opinion about encoder quality seriously.
spork
What I mean by this is, are you trying to be as true to the original recording as possible, or do you just want decent sound? If the former, you're trying to approach hardcore high-end audio and you don't want ogg or mp3. If the latter, then just go by what your ears tell you -- from everything I've experienced, the two formats are virtually indistinguishable on a standard speaker setup.
Second, you're playing said file from a computer or some kind of mp3 player. How good are your speakers/headphones? Do they have the range, presence, crispness, etc. that you want? How good is your player's line out and D/A converter? How noisy is your sound card? Hell, how much RF interference does your computer produce or induce in the sound card? If you want to be really anal, what kind of cables are you using to run to the speakers (or stereo)?
Ultimately, since you know that you're going with something that's not going to be totally true to the original, you just have to go with what you think sounds good. You have to remember, not all ears are created equal. Go by what's good for you.
Having said all that (and at the risk of contradicting myself), with -specific- songs I've noticed a difference between encoding at 128k and, say, 192k. This is especially true when listening with quality headphones. Classical music in general or music like Orbital in specific seem to sound better to me at 192k. After 192, I personally can't tell a difference. Your mileage may vary. I've listened to two identical classical pieces, one compressed at 128k and one at 192k, over a friend's hifi stereo and there was a difference in hearable elements and sense of presence. Over my lofi stereo there's no discernable difference.
So, of course make sure you take this with however much salt you desire. It all comes down to what sounds good to you, and what kind of sound setup you're using. As the question was stated, it's difficult to give an accurate answer -- and of course, even a "correct" answer may not necessarily apply to you.
Including this one.
- Jonathan
The reason for encoding CDs into digital formats are size, archiving, convenience, portability.
Size - some say Ogg is better at smaller sizes, but it's debatable. Storage has never been cheaper and is getting cheaper still. Why would anyone encode at 128k anyway? MP3 with VBR and the right options is about the same size as 192k and without some very high end playback equipment is indistinguishable from CD.
Archiving - there is no real difference in quality if you know how to use Ogg & MP3 encoders properly. Archival encoding means you want to have it forever, so you're not going to be caring much about size differences between formats, minor as they are. Quality matters most here. Can you tell the highest quality encodings in both formats from CD? Day to day use, no. Again you need some very high-end gear to hear the differences, i.e. not your soundcard or your portable.
Convenience - both formats give you the ability to playback what you want without reaching over to the CD rack, just open the player. No difference there.
Portability - MP3 has it all. Ogg has virtually none. Come on, someone reply with a link to some tiny Korean company that promises to make an Ogg player Real Soon Now.
Why would you bother with Ogg? Maybe if you absolutely will not use something that anyone has a patent on, but if that's the case you're going to have a difficult life.
Never understimate the power of the placebo-effect! I used to think all formats sounded like crap at 128kbit, but I guess I was fooling myself.
The other day I did a blind test comparing wav, mp3, mp3PRO, ogg, wma and acc. Since my speakers aren't all that good, and the acuostics of my room are less then perfect, I use a set of nice headphones connected to my EWS64XL soundcard. I tested with a few different songs, both classical and "modern". I converted the a wav to all the formats at 64, 96, 128 and 160kbit (except for mp3pro which I could only encode at 64 and 96kbit and acc at 64, 96 and 128), and then back again to wavs (so buffering delays won't reveal what I'm listening to). Then I made a playlist of them in winamp and randomized it. I put pieces of paper on my monitor so I could only see which number in the playlist I was listening to and then tried to guess what I was listening to.
My conclusion was that if a good encoder was used for MP3 (I used LAME at highest quality settings) I could tell that it was compressed about half of the times at 128kbit. At 96 and 64kbit it always sounded awful, and at 160kbit I could never tell it from the original.
I was really impressed with ogg. It has been tremendously improved with rc2! I could actually not tell which was wich at either 128 or 160 kbit, and about 50/50 at 96kbit! Ogg was also the format that took the crown at 64kbit. I would say 64kbit ogg is really enjoyablem, at least with less than perfect equipment. The default bitrate in the oggdrop encoder seems to be 80kbit. I guess that's a good choice.
WMA sounded better than mp3 at 64 and 96kbit, but I could actually tell more wma 128kbit's from the original than mp3s. I couldn't tell the original from 160kbit wmas though. The encoding scheme of wma seems to be quite different from the others. There seems to be less "compression-sounds" but it is as bad as some others at buchering the comes through. When few sounds are heard (a single violin for example) it sound really good at 96 (and quite nice at 64kbit too), but as soon as lots of sounds at a wide frequency range appears (such as big symphony orchestra chord), it sounds as if it is doing rough low-pass filtering or something. Really nasty.
MP3Pro sounded worse than wma with the violin but better with the orchestra, at both 64 and 96 kbit. I could always tell them from the original though.
ACC is as good as (possibly slightly better than) MP3 at 128kbit, about as good as mp3pro at 96kbit, but really bad at 64kbit. This could have been due to a bad encoder though. Sounded like it did lots of low-pass filtering.
Overall, I'd say ogg is the winner. I now encode all my music with ogg at 128kbit. I'm eagerly awating ogg 1.0!
Well, just my thoughts.
Regards / ushac
From my own experiences:
.WAV's. I wonder if at such a high bit rate you even gain anything? Although I know little about the inner workings of MP3s i would assume that the compression scheme in general is what stops mp3s from being wav quality once you pass say 192k and not the stream width. Can anyone enlighten me on this?
Size vs sound WMA wins hands down. I songs ripped in 64k WMA which are listenable, where as 64k in any other format is pretty laughable. If your not being picky about sound quality or anti-MS beliefs 128k WMA's encode fast, take less space and sound great.
Mp3 is still my format of choice because it is the most transferable/accessable. However, I find there is a *huge* difference between mp3 encoders. LAME is by far and away the best. Some songs I listened to (use Aphex Twin's "Girl/Boy" song as an example) just never ripped correctly (the snares sound wacky). However lame can make these songs sound much closer to the original even at a modest 128k.
I have heard about something called MP3PRO which attempts to seperate high and low frequencies and encode them seperately. Anyone have any info on this?
To be honest I am an advocate for extreme high definition. The more information the better (even if we can't hear it). As such, from a quality standpoint vinyl is actually my favorite format. With a good setup, nothing can beat it (note i have no DVD audio CDs). I would rather see more data coming through than better compression. Lets hope something like Sony's super CD takes off.
With people doing silly things like ripping songs at 256 and even 320k MP3s I wonder why they don't just start distrubuting zipped
r3mix.net has what appear to be properly done tests.. for mp3 at least.
i personally dislike mp3. i've never actually used ogg. i'm sort of the audiophile type and do not believe in destroying music by compressing it and ripping out the warm lows and lushes highs. the format i use is shorten (shn). it's a lossless audio compression format that achieves a compression ratio of up to 2:1. not spectacular, but i feel it is well worth the preservation of the audio. i can listen to the shn files directly using winamp, or xmms (there is also something for mac) or decompress them (to exactly the original file i started with) and burn to an audio cd. my audio system isn't spectacular, but i do notice when the bass end bottoms out and my speakers cackle. i'm also taking into consideration that i will one day have an audio system worth thousands of dollars (being a student sucks in that respect...). for more general information on shorten, try www.etree.org. not the official shorten page, but they have lots of free software and scripts for different platforms.
Yes, those things matter. And that's another factor in what format is "best". At the risk of sounding trollish, anyone listening to music via their computer is most likely not particularly concerned about sound quality.
:)
The S/N ratio of most soundcards is farily poor, especially compared to decent receivers.
Speaker wire and cabling makes a difference. No one agrees on how much, though
Speaker placement & seating position greatly impacts sound quality (e.g. stereo imaging).
Speakers play an obviously important role.
Finally, most people just arent' aware of, or don't care about, the actual sonic quality of stereo equipment. We just want something that sounds good to us.
Consider a previous poster, who loves his Bose speakers and Sony DE receiver. Home audio enthusiasts generally agree that the Sony DE line is definitely inferior to the higher DB and ES series. Likewise, Bose is generally known to be of lower sonic quality than other equivalently priced speakers. But he loves the setup, and that's the thing that matters.
Similarly, I've got a solid mid-range receiver (Onkyo 696) matched to low-end speakers (KLH bookshelf). Sounds great to me, but it's not really top-quality sound.
The encoder quality is just one of many possible limiters in sound reproduction. And if you're playing it through low-fi equpiment (e.g. computer soundcard and computer speakers), then just pick one that sounds decent and run with it.
ShoutingMan.com
I've heard a lot of people whine about how they wish that OGG would be supported on their Rio or Nomad or whatever. As somewhat of an insider in the portable MP3 player industry, I can say that the people who code the player applications for these devices wish that they could get their hands on a fixed-point algorithm for decoding Vorbis. If someone were to write a proof-of-concept library or application and put it up on Freshmeat or Sourceforge, I'd personally insure that it gets in the hands of the right people.
Why fixed point? All of the portable, mobile, and stereo component MP3 players are based around microprocessors that don't have any hardware floating point coprocessors. Since software FP is too sluggish, an efficient way of doing the Vorbis decode with integer operations alone is necessary.
If anyone is interested, don't hesistate to email me at the address above. No promises, but I might be able to get some development hardware for whoever is interested...
These questions really gets down to how the music is going to be used. I have two ways I listen to music - at home, and on the road.
First a little background on where I'm coming from. I listen to music through Paradigm Active 20 studio monitors, which are professional studio speakers with internal amplifiers, or through medium/high end Sony MDR-V900 headphones. I'm also a video professional, so I've very attuned to quality (I don't watch movies on VHS, for example, as the poor quality is too distracting). I'm not quite so fussy about audio, but am still pretty fussy.
At home, I have all my music on an old PowerMac G4 400 I had lying around, which I also use to rip with. I use Maxtor 75 GB external FireWire drives, which are pretty much infinitely daisy-chainable to expand storage, so the only real issue in data rate is balancing quality per cost .
On the road, I listen to music via iTunes on my PowerBook G4. Quality is less important than storage effeciency, since I have a limited amount of space I want to spend on my hard drive for audio (2GB is my budget - I need a lot of room for video files). Also, I'm pretty much only listening the the music while I'm writing. I've found a 128 Kbps with an average data rate around 155 to be good enough that I'm not actively distracted by poor audio quality, although I can hear artifacts if I pay attention. However, I continually add and remove audio from my local storage
I did a bunch of encode tests, and spent quite a while figuring out the best way to go. I found audio sounded "good enough" for high end listening at 192 Kbps MP3. However, given the amount of labor of encoding all my CD's (34 days worth of music so far), I really, really wanted to make sure I wouldn't EVER have to go back to the original discs again. I assume I'm going to be recompressing from these files to new audio codecs for at least a decade to come, so I want the quality to be not only transparent for listening, but not to have a minimum of sub-audible compression artifacts that would make later recompression more difficult. Because of this, I encoded everything at 320 Normal (not joint) stereo, with no filtering. 256 might have worked, but it was worth spending a little more on storage in order to not have to worry about having to rip all those CD's again. Even assuming your time is only worth minimum wage, it's way cheaper to buy more storage and spend less time fussing. Still, it's a little irritating to know all those bonus tracks with 10 minutes of silence in them are still eating up 40 K per second.
For my laptop music, I encode at 128 max VBR, joint stereo, with a 10 Hz filter. These files sound just fine. I reencode all of these from my master array of music as needed. In the future, I'm sure I'll migrate to other audio codecs for this as the technology improves, allowing me to get more music on the laptop, the car stereo, or whatever I wind up doing with the stuff.
-Ben Waggoner
My video compression blog
Since the Ogg compression sounded awful...
.wav to check that it had read the track right. The sound was very plastic, it felt like a cheap radio playing inside a box. It wasn't even a question about any snobbish high-end audiophile 'take away information and it sounds like crap' kind of thing. It just sounded plain wrong...
Decided that it was about time I checked out the Ogg Vorbis encoder since, well, many people have said many good things about it.
I downloaded the vorbis tools, decided to get a CD that displays different charactistics and that I know well, and settled for the Delerium Karma album.
I started RipperX, choosed to encode the first track using the highest setting (320k), High Quality mode, no CRC, no VBR and ran the encoding.
The result, well, to tell you the truth, I had to listen to the
Equipment used was my Denon AH-D750 headphones (decent quality, not studio reference quality though) driven by a NAD 3020i amp (leftover from when I got new stereo equipment) fed through my SB Live.
//Humming
I'm too stupid to preview.
I have done a >REAL3000$ stereo equipment (Van den Hul
cables, atacama stands, gold plated connectors
etc) to play 2 tracks in :
a) vorbis, 192
b) mp3, notlame, high quality VBR, stereo, 128-320, 195 kbps average
c) original wav file
The tracks were ripped from a superb quality
classical recording (I play the piano), from
DECCA.
I then had 3 of my friends compare the track
quality "blindly".
The difference between vorbis and mp3 is
immediately noticeable. Vorbis was found superior
by all the listeners. Some people had difficulty
telling vorbis from wav but they generally
tended to prefer the wav. (each one was
questioned individually)
Personally I find the difference quite striking
and was truly amazed!
This was an important finding for me, because
I make amateur recordings at home and I need
an easy means of archival (we are talking many
GB here, and I don't intend to fill my HD).
I decided to use vorbis at 350 for all my
archived recordings. (I also keep
cds).
I cannot say whether vorbis is also superior
in lower bit rates such as 128kbps.
Petros
I avoided WMA for years, since I was afraid of all the horrible things people were saying about it. I finally tried it, and at least to my ears, a 96K WMA sounds as good as a 160K MP3. OGG is about a wash vs. MP3, and it's not supported nearly as well, which gives me about zero reason to use it. I don't spend much time in Linux, which is pretty much the only area where OGG is better supported than WMA.
Which listening tests are you referring to? I'm pretty darned picky, and I can hear a difference. 96K is pretty bad on OGG and MP3, and very good on WMA, at least for rock music.
And I would urge everyone to do their own listening tests - I took the pepsi challenge, and WMA won hands down.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
I emailed an mp3 radio station I once listened to and asked them to offer a vorbis stream. They responded and stated that they've looked into it (woohoo) because of mp3 licensing, but it would require a lot of time and work to switch over. They implied that they intended to switch over eventually however. A deluge of polite requests for vorbis streams would surely speed things up.
On a slightly different note, I recently purchased some hardware for which open Linux drivers were available. So I emailed the company and told them that the availability of free / open drivers was the deciding factor of my choice of their product over a competitor's (it was). We need to do everything we can to encourage and reward good behavior in hardware manufacturers. They do listen as evidenced by the parent.
I don't use Ogg or mp3 for my stuff.. I use shn (from etree.org) instead, which is a lossless audio compression method that cuts the ripped wav file roughly in half. I listen with Sennheiser 495 headphones plugged into a headphone amp. Ogg and mp3 simply aren't good enough.
in the words of the great Steve Albini.
Picky listening? For my money no digital format is all that good, not even CD let alone a lossy format like MP3 or Ogg. The warmth, the dynamics of vinyl records can't be beaten, especially if played through vacuum tube equipment.
May be one day when the sampling rate is high enough digital will approach analog quality. Audio DVDs have promise. Unfortunately the music industry oligarchs are not supporting it.
But if for convenience or out of necessity you compress, Ogg beats MP3.
I ripped the Playstation Descent soundtrack to .wav, and proceeded to encode it to mp3. Problem was, there was one track with a particular instrumental arrangement that my normal 160K MP3 (LAME) just mangled. I tried various mp3 codecs, all the way up to the max of 320Kbps, and couldn't get it to sound correct. Then I tried Ogg Vorbis just for fun. Even 96K Ogg reproduces it correctly.
;)
Not exactly a scientific comparison, but a valuable example none the less. I've found that mp3's biggest problem is that it will mangle certain patterns in certain songs. Chances are, if you picked a random song out of my 1000+ playlist, it would sound reasonbly good at 128, or even 112 or 96. But there's a few in there, just a handful, that require 160 to sound ok, and a few (as above) that even 320 can't save. Try encoding Metallica's (heh, irony) "Until It Sleeps" at 128 or lower. When the main riff kicks in, you should be moved to vomit by how awful it sounds. Try again at 160 and it should be ok. If you can't hear it, consider yourself VERY lucky
I wonder why always people forget about main CD idea: audio CD doesn't have error correction. Developers of audio CD standard, back in 80's, though that nobody will notice loss of 100 harmonics out of 200 in 'regular' sound.
That's why there are so fscking expencive CD transports - they try to correct unavoidable loss of quality of CD's.
So, actually, whith cdparanoia, ogg vorbis and USB audio with external DAC you can get better quality than from CD. Especially, if you're listening from those cheap damn computer cdplayers.
Ok, the idea again: cd looses harmonics because of never-ideal reads, and ogg vorbis carefully removes unhearable parts of music.
eme
The post got me curious as I'd never tried ogg before so I downloaded the plugin for winamp and set about comparing the two formats. I pulled 30 seconds of a song (Electronic's Prodigal Son) to a wav and then encoded that wav into eight files, four files for each format. One for both mp3 and ogg in 64, 128, 192, and 256. I then added all nine files (eight encodes plus wav) to a play list and listened to them at random for a while. To be honest, I really couldn't tell the difference between anything in the 256 range. The ogg, the mp3, and the wav all sounded nearly identical. At 192, I could tell the difference (but not by much) between the encoded files and the wav, but not between each other. At the lower ranges, ogg sounded better, probably due to it's variable bit rate. My guess is however, that no one's considering encoding in 64 these days anyway.
As for what I'm running the sound through, I can't help but think it's all irrelvent. I mean, a good sounding mp3 will sound better than a crappy mp3 regardless of the system. You may be able to achieve higher quality sound via elaborate setups on high end consumer electronics, but the coded file hasn't changed. Seems to me like we were being asked which format was better, not what was the most important factor in determing sound quality. Any true audiophile probably wouldn't even play music on a computer unless he or she had to. I mean come on, do you really think a 100 dollar sound blaster card can do as much as a 2,000 dollar harmon kardon receiver?
In short, senor Taco, my expirience seems to be that if you're looking for good quality take the bastards up to 256 and use what you feel like, there's no difference I can distinguish. If you're looking to save a little space but maintain a decent level of quality, I'd go with ogg.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
i became a fan of .ogg this summer, just because i thought it sounded better on my altec lansings. so when i came to school this fall, i couldn't resist challenging my audiophile next door neighbor/old roomate/good friend to test it.
.ogg, he made a 256k .mp3 with whatever encoder it is he prefers, and then we both decoded them back to .wav, and made a 3-track cd (the 3rd track being the song uncompressed).
.ogg.
i'd just gotten a wynton marsalis cd from amazon, so _carnival of venice_ was used as the testing track. i made a 256k
we did a blind test, kinda. put the cd in his player and set it on random. it was obvious that one track was better than the others (cd) and one was a lot worse than the others (mp3). the ogg sounded remarkably like the cd track, though there were some small things that allowed us to differentiate.
i'm not sure i'd be able to do so well on the same test using my computer speakers, of course. but the difference is certainly there.
test stereo setup:
CD Player: NAD 512
Integrated Amplifier: NAD 314
Speakers: Acoustic Energy Aesprit 300
Interconnects: Kimber Kable PBJ
Speaker Cables: Kimber Kable 4VS
of course, there are problems in the test in that we only tested one track, so the findings are only representative for the wynton marsalis genre. but it made me a fan of
i encourage everyone to try something similar and draw your own conclusions.
I'm the guy who wrote up a 'sonogram encoder study' using a pathologically impossible waveform to encode, and then measuring how much different mp3 encoders fell apart, and in what ways. Like r3mix.net, I wound up supporting LAME, but with some explanations for what people find compelling about Blade and Fraunhofer, respectively.
You also should know that people have been pestering me to add Ogg comparisons for _ages_, even wanting to send me the files I couldn't encode myself on an OS 8.1 Mac.
Well, there have been some changes at Airwindows:
And so, _yesterday_, I set about getting a preliminary look at Ogg Vorbis using sonogram analysis on my Encoder Hell test sound- put in half a day on it, and updated my site to include the new information. And today, guess what turns up on Slashdot? Spooky.
Now, I need to emphasise that the process wasn't exactly the same as last time- I had to include some 'control' sonograms using the same mp3s that I used last time (Frau 128 and Blade 320, strong but idiosyncratic performers of known characteristics) for comparison. It's preliminary, and I don't want to immediately go into a complete shootout again because (a) it's such an undertaking and (b) I'm not at all sure I'm using a current Ogg version here. That said...
Here is the result of this early look at Ogg Vorbis, and I think I managed to sort of exactly what Ogg is relative to mp3. Quotes from the final report:
That is, to my mind, a pretty strong endorsement, requiring only that high bit rates be used (as is intended) As such, I think Ogg will only become more relevant as bandwidth and storage space inevitably expand. It also is, in my professional opinion, very well positioned to keep mp3 in check- mp3 can only maintain its dominance by not getting carried away with licensing and IP abuses, because Ogg is sonically superior enough to be able to take over _if_ given the opportunity of a situation involving harsh mp3 licensing, given widespread use of higher bit rates rather than low ones. (This is why I dismiss WMA- it belongs to yesterday, an era of limited storage space and harsh licensing restrictions)
Now, about iTunes? I have some observations that I'd love to learn more about. Basically, I picked up iTunes because there's a patch making it possible to install on system 8.6, and I did that- only to be startled by a distinct difference in sound quality which I have the background to interpret. Briefly, it sounds like iTunes dithers its mp3 output to 16 bit, instead of truncating it.
A bit of background: any decoder, either mp3 or Ogg or whatever, is effectively synthesising a waveform from limited information. It's adding harmonics together to produce a linear PCM representation that's piped to the sound output hardware.
I suspect everyone making mp3 players has been simply truncating the waveform to 16 bit on the assumption that it's low quality anyway and doesn't matter... until iTunes... which has startlingly better dimensionality and depth than any other player I've heard.
However- there's no patent on the general concept of dithering. Some of the fancier ditherers and noise shaping algorithms are proprietary, but I happen to know many that are actually GPLed...
It's exciting to see the pieces of a truly superior free audio technology come together...
iObjects Dadio operating system for digital music players supports OGG Vorbis files, so at least some hardware players out there could in theory play them. To the best of my knowledge, Iomega's HipZip is the only players actually using this operating system at the moment. That being said though, I'm pretty certain that the processor used in the RioVolt will support the same operating system, though the rest of the hardware likely does not. That means that should SonicBlue decide to do so, the RioVolt could potentially be upgraded to support OGG as well.
As far as actual processing power goes, most of the portable digital music players out there should be capable of playing OGGs, the format shouldn't take much more or less processing power then MP3, and would be very comperable to any of the other "new" compressed audio formats (WMA, AAC, etc.). The problem now is two-fold. First, a lot of the old portable audio players used ASICs which can't be reprogrammed. Fortunately almost all of the new ones I've seen come out these days have moved to either a straight DSP or an ARM processor, both of which are reprogramable. Other then that, it's just a matter of someone actually adding the code to these players. Not exactly something that could be done in a weekend, but given that the OGG format is OpenSource in straight C code, porting it shouldn't be TOO hard.
For me personally though, I really can't tell the difference most of the time. A good quality encoder for either mp3 or ogg should produce fine sound when used in the 160kbps range. I prefer the OGG format for political reasons, but that's somewhat beyond the scope of this discussion :>
Anybody have a Dennon Test CD or digital equivilant? Anyone have a distortion anlyzer? Osciliscope? Spectrum display? Take a CD of some of the sine wave tracks (direct digital mastered) and encode them into the various formats. Check the results. I am interested in THD, S/N ratio, Jitter, and ailising frequencies. Anybody up to this and posting repeatable test results? Lets find out what the artifacts are on a 20 HZ bass signal as well a 440 HZ and 3 KHZ. I have part of the test equipment needed to perform the tests. My amp is rated at 0.005% THD which is below the capibilities of my test equipment to measure it.
The truth shall set you free!
I had the advantage of living near an excellent audio store here in Seattle, of which I availed myself before buying my audio gear. They have an excellent page on exactly how you should structure your listening tests: you should listen to the tune.
(The rest of this comment is a small rant; feel free to ignore it.)
I ended up buying my integrated amplifier from NAD (which has the added benefit of a humorous name), CD player from Marantz, and speakers from Axiom. (You can't imagine how good these inexpensive speakers are.) I aimed for decent sound in my office without spending too much money. I'm not an audiophile, but I also know a particularly obvious imperfection will bother me. The system is pretty well-balanced for the price.
After replacing my crapomatic integrated bookshelf stereo in the office with decent components, the issues of MP3/OGG/etc. became irrelevent. They're all crap, and your only options are separating less stinky crap from really stinky crap, if you're listening to generated waveforms coming from your internal DAC. My SGIs, which spank any PC with an internal sound card for fidelity and noise level, don't even match up.
I really want to try one of the USB-connected external DACs, because I like the ability to manage my entire CD catalog from one place, without having to switch CDs. However, I couldn't continue kidding myself that the sound from the computers was the least bit faithful.