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Dial-Up Audio Public Listening Test Opened
CaptainCheese writes "Hydrogenaudio.org's Roberto Amorim just announced the opening of their 32kps multi-format listening test, intended to test the current 'dial-up' quality codecs.
From the Announcement: "The formats featured are Nero Digital Audio (HE-AAC+PS), Ogg Vorbis, WMA9 Std., MP3pro, Real Audio and QDesign Music Codec.
Lame MP3 is being used as low anchor, and a lowpass at 7kHz is being used as high anchor." These codec tests are unusual in that they adhere to ITU-R BS.1116-1. The test is open until July 11th and all are invited to participate. There's more info in the original test discussion, which indicates the originator is interested in 'testing formats working on dial-up streaming bitrates' - the test page notes: 'The real arena where codecs are competing, and most development is going, is at low bitrates.'"
Now if only the companies who manufacture digital players would take a look and see that there is life beyond MP3. Nice that a few are starting to offer Ogg Vobis, but they are few and far between.
I've seen the double-blind tests done at 128kbps and again fail to see the point.
What I really want to see is a rating of codecs that are able to achieve DBT-proven audible transparency and see them rated in terms of storage space (thus allowing the VBR schemes to finally compete).
Of course FLAC would come in last (considering WAV is the 'source'), but can my high quality VBR LAME MP3 pass for the original and take less space than MPC?
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
Good point. Can a study that will probably have relatively small survey size of an opinionated tech crown likely to exhibit bias be trusted? I don't know too much, admittedly, but wouldn't an automated test that just compared the output of a compressed audio track to the original be more accurate? Or is there more truth than I think to certain frequencies being worthless and inaudible by human ears?
Wow! I thought people on this site would have been a little more understanding. Believe it or not there are other places in the world (such as Africa) where high-speed Internet is not the norm or even available. Plus if you stream audio, any attempt to lower bandwidth is a plus as it lowers your bills.
Get over yourselves please.
By the way, did you ever notice the lack of multimedia even on this site? Why might that be? Hmmm...
Damn, this is the kind of crap that gets modded-up these days...
Codecs continue to get better and better. Vorbis is pretty good even at 48K (artifacts are subtle). And even if this was 1997, and 32K sounded like crap with current codecs, you're statement is just like the famed "640K is enough for anybody", and "there is a world market for maybe a dozen computers". It's absolutely guaranteed to be proven wrong with time.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Err, no. No matter how good the line is, sending a well-designed lossily-compressed digital signal over it at the maximum bitrate that can be supported by the line is guaranteed to give you a better result than sending an analogue signal over it. Information theory requires it.
The problem is that "automated comparisons" don't mimic human system responses (the ear, or the eye for video). Take video: the eye would finds grainy VHS tape more pleasing than a digital video that displayed some blocking. The blocked digital video, mathematically, is much closer to the original than the the VHS with its added noise...
These types of psychovisual (or psychoacoustic) responses are what make automated tools almost useless for judging the perceived quality of any lossy encoder. Perceived, that's the key word....it may not be mathematically up to scratch with the original, but if you PERCEIVE it to be as good as the original, thats what matters (this is of course for CD-quality high bitrate tests).