After 4 Years, HydrogenAudio Opens New 128kbps Listening Test

kwanbis writes "After more than four years, a new MP3@128kbps listening test is finally open at HydrogenAudio.org! The featured encoders are: LAME 3.97, LAME 3.98.2, iTunes 8.0.1.11, Fraunhofer IIS mp3surround CL v1.5, and Helix v5.1 2005.08.09. The low anchor is l3enc 0.99a. The purpose of this test is to find out which popular MP3 VBR encoder outputs the best quality on bitrates around 128 kbps. All encoders experienced major or minor updates that should improve audio quality or encoding speed, and we have a totally new encoder on board. Note that you do not have to test all samples — it is a great help even if you test one or two. The test is scheduled to end on November 22nd, 2008."

Comments

use the cans, luke

[PhrostyMcByte]

good headphones are a must for such close listening tests. you'll only be able to hear really major differences with most speakers.

Re:use the cans, luke

[maeka]

good headphones are a must for such close listening tests. you'll only be able to hear really major differences with most speakers.

Good headphones are nice in so far as they block ambient noise and allow you to hear any artifacts easier, but since MP3 is a perceptual encoder it is actually more likely that artifacts are audible on "defective" hardware.
If a cheap speaker or cheap headphone's frequency response is bad enough to mess with the model's idea of masking, for example, poor quality reproduction can actually make the 'tricks' of MP3 apparent.

Re:use the cans, luke

[aliquis]

While headphones may give better sound for the money spent isn't expensive speakers better than expensive headphones?

Re:use the cans, luke

[TheRealMindChild]

I call horseshit. I only care about the differences *I* can hear with the speakers/headphones *I* have. Isn't that the whole point? The shortcuts I can take without noticing a difference...

Re:use the cans, luke

[perlchild]

Depends if you can isolate outside noise as well. If you live like a hermit, certainly(no neighbours making noise while testing, etc...

Good headphones do that for you, and isolate ambient noise better. You can't noise-cancel on speakers either, not practically.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I call horseshit. I only care about the differences *I* can hear with the speakers/headphones *I* have. Isn't that the whole point? The shortcuts I can take without noticing a difference...

It is a heck of a lot easier to upgrade your equipment than it is to re-encode your audio, assuming you even have the original sources around.
What sounds fine today on your current system may sound poor on your next system tomorrow.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be very, very surprised if $200,000 speakers sounded as good as $200 headphones.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'd be even more surprised to see a moron who paid $200,000 for fuckin' speakers to admit otherwise.

Re:use the cans, luke

[rtollert]

A lot of very high quality encoder tuning has been done with $30 headphones on laptops. Concentration and patience is more important than equipment here.

Re:use the cans, luke

[aliquis]

I had the impression headphones was supposed to be better earlier but then I got the impression on head-fi that speakers was considered superior. Atleast afaik, so that's what I wanted to ask to make "sure."

Neither of my speakers or headphones are that exclusive, rather cheap B&W DM603s2s and also not that special Alessandro/Grado MS-1. And I think it's very hard to compare the "feeling" of each medium, sound levels and such makes such a huge impact beyond signature.

Without having listened to them I think I'd bought some of the Beyer-Dynamic DT770/880/990 instead today, but it's to late now =P.. Some other day :)

Re:use the cans, luke

[compro01]

It depends entirely on the room the speakers are in. If the room isn't any good (size, shape, irregularities, etc.), it doesn't matter how good the speakers are, they'll still get blown out of the water by a good pair of headphones.

Re:use the cans, luke

[aliquis]

So all open headphones is shit because they don't isolate ambient noise? ;D

But ok, closed cans is probably better while vaccuming the appartment than speakers :)

Re:use the cans, luke

[jmv]

Then take a 64 kbps test and encode your music at that rate. When you want higher quality, you use 128 kbps and you need to test that more carefully.

Re:use the cans, luke

[poopdeville]

Yeah, except at tone and stereo imaging and frequency response. You know, the "sound".

Re:use the cans, luke

[maxume]

If that is what you care about, you should just go ahead and follow someone else's encoder recommendations (the differences are small), and you certainly shouldn't bother sharing your listening experience with others.

Re:use the cans, luke

[MrHanky]

You won't get proper bass response from any headphones, and the reason for this is a) deep bass is picked up not so much by the ears as by other parts of the body, and b) bass demands a lot of air to be shoved around, meaning you need huge drivers. I know I'd prefer listening to $200,000 speakers set up correctly in a well suited listening room to $200 headphones any time.

Re:use the cans, luke

[setagllib]

Then imagine how good $200,000 headphones would be. They'd include an extra large driver to place on your torso for deep bass.

Re:use the cans, luke

[lysergic.acid]

it really depends on the application. for music, headphones are probably a much better value and give a better listening experience. but if you're building a home theater setup for watching movies, obviously speakers are the way to go. you just can't properly enjoy 5.1 surround sound with stereo headphones. but at the same time, most recording studios probably work with headphones far more than they work with speakers.

and in this day and age you shouldn't have to spend $200 to get a decent pair of headphones. likewise, quality speakers shouldn't cost tens of thousands of dollars, much less hundreds of thousands of dollars. i mean, how much did a top of the line sound system cost in the 70's? even by then most high end audio equipment probably exceeded normal human hearing ability. i would hope that today's mid-level consumer audio equipment would be able to at least match the state-of-the-art from over 3-and-a-half decades ago.

Re:use the cans, luke

[aliquis]

Just give me neural driven audio already :D

Re:use the cans, luke

[Aphoxema]

Haven't you heard of this new fangled software stuff that can do that stuff for you?

If someone cares so much about how stuff sounds I would always expect them to rip lossless.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

I call horseshit. I only care about the differences *I* can hear with the speakers/headphones *I* have. Isn't that the whole point? The shortcuts I can take without noticing a difference...

I could be wrong, but it kind of sounds like you're the type of iPod earbud user who couldn't tell the difference regardless due to your cavalier attitude about hardware.

Re:use the cans, luke

[westlake]

The shortcuts I can take without noticing a difference...

The keyword here is "I."

It doesn't tell you which codec to chose and which bit rate to select when you need to satisfy a larger audience - even within your own family.

Re:use the cans, luke

[aywwts4]

Assuming equal quality speakers (which indeed cost a lot more than headphones) The difference is your room. Many people don't enjoy the sound of being in an isolation chamber with your headphones, An effect that would be mimicked listening to speakers in a sound dampened room. A lot of people enjoy the effects of sound unfolding like in a music hall.

I'm sure the best sound in the world comes from those ridiculously expensive listening rooms you see, baffled and shaped like an opera house. But if you put the same expensive speakers in the average living room with vaulted ceilings hard angles and whatnot, the sound will not be equal in all places, there will be echos and some sounds will be scientifically and measurably deadened. Speakers are always at the whim of their environment, while headphones are only manipulated by your ear canal.

Re:use the cans, luke

[aliquis]

And how would we know if they have a similar quality? I would assume it's easier to get things "right" the bigger format you're working on but obviously that will use more material which if nothing else would raise the cost.

My headphones was manipulated by a cup of tea yesterday, I stumbled upon my TP cable (access point power supply is broken since I stumble upon that one to but anyway :D), I saved the sandwich I held in my hand but the cable tiped my tea cup and some of the tea went into one of the ear pieces of my headphones.

I lifted them up so some dripped out and put them on a chair with a hair drier.

Serious question: How much do you think this will affect their performance?

They wasn't drown in the tea but they probably got at least a table spoon of the liquid thru them ..

Suck but what should I do about it? :/

Re:use the cans, luke

[arth1]

Good headphones are nice in so far as they block ambient noise and allow you to hear any artifacts easier, but since MP3 is a perceptual encoder it is actually more likely that artifacts are audible on "defective" hardware.

Good headphones seldom block ambient noise. Some of the very best headphones out there are open, including (but not limited to):
AKG 701/702
Grado (all models)
Beyer DT880
Sennheiser HD600/650

They're made, not to isolate you from the environment and prevent sound from escaping either way, but to replace loudspeakers with the best sound possible, with no regard to (or for) the environment.

My beef with this test is that they use 128 kbps VBR.
These days, space isn't as such a premium as it was a few years ago, and few use 128 kbps anymore, unless it's the default for their encoder or they haven't bothered changing.
I would think that 160, 192, 224, 256 and even 320 kbps are more common than 128 kbps these days.

Then there's VBR. And VBR in itself is by many considered evil -- yes, you cram in more data that way, but you end up with a sound stream that switches back and forth between different qualities, which is more apparent to the ear than if it was all at the lowest quality. It's like listening to a radio where the FM stereo kicks in every now and then. Yes, that is quantifiably a better quality than listening to it in mono, but I still prefer switching to mono to get a worse, but stably worse, sound.
The same piano key hit multiple times can end up sounding different with VBR. First you get an awesome 224 or 320 kbps note, then another, but then omgwehaveusedupallthebandwidth you get a 80 kbps note that just doesn't sound similar. Overall, the quality has gone up, but the net effect is that it sounds jarring.

Personally, I have enough disk space, and use FLAC when I can. When I can't, I use 224 kbps CBR, because at that high bitrates, I can't really tell any difference, and I avoid the whole VBR bitrate-changing problem.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Cowclops]

Actually, the point of VBR is to keep quality close to constant, as some audio frames are more easily compressed than others. Constant bitrate actually gives you variable quality. Variable bitrate gives you near constant quality. If you "hear" the quality changing in a VBR recording, theres something wrong with the encoder.

Re:use the cans, luke

[jmv]

If a cheap speaker or cheap headphone's frequency response is bad enough to mess with the model's idea of masking, for example, poor quality reproduction can actually make the 'tricks' of MP3 apparent.

Maybe sort of in theory, but I can't seen that happening in practice. What happens in practice is that bad quality hardware will produce distortion that will end up masking the artefacts of the codec, i.e. many subtle details will be lost in the distortion so you won't know whether the encoder coded them properly.

Re:use the cans, luke

[spinkham]

And this is the difference.
High quality headphones work in the space you have, to get a great listening experience with speakers you need a new house built around your listening space..

There is a middle ground, I often listen to my Grado headphones with the speakers off and my subwoofer on for the full experience.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

The same piano key hit multiple times can end up sounding different with VBR. First you get an awesome 224 or 320 kbps note, then another, but then omgwehaveusedupallthebandwidth you get a 80 kbps note that just doesn't sound similar.

ahh, audiophiles. they'll make up anything to try and sound like they hear better than the rest of us, even when what they've described it entirely NOT how VBR works. it's nothing to do with available bandwidth, it's about what is required to represent that frame of sound. if encoding silence at 224kbps makes you happy, by all means go on believing that shit sounds better than 320kbps vbr files that will come out smaller in size.

personally i just use apple lossless for everything so i dont have to concern myself with whether or not i can hear a difference. there is NO difference from the source and the extra the space needed is minuscule in respect to drives these days, but I'm not trying to delude myself that I can tell the difference.

Re:use the cans, luke

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think that you might be disappointed in that hope. Parts of a sound system, particularly audio storage, playback, and amplification, have probably improved out of sight since the 70's. Quite good silicon amplifiers are commonly available, and we have loads of expertise and economies of scale in designing low noise power supplies; because of demand from all the digital circuitry.

On the speaker side, though, the news isn't so rosy. Speakers are fundamentally about moving air forcefully yet precisely. The fundamentals, big boxes, big drivers, very dense materials, etc. aren't fantastically costly; but they aren't really open to cheating, either. Rare earth magnets and high strength synthetic fibres can probably help you push a bit more out of weedy little speakers; but there really isn't any substitute for sheer bulk, which costs money and is only attractive to a small minority of buyers(hence the proliferation of little tiny Bose cubes on sticks).

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the headphones. Mine certainly don't (they're supra-aural).

Re:use the cans, luke

[bh_doc]

Modded funny, but there is something to be said about being able to not just hear music but feel it. Headphones are not natural in this way, because they can produce significant amounts of audible noise, without any of the haptic (?) noise that would normally accompany it.

Personally, I like my music to kick me in the guts a bit, you know?

Re:use the cans, luke

[AmberBlackCat]

You know, if the recording has mono and stereo parts to it, I bet a stereo recording that switches to mono during the mono parts would sound exactly the same as one that keeps the whole thing in stereo.

Re:use the cans, luke

[AmberBlackCat]

personally i just use apple lossless for everything so i dont have to concern myself with whether or not i can hear a difference. there is NO difference from the source and the extra the space needed is minuscule in respect to drives these days, but I'm not trying to delude myself that I can tell the difference.

I don't know. I think that's kind of like using PNG instead of JPEG, just because some people claim they look different even at the highest quality level. I have a cabinet, in which I keep all my CD's. In the computer, I have the lossy version of every one of them, recorded in variable-bit-rate mp3. Until I can tell the difference between them and the original, even if I have enough disc space, I won't use it for lossless audio.

Re:use the cans, luke

[greg1104]

This is why I use good heaphones and cover myself with these.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

then your vbr encoder is doing a crappy job.
proper vbr encoding keeps (or tries to keep) the quality constant, and selects bitrate accordingly.
if were talking about lame here, that "omg weve used up the bandwidth" sounds more like "abr" encoding, which is stupid i agree, so dont use it.

Re:use the cans, luke

[BrokenHalo]

I have a cabinet, in which I keep all my CD's. In the computer, I have the lossy version of every one of them, recorded in variable-bit-rate mp3. Until I can tell the difference between them and the original, even if I have enough disc space, I won't use it for lossless audio.

I'm with you. I can't make any claim to having superhuman hearing (I am over 45 for a start, with the loss of frequency response that the ageing process confers). The MP3s on my iPod are encoded at 192-bit VBR, since that is what I have found works best for my ears, music and headphones. I have only recently acquired a 160GB iPod, so lossless wasn't an option at the outset.

But there is no doubt that even I can distinctly perceive the difference between the compressed signal from my iPod and my CD player through my good headphones or OK Athena Technologies speakers. If I use the tacky little earphones that Apple supplies, everything sounds tinny no matter how it's encoded. Having said that, I wouldn't even consider walking around with my Grado RS-2 headphones on my head (I guess I can find some other way to be a dork), since higher levels of ambient noise make that pointless.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

i just had a visual of a 300 lb dude in a limo driver;s cap sitting on me..

Re:use the cans, luke

[afidel]

If you're going for a HDD based player then sure Apple Lossless makes sense, but if you want a touch then you'll want the best encoding that sounds good/transparent to you. I wish Apple had made a 160GB HDD based touch, I would have bought it in a heartbeat.

Re:use the cans, luke

[afidel]

Uh, PNG DOES look better for certain content, namely screenshots. Due to the way JPEG works it will always blur fonts more than PNG. For pbotographs you will get a better looking shot out of JPEG than PNG for the same files size ~90% of the time, so use the right tool for the job =)

Re:use the cans, luke

[Kjella]

Then there's VBR. And VBR in itself is by many considered evil

That would be the same idiots that don't use MPEG2, VC-1, H.264 or indeed any other modern codec for video, right? Because we all know our eyes can't handle the constantly shifting quality *rolls eyes*.

Re:use the cans, luke

[RichiH]

> You can't noise-cancel on speakers either, not practically.

Yes, you can.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

God, I thought everyone had left that anti-VBR FUD to the nineties. Apparently not.

Re:use the cans, luke

[rav0]

High power bass moves around a lot of air. Headphones are very close to your ear, and get the same intensity as distant speakers with much, much less power. Most headphones can give good bass response.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Wavebreak]

Actually, the reason I use PNG is so I don't get cumulative encoding losses if I edit the image for some other purpose at a later date. I would think that the same holds true for lossless audio for the purposes of many people who advocate it.

Re:use the cans, luke

[korean.ian]

...at the same time, most recording studios probably work with headphones far more than they work with speakers.

This is incorrect. For recording music, the performers will have headphones on so they can listen to other parts of the song without having it bleed into the microphones (although with the sensitivity of some microphones, even this can be a problem!). The engineer and producer will do all the recording using studio monitors. When they come to the mixdown, they will mix on a variety of listening sources, including headphones, but primarily on different types of speakers. I would estimate they spend maybe 85% of the time listening on monitors.

I've never worked in a post-production facility, but I have visited a few, and they all seemed to be using monitors rather than heaphones.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Alpha830RulZ]

likewise, quality speakers shouldn't cost tens of thousands of dollar

They don't. You can get -really- good speakers from several internet only vendors for a couple grand. Check out Axiom for one example. I have a 5.1 home theatre set that cost $2400 a few years back that is as good a set of speakers as any I've ever heard. I'm old enough that my hearing is starting to go, so I'll probably never hear a better set. ;-) I drive these with a Pioneer Elite amplifier, feed them music through the SPDIF optical source, and don't think I will ever need a better system.

I think you hit a rapidly diminishing returns situation in speakers somewhere around the 2 to 3 grand price range. Interestingly, this has been true for about 30 years - which means that the cost of good speakers has dropped significantly in real terms over that time.

Re:use the cans, luke

[theaveng]

The same piano key hit multiple times can end up sounding different with VBR. First you get an awesome 224 or 320 kbps note, then another, but then omgwehaveusedupallthebandwidth you get a 80 kbps note that just doesn't sound similar.

That's not how it works. The encoder does multiple passes (or it should if you used the correct setting), and rather than have a 224, 224, and 80 kbit/s note sequence, it would self-correct that flaw and average the bitrate across the timespan, and reproduce all three notes identically: 192, 192, 192 kbit/s.

Now one could argue that 192 is not enough to accurate reproduce the rapid "edge" of a piano note, but that's a flaw of BOTH variable and constant bitrate encodings.

Re:use the cans, luke

[theaveng]

I disagree that good headphones will reveal flaws. I have found that I can listen to a CD-to-MP3 or AAC rip, and it will sound flawless.

But then I pump the same sound through my 4.1 surround speakers, and I can hear all kinds of flaws that were not present on the original CD (which of course sounds perfect on 4.1 speakers). The separation of the sounds brings-out the artifacts.

Re:use the cans, luke

[Anonymous Coward]

Your description of VBR is laughably incorrect. I challenge you to prove you claims via a double blind test.

Re:use the cans, luke

[freelunch]

good headphones are a must for such close listening tests. you'll only be able to hear really major differences with most speakers.

With the right two channel source recording, a good system and speakers can reproduce a 3D soundstage. The soundstage can extend outside the speakers and have depth in front and behind the speakers. Headphones, while very useful for evaluating some aspects of quality, lack the phase interaction necessary to reproduce such a soundstage.

Most studio mastering, mixdowns, etc, are done with reference monitor speakers and not headphones. Ask a dozen respected engineers and most will tell you that you can't get the sound right with headphones (which is too bad because they're a Lot less expensive than even low end reference monitors).

Fwiw, most commercial recordings lack a 3D soundstage for various reasons (original microphone configuration and technique, excessive processing intended for lowest common denominator playback, etc) and some will attempt to create it via procsesing.

Re:use the cans, luke

[gacl]

Make sure you don't eat any Mexican food before strapping that thing on.

Re:use the cans, luke

[EpsCylonB]

Thats basically what joint stereo does.

Re:use the cans, luke

[gregben]

Actually PNG screenshots are perfect reproductions of the original screen. There is no blurring at all.

Re:use the cans, luke

[TheoMurpse]

I think what you're trying to say is that PNG is lossless, while JPG is lossy. This is similar to how FLAC is lossless, while MP3 is lossy.

ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, what a mess. Download this package. Now download fourteen more packages (DownThemAll is the only reason I didn't give up right then). Y'know, I'm kinda interested in this subject, as I have no trouble hearing artifacts in most 128kbps CBR MP3s, but this is just a huge pain in the ass. Wouldn't a simple Flash app have made things so much easier?

Re:ugh

[HateBreeder]

Agreed.
I went into the trouble of trying to run this under Linux.
the supplied batch files didn't work - it was missing files due to bad paths. the java application required a HUGE meddling around, choosing the settings, creating tests... I gave up. I'm not *that* motivated to help.

If you're trying to design a public test, the goal is to make it as simple as possible. An online application is an absolute must here.

I would be surprised if there will be anymore than a few hundred responses to this, all from a very specific demographic, Hardly a representative sample of the general population.

Re:ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't a simple Flash app have made things so much easier?

I don't. A Flash app cannot deliver the quality needed for this testing.

Re:ugh

[syousef]

Wow, what a mess. Download this package. Now download fourteen more packages (DownThemAll is the only reason I didn't give up right then). Y'know, I'm kinda interested in this subject, as I have no trouble hearing artifacts in most 128kbps CBR MP3s, but this is just a huge pain in the ass. Wouldn't a simple Flash app have made things so much easier?

I gave up at step 3751 "Buy Monster cables". ;-)

Re:ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to that, not to mention the website is also pretty terrible.

Say what the point is in one sentence, and then say how to participate in one sentence. Leave the rest of the crap for afterward, and don't hide the downloads halfway down the page.

Installers and package managers were invented for a reason.

Re:ugh

[pablomme]

I went into the trouble of trying to run this under Linux.
the supplied batch files didn't work - it was missing files due to bad paths. the java application required a HUGE meddling around, choosing the settings, creating tests...

All works fine under my Ubuntu box with the latest Wine and Java JRE runtime (which I happened to have installed).

But whatever, I agree with you: who on Earth decided that testers should even need to use the command line? Why didn't they just embed the Java into a webpage?

And it's not only that the sample will be reduced, it could be that the results come out biased -- what if it turns out that geeks tend to be tone-deaf, or another unfortunate correlation like that?

Re:ugh

[Petrushka]

Fortunately someone on the HydrogenAudio forum was equally annoyed and has posted all the samples in a single zip file (54 MB file).

Re:ugh

[4D6963]

Wait, what? It's not a blind test? Fail. For it to be done correctly it should be a blind test (i.e. you don't know what was encoded with what) and made sure that all outputs have the same volume (that influences on your perception of quality, just like sugar level influences how tasty you think a soda is).

Re:ugh

[Canar]

You haven't been involved in many listening tests, have you? It is a lot of work to complete a single package. You are probably not going to get good results at more than a package a day. It's a slow process, and your ears get fatigued quite quickly. Grabbing all of them is overkill.

And you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at just how good MP3 can sound at 128...

Re:ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

It is blind. Take a look at the home page for ABC/HR:

http://ff123.net/abchr/abchr.html

I wonder how you came to this assumption.

Re:ugh

[4D6963]

By not RTFA and by assuming that if the tests were run by the user it meant he could know which made what.

Re:ugh

[mollymoo]

That hardly solves the problem. The applet should be embedded in the web page and download all the samples automatically, on demand. Why the stupid rigmarole of doing everything yourself? It's a ridiculously complex process. I gave up when I discovered that "OS X users are asked to handle decoding of samples themselves" what does decoding the samples involve? I haven't a fucking clue, because that's all it tells me.

Re:ugh

[Neoncow]

These guys look like they have a simpler setup. http://www.soundexpert.info/index.htm

Download the file, compare the sample to the control, and fill out a little survey on how degraded the sample sounds.

Rinse and repeat.

Re:ugh

[Sinbios]

What? Is Flash incapable of playing a MP3 file? Or does it detriment the quality somehow?

Re:ugh

[Blakey Rat]

Why would it rely on Java at all? Since Microsoft hasn't shipped it in, what, 6 years now, that's a software package that has a lot less penetration than it used to. I agree with the first poster, Flash would have been the way to go here.

I can say hearing it's Java has dissuaded me from participating. There's no way I'm going to install that, along with Sun's other crapware, on my nice clean computer.

Re:ugh

[narcberry]

All this work for some LAME encoding...

Re:ugh

[iamnotaclown]

It's not just that you have to download the samples separately, or that you can't extract the files on linux or mac without writing your own scripts. Once you finally get them installed and run the damn java app you're presented with a screen requires you to enter a dozen or so parameters before you can even listen to audio. I gave up at this point. I don't have the patience.

Finally, the kicker is in the readme:

After you finish the test, save the results, (7-)ZIP, RAR or ACE them together and mail the file to mail@listening-tests.info.

Who outside of the hydrogen audio forums is going to bother?

FAIL.

Re:ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment is so not what Hydrogen Audio is about it is untrue. Users are invited to undertake the test with any old equipment; many experienced testers listen with headphones and speakers.

By reading the instructions I was set up to take the test in five minutes.

Re:ugh

[afidel]

Uh, the folks over at Hydrogen Audio will be the FIRST to tell you not to buy monster cables (at least most of them will). It's the teenage brat at Tweeter/Worst Buy with the huge commission on the line that will tell you to buy Monster. They might suggest replacing your headphone cable with a slightly thicker one if you have high impedance drivers, but that will be based on science and testing rather than marketing and perceived value.

Re:ugh

[r4b1d]

The files played are not MP3, they are WAVE. This is necessary to ensure that the decoder is not an issue and, more importantly, as you have lossless (perfect/not lossy) reference files to compare to.

Re:ugh

[Fweeky]

From the HA T&C:

8. All members that put forth a statement concerning subjective sound quality, must -- to the best of their ability -- provide objective support for their claims. Acceptable means of support are double blind listening tests (ABX or ABC/HR) demonstrating that the member can discern a difference perceptually, together with a test sample to allow others to reproduce their findings. Graphs, non-blind listening tests, waveform difference comparisons, and so on, are not acceptable means of providing support.

Of course it's a blind test.

Re:ugh

[yukk]

Wow, what a mess. Download this package. Now download fourteen more packages ... this is just a huge pain in the ass. ...

I know what you mean. I got that far only to find that the app won't run under java 1.6. It would load up but crash when I tried to actually play a sample. Sure, I want to help, but I'm not downgrading my java to last decade's 1.5 to do it.

Re:ugh

[syousef]

When did people on slashdot lose their geeky sense of humour.

I know what hydrogen audio is about. That's WHY the monster cable dig was funny/ironic to me.

By the way my favourite speakers cost me AUD68 (right now that'd be about USD45)

Re:ugh

[atraintocry]

I can say hearing it's Java has dissuaded me from participating. There's no way I'm going to install that, along with Sun's other crapware, on my nice clean computer.

You must be a fun person to shop for cell phones with.

Re:ugh

[Blakey Rat]

I have an iPhone. :)

What kind of music is involved

[CRCulver]

While popular music is acceptable at 128kbps with recent encoders, certain niche music genres like spectralist music clearly suffer at low bitrates. With pieces like Per Norgard's Symphony No. 3 or Grisey's Les espaces acoustiques you can easily hear the difference between 256kbps and the original CD-quality on even average headphones or speakers. Any music which depends on a greater portion of the natural overtone series than just the first handful of partials will need higher bitrate encoding.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[maeka]

You are asserting MP3 has faults it does not have.
"Overtones" are not an issue, nor do I think you could point out a 'problem sample' which fails due to the presence (or lack) of "overtones."
Popular music, in fact, is often harder to encode efficiently as it tends to have the dynamics compressed out of it (see loudness war), full of distortion, and therefore be closer to random data.
Temporal smearing is clearly a problem with MP3, and is evident in music such as harpsichord, but that is not the claim you make.
Do you have any ABX tests to back your claim?

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Aphoxema]

I'm not too worried about the quality of my music. Since I mostly listen to noize, industrial and EBM, the occasional scratching, pop, siren, explosion, grinding metal and screaming only accentuate the already apparent awesomeness of what I'm burning holes in my ear drums with.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

No he's right I'm afraid. On sounds with hundreds of overtones, even a rate of 256 kbps (in stereo) isn't enough. I know because I experimented with image transmission over the sound by synthesising an image into a sound by turning each horizontal line into a modulated sine at a specific frequency. Here's an example with the input and output image transmitted over a 256 kbps (mono!) MP3.

Long story short, when you've got over 500 overtones simultaneously, you need a much higher bitrate. In the aforementioned example with a bitrate of 128 kbps (mono) the output image would get very noisy, and at 64 kbps (mono) which should be considered a normal rate for normal audio music, you could barely recognise either the sound or the input image. The areas that wouldn't be blacked out (entire squares or triangles) would be noised out beyond recognition. Feel free to reproduce my example with varying MP3 encoding rates and you'll see for yourself, the amount of overtones matters an awful lot.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Anonymous Coward]

Overtones are exactly the issue.
One of the ways MP3 reduces the data is to remove quiet tones when there are louder ones of a similar frequency.

If the music relies on hearing the overtones, MP3 is not a good idea as most of them will be removed!

Heavily compressed and distorted signals are harder for a *lossless* compressor to deal with, but not a *lossy* perceptual compression system like MP3. This is because of the increased masking effect of a noisy and distorted signal!

Re:What kind of music is involved

[rtollert]

That's great if you're trying to use a codec for a purpose it was never designed for and nobody actually uses. Would you choose a JPEG codec based on its ability to encode/decode raw audio? Would you choose a car based on its ability to traverse the English Channel?

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

No it's not the point. The point is, in such kinds of music as "spectralist music" there's a much higher density of "sound information" due to the shear number of overtones and it requires higher encoding bitrates.

As for the point of the experiment I linked to, the point isn't to actually store images in MP3s but to show how images can be transmitted over sound with a good quality, furthermore in an intuitive format (i.e. the image's 2 space dimensions are 'mapped' to the sound's time and frequency dimensions). The practicality (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[TBoon]

Would you choose a car based on its ability to traverse the English Channel?

Seeing the luck Top Gear had with that one, I think I'll take the ferry instead...

Re:What kind of music is involved

[rtollert]

Spectral music might make for great samples for this kind of testing, but your assertion is ultimately unsubstantiated unless you can provide real listening test results that show it makes for a more sensitive test. There are all kinds of subtle things going on that might seem to make for great encoder testing, but largely turn out to make an imperceptible difference. Just because so many overtones exist (99% of which do not exist in msot acoustic music, btw!) doesn't mean they are necessarily audible if they are perturbed. More specifically, I'd anticipate that most FFT-based imaging techniques would hammer encoder lowpasses very hard, but would not be nearly as hard on preecho performance or stereo imaging artifacts. In a lot of situations, the preecho is a lot more important than the lowpass.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[maeka]

Overtones are exactly the issue.
One of the ways MP3 reduces the data is to remove quiet tones when there are louder ones of a similar frequency.

Only if the quiet tones are determined to be masked.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

Unsubstantiated? Didn't you read what I say earlier about the effect of lower bitrates? STFU?

Re:What kind of music is involved

[IceCreamGuy]

"Overtones" are not an issue

Incorrect. One of the ways MP3 achieves lower bitrates is by removing overtones of a fundamental frequency when the overtones are reasonably quieter. If, for example, you pluck an "A" string tuned to 440hz, the string would also resonate at 880Hz, 1320Hz, 1760, and so on. An MP3 encoder would remove these overtones if they were significantly quieter than the original 440Hz tone, since research has shown that the human ear doesn't really notice them if the fundamental is much louder. The problem arises, as the parent noted, in some niche music; however anyone should be able to notice this in things like cymbals, where the most basic sound and timbre of the instrument is defined entirely by the overtones it produces. You can hear this as an almost flanger-esque quality to the cymbals in sub-128Kb/s encoded MP3s. Any drummer will tell you that this drives them up a wall, and the way the psychoacoustic model of MP3 compression handles overtones is the culprit.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[IceCreamGuy]

Yeah so I just saw your response to that AC and I did leave out the part about masking (I'm by no means an expert, so I'm not entirely confident in this response); however still, with things like cymbals, you have a large amount of overtones close enough to each other to be considered "masked" that MP3 compression does significantly alter their sound because of overtones.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[dokebi]

Wow, that is the worst form of codec abuse I've seen yet. I mean, I've heard of people trying new things, but what kind of twisted mind would come up with the perversion of using mp3 codec to compress images? And don't even get me started with bombarding the poor audio codec with bits that it can't recognize! Think of the children!

You! Stay away from that codec! I'm calling the FBI.

(Seriously, the whole HAL-photoshop drawing tests only confirms that sound has a lot of redundancy, especially in the frequency domain. That's why mp3s work. Compressed binary bits, as are in jpeg files, are whole another beast. If you are curious about how you can use the audible range to transmit information, look into how modems work. Oh, and the whole "groundbreaking paradigm-shifting vision that sounds are images" is actually very old--bits are bits.)

Re:What kind of music is involved

[fbjon]

Lossy compression is based on subjective tuning. It doesn't matter how the encoder handles high frequencies or overtones objectively, as long as no listener can perceive any difference. Just about every lossy encoder can be made to fail horribly with some constructed test data, but that situation will never occur in practice with a good encoder (and a reasonable bitrate).

Re:What kind of music is involved

[fbjon]

If the music relies on hearing the overtones, MP3 is not a good idea as most of them will be removed!

The whole point of creating a high-quality encoder is accurately finding and retaining exactly these important overtones you speak of.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

Yeah, you're right about the HAL-Photoshop comment, actually you know what, if you had an audio codec that looked at the features in a sound, "vectorised" them (or if you prefer, "described" them) instead of dumbly cutting the sound in time chunks and encoding that in the frequency domain, you'd get a hell of a strong compression algorithm, way higher than MP3, even though probably quite lossy. Funny this thought never occurred to me before.

And I'm not sure I understand your "bits are bits" comment. If you mean that you could already carry images in the sound by either modem-like communication or using a binary stream you miss the whole point by a huge shot. The point is that sounds can be created and modified as images.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[hamster_nz]

As far as I can hear, the hardest sounds to encode are things like white noise. The sound of an audience clapping, is particularly hard.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

The problem is, when you give the encoder a precise bitrate to work with, and that you have hundreds of overtones which are all about as loud, well, it can't do, so things have to get ugly.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

There's overtones in cymbals? I thought it was more all like noise.. oh well, same difference, regarding the MP3 conversion that is.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[CRCulver]

All resonant bodies produce overtones when struck. Whether they seem like noise or not depends how close they come to what you consider consonant intervals (and this does vary to some extent from culture to culture).

Re:What kind of music is involved

[fbjon]

That's the tricky bit of lossy compression, and also why anyone sane uses either VBR or maximum bitrate.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[fbjon]

As far as I remember, the frequencies in any particular band are actually kept most of the time, but their amplitude is quantized into larger steps. Their amplitude would have to be truly insignificant to be completely zeroed out, and I don't think modern encoders really do that since it means essentially dropping out a whole frequency band for that frame. Too much quantizing leads to the "warbling" effect that's obvious in low-bitrate MP3's.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

This drives me up a wall too, although it's pretty hard to notice with 320k MP3s (one reason I buy from Amazon).

What's odd is that AAC is absolutely awful in this regard. It significantly outperforms MP3 at = 128kbps, but at higher bitrates AAC seems to still murder overtones whereas MP3 gets significantly better.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

Allow me to be very sceptical, or should I say, BS! Noise is noise, there's no way you can cut it into saying it's overtones, because it's just not a bunch of discrete stacked up sines. You can just Fourier transform any such noisy sound into figuring this out.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

It doesn't solve the problem when your entire piece of music consists entirely of hundreds of sines all along ;). But it most practical cases you're right, it makes things better.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Zironic]

The point is I think, that information is information and you have always had the option of transmitting and displaying it however you like.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[arth1]

One of the ways MP3 achieves lower bitrates is by removing overtones of a fundamental frequency when the overtones are reasonably quieter. If, for example, you pluck an "A" string tuned to 440hz, the string would also resonate at 880Hz, 1320Hz, 1760, and so on. An MP3 encoder would remove these overtones if they were significantly quieter than the original 440Hz tone, since research has shown that the human ear doesn't really notice them if the fundamental is much louder. The problem arises, as the parent noted, in some niche music; however anyone should be able to notice this in things like cymbals, where the most basic sound and timbre of the instrument is defined entirely by the overtones it produces.

My favourite piece of music for showing off the flaws of MP3 is Mike Oldfield's good old Magnum Opus, Tubular Bells. At first listen, an MP3 can sound just fine, but then you listen again, and focus on the "walking treble" in the background. When the sound frequency hits a multiple of the foreground music, notes all but disappear, and if you're actively listening to the background theme, it's quite jarring.

For some odd reason, Fraunhofer's encoder (latest version) seems to handle this far better than LAME (latest version), but that doesn't mean it's better. For other music, Fraunhofer can make a horrible mess of things (like Alan Parson's "Poe" LP, where the deep bass of the intro gets raped by Fraunhofer regardless of bitrate).

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Per Wigren]

I've noticed that besides classical music, the music that is hardest to encode is 70s/80s underground punk music (the hard kind), because it's often recorded on VERY bad equipment with lots of background amplifier humming, distortion, recorded on a cheap cassette 4-track porta studio in someones garage, and no mastering what so ever. The encoder have a very hard time to keep up with all the "extras" that are usually mastered away. At 128 kbps, hihats and cymbals sound like "pssh" instead of "tss" and the guitars get a "digital bee"-like sound. They also often get what sounds like a subtle flanger effect on top of it. At 192 kbps most sound like the original vinyl or cassette but many need even higher bitrates.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

Yeah, that's not really my point.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[IceCreamGuy]

it's pretty hard to notice with 320k MP3s (one reason I buy from Amazon).

Yes! I can't imagine buying locked-in, 128Kb/s music from iTunes when Amazon offers at least 256Kb/s, LAME encoded, DRM-free tracks for the exact same price. Then sync that up with lala.com and you have a truly portable, relatively high-quality music library.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[caluml]

An MP3 encoder would remove these overtones if they were significantly quieter than the original 440Hz tone, since research has shown that the human ear doesn't really notice them if the fundamental is much louder.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only difference between a guitar plucked at 440Hz, and a sine wave at 440Hz is the extra harmonics you get with the guitar. If you took a guitar and filtered all the harmonics away, you'd just be left with a sine wave.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you choose a car based on its ability to traverse the English Channel?

Maybe you wanted to start a smuggling business?

Re:What kind of music is involved

[TrekkieGod]

Unsubstantiated? Didn't you read what I say earlier about the effect of lower bitrates? STFU?

I guess you didn't understand what the poster said. His point is that mp3's and other audio compression techniques are specifically made to sacrifice sounds that humans just can't perceive. Those same sounds might be conveying a lot of information when you're encoding a picture.

I do understand that you think that since you can hear the difference in the sound when you perform the encoding at lower bitrates, that the mp3 is failing at audio encoding, even at the human hearing frequencies. The problem is that the multitude of information in the other frequencies cause the audible artifacts. Those characteristics are simply not present in any music, orchestral or otherwise.

As the other poster also tried to inform you, you'd see the same thing if you tried to encode a few notes in jpeg. At 95% quality, your Lena picture might look exactly the same as the original. If you tried to encode sound, it's not going to be anywhere near to 95% quality of the original. That's because jpeg is optimized to sacrifice information that you won't notice with your eyes, but when you map audio information to a picture, not only will it have to sacrifice a lot of useful information BUT the picture is also going to be naturally a lot more difficult to compress so you're going to be able to see a lot of the artifacts. However, it's also not likely to resemble anything that you'd actually take a picture of, it's just going to look like noise. When you have noise in a picture, it looks better when you smooth it out. That would completely ruin the sound information, but make a picture look "better"

So, stop telling people to shut up. Admit that you don't know everything and be happy that you learned something new.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Mattsson]

While popular music is acceptable at 128kbps with recent encoders, certain niche music genres like spectralist music clearly suffer at low bitrates.

This isn't about high versus low bitrate or how well different kinds of music is encoded at a certain bitrate.
It's about how well different encoders do at identical bitrates on an identical piece of music.

An encoder that is lousy at encoding the latest hits at 128kbps will most probably also be lousy at encoding symphonic music at 128kbps.
It will probably also be lousy at 320kbps, though it will not be as apparent, since you get diminished returns.

With pieces like Per Norgard's Symphony No. 3 or Grisey's Les espaces acoustiques you can easily hear the difference between 256kbps and the original CD-quality on even average headphones or speakers.

Have you tried tweaking the filter-settings?
Many mp3-encoders do some fairly aggressive filtering at the high end of the spectrum in order to preserve bits.
Makes for better quality on most music, but some suffer horribly.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

By the way, it boggles my mind this knee-jerk reaction (i.e. "omg MP3 isn't meant to compress images!") should be modded all the way up. There goes my misconception that moderators didn't miss points (the fact that my example was about image transmission was irrelevant, what was relevant was the sheer number of overtones) as much as posters do.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

I knew that, thanks a lot, mind you, I have a bit of an idea what the MP3 codec does, thank you. The whole damn point was not how that codec is designed to only get rid of what you can't hear, the point is that it's also designed for specific amounts of "sound information density", i.e. nothing more dense than your average pop song, and that when you take that "density" much higher than it should be then you get very obvious effects.

That's what I was trying to tell you guys, listen and be happy you learn something new, and stop giving me that "but an audio codec isn't mean to compress images well!" bullshit, it wasn't about image compression, you thickies, it was about bloody overtones.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[korean.ian]

Cymbals do produce overtones. They are inharmonic (or partials, if you will). You're getting harmonics and overtones mixed up.Citation needed?

Re:What kind of music is involved

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I was trying to tell you guys, listen and be happy you learn something new, and stop giving me that "but an audio codec isn't mean to compress images well!" bullshit, it wasn't about image compression, you thickies, it was about bloody overtones.

You don't have enough data to support your hypothesis that it's the overtones that do it from your bloody experiment. There are far too many other variables which you introduced, but you're not accounting for. Perform a double-blind test with normal music and not just a noisy audio sample that wasn't meant to be listened to in the first place to find out.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[ChronoReverse]

Overtones that don't happen with music and sound that we listen to and can hear. So what's your point? That a sound that people can't hear isn't encoded?

Oh no, all the pitches about 22KHz isn't encoded! I'm losing INFINITE information here. What a bloody useless codec.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[ChronoReverse]

The theory is that only as much as needed is removed. You start with the ones that are hardest to perceive and start to reduce those first before moving to the stuff that's easier to hear.

The obvious consequence of this is that when you remove too much you lose what's perceptible and the ultimate end would be just the plain sine-wave as you say. Fortunately for many sorts of sound, you have enough bandwidth at 128kbps to handle the sound reasonably. It is still insufficient for a great deal of other sounds though.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[AdamThor]

"Wow, that is the worst form of codec abuse I've seen yet. I mean, I've heard of people trying new things, but what kind of twisted mind would come up with the perversion of using mp3 codec to compress images?"

I would. Long have I thought to myself (e.g.) "Man, it would be cool if I could copy just the bass track off this sound sample." I have more experience with image editing software than I do with sound editors, but it would totally be cool to be able to edit sounds with the image editing tools I am aware of. It seems to be the most intuitive way of doing complex filtering. I think ARSS is totally cool.

Don't like it? Can't use it? Fine. But it's hardly perverse.

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

They "happen" in the aforementioned "spectralist" music. And you can hear them. They're only a few tens of Hz apart, that's why you can hear them (and lots of them at that).

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

But wait, don't cymbals make a noisy percussioney sound?

Re:What kind of music is involved

[4D6963]

God, STFU.

i look forward

[Anonymous Coward]

To al those people who claim they can tell the difference between 256 and 128 eating their hats.

Re:i look forward

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

Re:i look forward

[Rip Dick]

Sorry, but that's hilarious...

Re:i look forward

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Sarah Palin, and I can see this message from my house.

Re:i look forward

[srussia]

I'm Sarah Palin, and I can see this message from my house.

From my house, Sarah Palin, I can see YOU!

Painfully painful test

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what, I thought I'd be nice and give this a shot, but the amount of effort involved just isn't worth it. If it isn't 'click on this link, listen, rate', it's too much work. Download x, install x, email x - way, way, way too much work for what is being given in return.

mono encoding

[EpsCylonB]

I am deaf in one ear, so I won't take the test since I don't think I can do it justice.

I know that mono encoding saves relatively little space since joint stereo minimizes redundancy between the channels, but is there anything else I should be aware of as someone who transcodes everything to mono before I copy it to my mp3 player ?.

Re:mono encoding

[Adult film producer]

use a pair of headphones.. after you're done listening to a sample, rotate the headphones and play the sample again to hear the other channel of audio. Then you will be ready to rock & roll.

Re:mono encoding

[Anonymous Coward]

You could find someone who is deaf in the *other* ear, put the bad ears together and put on one pair of headphones. You could then compare notes using sign language.

Re:Popups on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody (corporate overlords) is experimenting with various types of advertising on small sample sizes at Slashdot. A few months ago, I got an interstital ad here. Just once.

dotted

[KasperMeerts]

Only up half an hour and already slashdotted. Looks like their servers are not as strong as they were last time. Not very smart to ask about a million of surfers to download a couple of megabytes from thir servers.

Re:dotted

[Canar]

I'm one of the moderators at Hydrogenaudio. The site hosting the clips is not Hydrogenaudio. However all the people rushing the topic seem to be overloading our already stressed server. Bad timing. :)

Outdated?

[Max Romantschuk]

Umm... 128 Kbps? Seriously? And no Ogg Vorbis, AAC etc... If you're bothering to set up a listening test, why limit yourself to 128 Kbps MP3?

Also, this should really be set up as a blind test, you get to listen to two clips, and have to choose which is better. The clips are randomized, of course... I could go on, but I'd just make myself sound even more arrogant. ;)

Re:Outdated?

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Hey, I still listen to only 128 Kbps mp3 (and some AAC). It saves space. If I accidentally obtain an mp3 of higher quality, I downgrade it to 128 Kbps.

Re:Outdated?

[darien]

this should really be set up as a blind test, you get to listen to two clips, and have to choose which is better.

I agree entirely. They should also include different bitrates - do many people still use 128kbps? - and versions which aren't compressed at all. Hopefully the results might shut up the audiobores who keep insisting that MP3 isn't good enough for their precious ears.

Re:Outdated?

[doofusclam]

But it is an *mp3* listening test, the idea is to see the state of the art with mp3 and to check whether 128kbps is a reasonable bitrate for everyday use.

Also, this is a double blind test - maybe you should have read the link? HydrogenAudio are well known for their scientific approach to audio codec testing.

Maybe a little less of the arrogance next time, eh?

Re:Outdated?

[Chairboy]

For the same reason you do performance testing on slow machines. It makes it easier to detect differences in sound quality (or slow code in performance testing) and the results scale smoothly upwards.

By limiting the bitrate to 128, you're more likely to get good data instead of just guesses.

Re:Outdated?

[Canar]

Other codecs have been tested previously. Blind testing codecs is very labour-intensive and these events do not happen frequently. This test is expressly centred around MP3. If you'd like, drop by Hydrogenaudio and come take a look at the other listening tests that have been co-ordinated. There have been many through the years.

Re:Outdated?

[Petrushka]

Such tests have been available for a long time (though I think that can't possibly be a complete list: I thought there had been loads more tests than that). This item happens to focus on a single-format MP3 128 kb/s test; why this is newsworthy when all the other tests aren't, I'm not sure.

Re:Outdated?

[Snowblindeye]

Also, this should really be set up as a blind test, you get to listen to two clips, and have to choose which is better. The clips are randomized, of course...

Glad you took the time and checked how they do it.

The test is done using the ABC/HR blind listening utility, which does pretty much what you suggest.

Re:Outdated?

[Max Romantschuk]

Also, this is a double blind test - maybe you should have read the link? HydrogenAudio are well known for their scientific approach to audio codec testing.

Tried the link, was Slashdotted at the time at least... Seems to have opened though, gotta take a proper look.

Re:Outdated?

[PhrostyMcByte]

MP3 is plenty good enough, it just requires more bits. Why have 192kbps MP3 when you can save room with an equally good 160kbps Vorbis?

Re:Outdated?

[Max Romantschuk]

Tried the link, was Slashdotted at the time at least... Seems to have opened though, gotta take a proper look.

Took a proper look. The test does indeed seem to be set up very professionally. I stand corrected.

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Crazy isn't it? A 128kbps MP3 listening test only focusing on 128kbps MP3s...

If you take a look at the site you will see that the last 128kbps test included various formats. There have also been tests using different bitrates. You have to pick a situation to compare; you cannot test 64kbps Ogg Vorbis against 192kbps AAC.

Put your money where your mouth is: take the test and see if you really can tell the difference. You may be surprised.

Re:Outdated?

[Shrubbman]

Because they've already had to extend the testing deadline twice for lack of enough submissions and someone's got around to submitting it to a few sites like /. in hopes of getting more people involved, that's why.

Re:Outdated?

[davidphogan74]

Really? I aim for 320 VBR if I'm ripping my own discs. I still can fit plenty of music on a single CD for use in my car.

As far as long term storage, I have about 300 gigs available at home if needed. My laptop has a 120 gig hard drive even.

Re:Outdated?

[maxume]

Because I don't have to mess with the resulting file to use it on my media player, cell phone, etc., and storage is increasing irrelevant.

(The amount of space that 1 song takes up on my USB drive is currently irrelevant; the amount of space 1 song takes up on my laptop disk is nearly irrelevant; the amount of space 1 song takes up on my exercise-centered mp3 player is largely irrelevant. I'm not a huge collector, but I bet my collection is somewhere beyond the 80th percentile of what normal people will ever deal with, so my experience is actually relevant)

Re:Outdated?

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

That's odd. I actually have that same amount of hard disk space available to me, but I'm constantly running out of room. Hmm......

Re:Outdated?

[A Friendly Troll]

MP3 is plenty good enough, it just requires more bits. Why have 192kbps MP3 when you can save room with an equally good 160kbps Vorbis?

Why have 160 kbps Vorbis when hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price?

I used to encode things in 192 kbps, then VBR, and now I want to smack myself over the head for doing so; blank CDs weren't so cheap back then, and I wanted to save a little bit of money. Looking back, it sure as hell wasn't worth it - I have crappy, lossy mp3 encodings of rare albums that I cannot obtain anymore, and a hard drive that could easily hold 2000 albums encoded with FLAC.

Sure, there was a time when storage was a premium, but now it isn't. Save room for WHAT? Five years from now, when you will be able to cheaply have 10 TB of storage space in your computer, are you going to regret having 160 kbps Vorbis instead of FLAC encodings? I know I would be, so now I'm encoding every CD I still have in lossless. If I were interested in HD video (which I'm not), I'd have no intention of re-encoding it to smaller sizes, because I *know* there will be a time when I'd regret it. Of course, YMMV.

Re:Outdated?

[hedwards]

Probably because MP3 is still the format of choice for use on portable players. Yes, iPods and a couple of other players can handle AAC and non-iPods can handle WMA, but what person in their right mind uses either format? AAC is fine if you don't want to ever play it on a non-Apple player, but for those that have multiple types of players it just doesn't cut it. And some people do still share via the sneakernet, cutting out nearly 1/3 of players is kind of silly, really.

MP3 at 192kbps variable is perfectly acceptable in most cases and is virtually identical to the original source.

At home, I like to keep my music compressed with something like flac or monkey's audio so that I have the full quality and don't have to rerip every time I change my mind about the type of format that I wish to use on my device. And can better handle multiple players with differing capacities.

Re:Outdated?

[hedwards]

Indeed, after reripping my entire collection for like the 3rd or 4th time because it got corrupted randomly, I switched to just ripping everything to lossless. If I need a copy for multiple MP3 players and such or change my mind about what compression rate or type I want it's a task my computer can handle without me swapping tons of discs.

It's always been easier to encode to a lower quality than to a higher quality. And in a strict sense the latter isn't really even possible.

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as 320kbps VBR...

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see this listening test is unfortunately generating a lot of confusion. I'll try to explain some of the decisions in a new light.

First a history lesson. MP3 at 128 kbps has very bad name. I'm sure we all remember the 90s and first MP3s being passed around on 3.5" floppy-disks. Everybody was astonished by 12:1 compression ratio and whatnot, but as soon as people tried to use the free encoders for something serious, it became apparent how poor the quality was. (For nostalgia, find the (c) 1994 low anchor encode in one of the test samples provided for this test ;) So the bitrates started to go up.
But since then, people testing and finetuning the encoders have done a tremendous job. I used to dismiss low-rate MP3 (and even MP3 in general) as flawed, because they sounded to me awfully clipped of high frequencies and some ugly echo artifacts were audible on pretty mild parts of the music. But when I tried some double-blind tests with recent LAME versions, I had to admit they're transparent for me even on ~128 kbps, unless I'm testing some particular killer-sample. Does that make me ripp stuff to such bitrate files only? No. But I'm not scared about 128 kbps MP3 anymore and I don't have a reason to disrespect it.

Then why MP3? Because it's an ubiquitous format. You can play it on every OS, every portable DAP, every (data CD capable) car stereo, heck even on your toaster. I am aware there are many other audio encoders and containers around with many great improvements, but a shitty old MP3 is still the most portable choice.
I think nobody serious is criticizing using FLAC or other lossless format for local storage of CD rips. After all, you get a bit-perfect backup of the original CD that way and a guarantee you'll never have to go through the hassle again. And if your portable player supports some shiny AAC, fine. But for sending a recording to my mom, I'll use MP3, because I know it'll play safely anywhere.

And one usage where bitrate still counts a lot is streaming. If your internet radio has 2000 listeners, each kbit of bitrate costs you 2 Mbit of bandwidth and over 250 MB transferred per second. If it's possible to lower that while maintaining sound quality, I guess every streamer would like to know.

There are more reasons for chosing just 128 kbps. Like that the test is already using short, carefuly selected, problematic killer-samples rather than random music parts, so that people are able to notice at least something. Or that placebo is evil, evil, evil - I learned that the hard way myself.
All in all, I think such test will still provide a lot of interesting information even today and hope some more people will take it seriously and contribute.

Re:Outdated?

[davidphogan74]

My encoder allows me to set a target bitrate (I think that's what it calls it), so if you want you can do 128 Kbps VBR, or 192, or 224, etc. It's more of a file size limiter.

Re:Outdated?

[daern]

Also, and I know I'll get shot down for this, but they sort of missed off the one that 99% of non-technical Windows users will inevitably use:

Windows Media Player.

I mean, what's really the point if you miss off the one encoder which most people will tend to use , if only because they don't know better?

POINTLESS.

Re:Outdated?

[Pieroxy]

Still, there is no such thing as 320kbps VBR...

If my encoder let me choose this option, I would be very suspicious.

More seriously, 320KBPS is the maximum bitrate for MP3. So if you get a file that is 320kbps, it is CBR by definition.

Re:Outdated?

[Neoncow]

soundexpert.info seems to do what you suggest. Multiple bitrates, other formats, blind test, AND they do higher and lower bitrates.

http://www.soundexpert.info/coders128.jsp

The instructions seem fairly simple as well. Download the test file, listen to the samples, and fill out a short questionnaire.

http://www.soundexpert.info/testroom.htm

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I still listen to only 128 Kbps mp3 (and some AAC). It saves space. If I accidentally obtain an mp3 of higher quality, I downgrade it to 128 Kbps.

I'm an audiophile, so I'm okay with using more space with my music. If I accidentally obtain a 128kbps mp3 file, I reencode it as 320kbps.

Re:Outdated?

[Eskarel]

Somewhat tragically, ogg is pretty much a waste of time at this point. It's a good thing it exists because it keeps the people who own(ed?) mp3 from being totally tools about it as there's an alternative, but aside from being open source, it isn't measurably superior to mp3 in any way I've been able to work out.

It's also not supported by the vast majority of portable media players out there(I have one which does and I selected it specifically for this feature), and that unless you have an excessively large legal music collection(nothing you download will ever be ogg encoded and re-encoding is rather silly) if you're not worried about portability you'd be better off with something lossless.

That aside I think the point of the test is to find errors in the encoders so a standard(lowish so compression is more likely to cause errors) quality level, and a single format are probably pretty necessary.

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

What have OGG and AAC got to do with an MP3 listening test?

Why use higher bitrates and quality of the individual encoders by throwing more data at it.

Do you even realise what the point of this test is?

Re:Outdated?

[Sinbios]

320kbps VBR does exist, it's where the maximum bitrate is 320kbps, but could be say, 32kbps for silence. You can do this in LAME with the -B switch. I believe this is the default setting when you specify VBR, but it's there to allow you to restrict the maximum bitrate to a lower value for some perverse reason.

Re:Outdated?

[Sinbios]

You should really just uncompress it to a wave file if you're a REAL audiophile :P

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it could be ABR(Average BitRate).

Re:Outdated?

[Onymous Coward]

Yep, outdated. Mostly, anyway.

After I got a spare 120 GB drive I decided that it was time to go lossless with the whole collection. That was in 2002. Having a small collection helped with that thinking. Now my collection is 800 albums, 7500 tracks, 194 GB. It's still growing, but so is my available disk space. Advancing storage capacity (and speed) just continues to make lossless easier.

Lossy compression formats are still valuable for portable music players. At least for the next five years. Then I don't know how they'll be useful.

Re:Outdated?

[r4b1d]

VBR. Variable BitRate. You can tell the encoder to not go above a certain bitrate, or below, as you say, but the whole point of VBR is that you are after a certain quality, not bitrate/filesize. 320 VBR is an oxymoron.

Re:Outdated?

[r4b1d]

The test is a blind test. Why compare how encoder A sounds at 128kbps against encoder B at 192kbps? That makes no sense at all. If the previous multiformat 128kbps test is anything to go by more people should use 128kbps as many find it transparent. Your comments regarding 128kbps MP3 and audiobores conflict - although I agree with the sentiments.

Re:Outdated?

[r4b1d]

Because 100x more devices play MP3 than Ogg Vorbis?

Re:Outdated?

[xorsyst]

Sure, there was a time when storage was a premium, but now it isn't.

I keep hearing this, but it simply isn't true. I have 40+Gb of 128Kbs MP3s. I have a 160Gb hard drive which is near, but not at, capacity. I'm not going to shell out £50+ in the middle of an "economic downturn" to buy another hard drive just so I can stuff it full of almost-indistinguishable-from-MP3 lossless copies of my music.

Re:Outdated?

[Sinbios]

I don't understand why this is such a difficult concept. The bitrate is still variable, but the range it varies over can be manually restricted. When you restrict the top to 320kbps, it's called 320kbps VBR. Where is the contradiction?

Re:Outdated?

[r4b1d]

If you use -B 320 to restrict the maximum bitrate to 320kbps you do not have a 320kbps file, unless you used -b 320 as well. If you encode multiple albums using -B 320 they will all have different average bitrates, none of which will be 320kbps. I understand your confusion, but my point is simply that you cannot use VBR properly and then refer to an exact bitrate. That's CBR, or even ABR, but certainly not VBR.

Re:Outdated?

[FlightlessParrot]

The point of the software is to blind the tests. At the moment, the results are being handed in, and nobody except the organiser knows which sample is which.

It's 128Kbps, mp3 only, because it is one of a series of listening tests. If you ferret around on hydrogenaudio, you'll find lots of tests which include AAC, Ogg Vorbis, and one or two others, at a variety of bitrates.

The point of this one is to see if other mp3 codecs have caught up with LAME, at a bitrate which is still used when space matters, as it still does on flash-based players.

Re:Outdated?

[FlightlessParrot]

It is blind, with the software. There have been plenty of other tests done on HA which test different bitrates, and different codecs.

Re:Outdated?

[r4b1d]

I have just re-read your original post. From your curious explanation 99% of VBR files are 320 VBR, as they don't specify an alternative maximum (thankfully). If you want to call them 320 VBR then by all means please do, but it is a severely confusing term to cover 99% of all VBR files!

Re:Outdated?

[Pieroxy]

Let's try to explain this through mathematics, since logic fails me here.

Let's say you have a list of numbers, from which you know one thing: They are in the range 32 - 320, inclusively. If the average of all the numbers is 320, then it means all your numbers are 320 in your list.

The same, if your MP3 has an average bitrate of 320kbps, it means ALL its frames use the 320kbps encoding. Thus, it is CBR.

Re:Outdated?

[MindShoot]

Why have 160 kbps Vorbis when hard drives are growing in capacity and dropping in price?

Hard drives may be getting cheaper and bigger, but my iPod Nano isn't! My music collection is now held as about 160GB of FLAC files that I listen to using a Squeezebox (which I love), but I squash them down to 128kbps MP3 files to listen to when I am out and about. I encode a few albums with problem tracks at a higher bitrate, but mostly 128kbps is perfectly acceptable when out and about. It's certainly a compromise I'm happy to go with if it means I can squash a bit more variety into my iPod or satnav...

Re:Outdated?

[Wavebreak]

Strict sense? It's not physically possible in any sense whatsoever. You can, of course, throw more bits at it, but that doesn't make it higher quality, it just encodes the artifacts introduced by the previous encoder more faithfully. The information discarded by the first encode isn't going to magically re-appear.

Re:Outdated?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to encode things in 192 kbps, then VBR, and now I want to smack myself over the head for doing so;

VBR will almost always do a better job with the quality of a track, as it can switch to high bitrates when needed. Essential, when using Lame, a VBR 2 (which averages 192) setting is going to give you a better rip then CBR 192. Hydrogen Audio wiki on Lame VBR

And while I see your point about hard drive space, a CBR 320 rip is just wasteful, especially if it is a CD ending track with 5 minutes of silence and then another track. I really wish people would stop using CBR in general.

Re:Outdated?

[Denyer]

the results scale smoothly upwards

Do they?

Re:Outdated?

[lab16]

Indeed, after reripping my entire collection for like the 3rd or 4th time because it got corrupted randomly,

Even if it is lossy, it's still in digital format on the HD, right? Wouldn't random corruption be indicative of a bad hard drive?

Re:Outdated?

[gerwen]

Seriously? Do you realize you make it sound worse by transcoding from 128k to 320k? You're sending a lossy encoding, through another lossy process, and will lose more information.

Direct link

[Snowblindeye]

Only up half an hour and already slashdotted.

Here is a direct link to the download site: http://www.listening-tests.info/mp3-128-1/

You only need to download *two* files

[rtollert]

The ABC/HR zip, and one sample zip. Each sample zip is a separate test that can be run completely separately from the others. Testing each sample may take quite some time (it took 1-2 hours for a single sample last night for me) - so splitting this up actually does make a bit of sense. That said, even on Windows this test has been plagued with problems. I've had to downgrade to Java 1.5 to avoid a crash.

What's the point?

[DogDude]

What's the point? MP3's? Welcome to 1990! With storage and processing power as ridiculously cheap as it is, why do people still use MP3's? I don't understand it. I've got my entire music collection stored as FLAC right now on a single half-gig hard drive. I think that in a few years, even that will be pointless, and we'll be back to storing our music as WAV's again. So, why do people still bother with crappy 128 bit MP3's?

Re:What's the point?

[corychristison]

I've got my entire music collection stored as FLAC right now on a single half-gig hard drive.

Must be a really small 'entire music collection'. 1/2 of a gig is 512MiB. Average FLAC encoded song I have are anywhere from 8MiB to 25MiB per song.

I hope you meant a half TB. That would make it much bigger... but again, you could still probably have your entire collection stored in WAV. I have about 1,300 songs.. all stored in various formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC) and it's under 10GiB.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

512mb harddrive? Welcome to 1990! ;)

Re:What's the point?

[Polarina]

Why switch back to WAV when you can have your music played at 192000 Hz and a 48-bit volume scale?

Re:What's the point?

[guruevi]

Some of us (most of us) have more music than you have. 500MB (0.5 Gig) as you so eloquently put it is only a few minutes of music. I have about 500G (~21 days) of MP3-compressed music, I have 500MB just in WAV/FLAC samples, 700MB in Tracker (as in FastTracker) format and 15G in AAC format. Putting that all in FLAC/WAV would take a few TB which quite honestly, I just don't have (especially since I need a backup of all that as well) and lugging an XRAID to a party would definitely look good but it's just too expensive.

Re:What's the point?

[TheStonepedo]

PCM is not limited to some arbitrarily low sampling frequency or resolution. Regarding 48 bits, can your ADC chips really pick up 2x10^14 distinct amplitudes? Can your ears?

One decent argument for switching back to WAV is the simplicity of handling uncompressed data. No complicated transforms are calculated because uncompressed signals need not be decoded; simple, energy efficient processors can play back WAV using less power than complex, optimized routines on advanced hardware would use to play back FLAC.

Re:What's the point?

[Von Helmet]

What's the point? MP3's? Welcome to 1990!

MP3 players, perhaps? They've been around a while, since nearly 1990 in fact, so I'm surprised you've not heard of them. I'm not aware of any portable music player that can play FLACs. Hell, there's barely any that can play Ogg Vorbis.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely. I do store all my CDs as FLAC, but when I put them on my portable I transcode to MP3. Granted, I don't use 128kbps because it's pointless (VBR is superior to CBR and ABR and my portable has a large enough drive that lame at -V3 is fine). But MP3s are still useful. Hell, I buy them from Amazon now and again.

Re:What's the point?

[Aphoxema]

That's where transcoding and a couple days to let your processor work is nice.

If someone is so seriously worried about listening to their music on the go in high enough quality they'll drag their laptop around with them. And I do believe the ArchOS can play FLACs but I'm not sure.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not aware of any portable music player that can play FLACs.

Actually, you'd be surprised - most of them can play FLACs. I mean, if two random noname Chinese mp3 players of the cheapest variety could, I don't see what couldn't!

Re:What's the point?

[TeknoHog]

One decent argument for switching back to WAV is the simplicity of handling uncompressed data. No complicated transforms are calculated because uncompressed signals need not be decoded; simple, energy efficient processors can play back WAV using less power than complex, optimized routines on advanced hardware would use to play back FLAC.

FLAC is optimized for decoding on low-end hardware, unlike many other codecs. Then again, CPU power seems to be increasing much more than storage capacity and speed. For example, TuxOnIce achieves much faster suspend and resume with compression, because of limited hard drive speed. FLAC is also pretty light when encoding, I often record straight to FLAC without taxing my Pentium M over the minimum of 600 MHz.

I also don't like the idea of wasting space just for the heck of it. WAV contains redundancy, but it's not the most useful kind of redundancy. Instead of WAV I'd rather use FLAC with RAID to use the extra space.

Re:What's the point?

[westlake]

With storage and processing power as ridiculously cheap as it is, why do people still use MP3's? I don't understand it.

Distribution costs. Someone - meaning you - has to pay for the additional bandwidth. The iTunes track at $1 becomes the iTunes track at $1.50.

Re:What's the point?

[Tomfrh]

Damned right. After hearing how good FLAC is I converted my entire MP3 collection. Let me tell you, the difference is astonishing, even compared to 384 kbit MP3!!

Music is so much richer and warmer now.

Re:What's the point?

[eric-x]

The point is to speed up file sharing and to fit more tracks on portable players.

Reverse your question: unless you think you can hear the difference between FLAC and 192kbps mp3, what's the point of using lossless?

Meanwhile, mp3 offers the following advantages:

1.up and downloads go faster
2.Do I want 100 or 1000 tunes on my portable player? Hmmm tough decision.
3.no need to transcode
4.less space means quicker backups.
5.why waste space unnecessary? 'Because you can' is not a valid answer, it also does not compensate for small dick size.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The downside of using WAV is lack of tagging. The only way I would use completely uncompressed format is if it was some kind of wrapper that allowed tagging. Flac is extremely easy to decode so I don't see too much point in using WAV (other than the ability to dd a WAV file to /dev/snd or something).

Re:What's the point?

[Pieroxy]

>> when you can have your music played at 192000 Hz and a 48-bit volume scale

WAV can be just that, you know...

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us (most of us) have more music than you have. 500MB (0.5 Gig) as you so eloquently put it is only a few minutes of music. I have about 500G (~21 days) of MP3-compressed music

Ha, you point out his mistake and you make your own. Unless you have those mp3s stored at 2311 kbps.

Re:What's the point?

[karnal]

From what I recall, all of Cowon's players will play .flac and .ogg as well. There were issues a few years back when I initially bought my D2 where flac files encoded with -8 (max encoding) with the latest encoder would barf on the player, but they brought out a firmware update rather quickly to fix that.

But you're right - I have an mp3/cd player in my car, and I find myself keeping 2 versions of music on my fileserver - flac for backups and "critical listening" and mp3 for the vehicle/gym.

Re:What's the point?

[MtViewGuy]

Actually, I would prefer music--if digitally compressed--stored as AAC files with 256 kbps variable data rate compression. The reason is simple: iPods support this format, and a lot of new portable music players now support AAC format files (at least in non-DRM'd form). AAC files are reasonably small in size, and being a newer compression format it often means better sound quality, too.

Re:What's the point?

[MtViewGuy]

Most non-Apple portable media players support MP3 and MA compression formats. But with more and more portable media players supporting the AAC format, I think in the end we could see AAC as the mainstream alternative to MP3 format in the near future.

Re:What's the point?

[TheStonepedo]

RAID and a Pentium M would require lugging a laptop in place of an iPod. I reckon your Pentium M wouldn't run out of power decoding high resolution, high sampling frequency FLAC files but current portable music players with processors optimized for audio playback do clip and lag on high quality audio.

Re:What's the point?

[borizz]

My 2 year old Cowon iAudio G3 would like a word with you.

Re:What's the point?

[TeknoHog]

Let me clarify. I mentioned that FLAC is optimized for playback, so it takes much less power to decode than encode. Then I mentioned that realtime encoding is possible with a low-end laptop (a couple of hundred of MHz). Thus you can imagine that decoding FLAC is pretty light on resources.

Actually, I just throttled my CPU back to 75 MHz, and played a CD-quality FLAC with about 20...25 % of CPU utilization.

Don't worry

[Anonymous Coward]

Just re-encode the 128kbps MP3 to 320kbps and it will sound much better.

Re:Popups on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the fuck did firefox tell me it blocked a popup on slashdot?

Because you have a virus. Sorry dude.

Re:Popups on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, and I thought I was just stoned when I saw one.

Out of phase

[tepples]

is there anything else I should be aware of as someone who transcodes everything to mono before I copy it to my mp3 player ?

Some songs are recorded with parts out of phase between the stereo channels. This means that the left and right channels, instead of being up/up and down/down, are up/down and down/up, which creates directional effects in stereo (especially on a surround receiver) but cancels itself out in the conversion to mono. For instance, "Happiness in Slavery" on Broken by Nine Inch Nails loses the snare in mono, and the quality of the snare drum in the remix of Coburn's "We Interrupt This Program" used with the NEDM meme drifts back and forth between clap-like and snare-like.

Some devices can't play Vorbis

[tepples]

Why have 192kbps MP3 when you can save room with an equally good 160kbps Vorbis?

Because handheld devices that play Vorbis might cost more for the same capacity. Or multifunction devices such as video game players or mobile phones might include MP3 and not Vorbis, and you don't want to carry a second device. Or you're trying to stream music to people who use a computer that someone else owns and administers, so they can't install the Vorbis codec into their QuickTime or Windows Media Player.

Lets move forward!

[Anonymous Coward]

128 come on!! with terrabyte HD's, broadband connections and MP3 player which can hold 120 Gig's we are still stuck with comparing 128?! I think we need to press on forward to FLAC or WAV gosh how about 24bit and higher sampling frequencies.

Bring music back! I am sick of substandard garbage. I rather listen to music not of my style that sounds beautiful then something I love that sounds like s*@t.

What year is this? 1999?

[rtollert]

"What you said earlier" was a lot of hot air about looking at spectrum plots instead of actually listening to the encodes in a controlled environment.

Did you ABX the 128kbps encode? If not, it's unsubstantiated. Plausible, sure, but not substantiated.

Re:What year is this? 1999?

[Trogre]

I'm curious. Is this how you respond to all constructive criticism of your work?

Sincerely,
A. Potentialinvestor

Re:What year is this? 1999?

[4D6963]

No, look, I just get that kind of bullshit all the time. I claim something based on years of research, and then someone who misses the point goes "it's a lot of hot air" and calls my claims unsubstantiated.

What I was talking about was the effects of compression at different bitrates on the time-frequency plan of sounds with a lot of "overtones", so I could care less how it sounds like, the effect seen on the spectrogram is enough to realise what happens. Yet then some guy with a narrow mind has to come up and go "blind listening tests or it didn't happen". What do you want to reply to that? If you dismiss my well-founded claims because it doesn't meet your irrelevant little requirements and that you insist, then I have nothing left to tell you.

This being said I actually respond quite well to criticism that is not stubborn dismissal of my claims.

Re:What year is this? 1999?

[4D6963]

Oops, meant to post that here.

1980 called and wants their technology back

[exabrial]

1980 called and wants their technology back. Please move on to AAC or Vorbis. It's not an "open" format (it's patented). Use something that's better (AAC) or actually open (Vorbis) Thank you

Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[The Optimizer]

It was 10 years ago when I bought a Rio PMP-300, the first readily available flash-based MP3 player. It came with 32MB of internal memory, and would accept a single SmartMedia card, 32MB max in size (which I quickly went out and bought).

Back then, the size of your MP3 files mattered a whole lot more. At 128K CBR, I could fit 6 to 9 songs on each bank, depending on how long they were. The artifacts were noticeable to even my poor hearing. So I then stepped up to 160kb CBR and then LAME -remix (VBR, average ~ 190K ) encoding setting. I will make a note here that not all MP3 encoders are created equal - there is no fixed encoding standard, just for decoding.

With the VBR files, I could only fit 3-6 songs per bank of the Rio, so yea, it mattered then. If I wanted a specific CD to take to the gym with me, I had to think about what I put on the Rio. Often I couldn't fit the whole CD on the device or I had to swap play order to better use the slack space in each memory partition.

Can you even buy a MP3 player with less than 1GB of internal flash memory today? Skip past something like the iPod shuffle or equivalent at 1 and 2 GB, and you are quickly looking at 4GB, 8GB, 16GB or more.

I just encoded my copy of Linkin park's Minutes to Midnight CD that I bought with LAME 3.97 high quality VBR and it came out to 77.6 MB for the whole thing with the average bit rates in the 230kb/s to 270kbs. It wouldn't fit on the RIO at this quality. On the cheapest iPod Shuffle, I could fit 13 similarly sized CDs at this quality encoding. On the cheapest iPod Nano, around 100 similarly sized and encoded CDs.

My point??

128Kbs is sooo 1990s.. We've moved on. Storage, be it flash or Hard drives, has gotten order(s) of magnitude cheaper and bigger. So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Freultwah]

Reason number one: streaming. Ogg Vorbis, however, is way better for that for a couple of reasons, one being the better container and the other being the better sound quality at smaller sizes.

Reason number two: portable use. Smaller files still take less space and as portable space is still limited, that's a good thing.

My Sony-Ericsson W810 plays MP3 and AAC, and if I have a choice, I go for 128 Kib/s AAC, because its quality sounds about on par with 192 Kib/s MP3 to me and that way I can cram way more albums onto the memory stick that is of a limited size. Shuffling files on and off the card (or a dedicated player for that matter) is a nuisance to be avoided and the better the new codecs fare at 128, the better off I am. Your kilometrage may certainly vary.

I keep my collection in FLAC when I deem it necessary, otherwise in Ogg Vorbis aoTuV Q5, but hard drive space is way cheaper than memory sticks or flash storage.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[sdhoigt]

Agreed (except on Linkin Park ;)

All I use anymore is: lame -V 0 ...which equates to the highest VBR quality setting.

I tried to wave the OGG flag for a couple years and threw in the towel. *Everything* plays MP3.

SD

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Anonymous Coward]

I stream radio all day @128Kbps. I want it to sound decent with minimal impact on my bandwidth. There are still scenarios where the quality/compression ratio matter for MP3.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[mckyj57]

128Kbs is sooo 1990s.. We've moved on. Storage, be it flash or Hard drives, has gotten order(s) of magnitude cheaper and bigger. So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.

When network transfer speeds start increasing at the same rate storage capacity increases, I say yes. Until then, 128Kbps has a definite place and improving the quality is a worthy goal.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there's not much of a noticeable difference in quality as you move onto the higher bitrates.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Their testing methodology is to start 'half way', grade how it sounds and assume it only gets better the higher[bitrate] you go.

I'm glad they're testing the new LAME 3.98, I can only assume that Vorbis has yet to release any updates/revisions since the last listening test and they don't need to test it again.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[MtViewGuy]

I agree with your sentiments 100%. :-)

In fact, for my 3G iPod nano (8 GB model), the CD's I "rip" for the player are all encoded 192 kbps VBR AAC format for the best balance between reasonable sound quality and file size.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[MtViewGuy]

I tried to wave the OGG flag for a couple years and threw in the towel.

Not hard to figure out why: Ogg Vorbis files don't support DRM, while AAC and WMA compression do. MP3 compatibility is being maintained since just about every portable media player out there support the MP3 format. I do think AAC will become more prominent in the future, since many newer portable music players now can play back non-DRM'd AAC files.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Anonymous Coward]

128Kbs is sooo 1990s..

Just like hydrogenaudio obviously.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Urza9814]

I have the most expensive iPod touch (or at least it was...do they have a 32 gig ones yet?) and I can't fit all the music I'd like to on it. Not sure what bitrate my music's encoded at - there's quite a mix. As low as 128, as high as 320. Point is, yea, MP3 players store a lot more than they used to, but they still can't store even a moderately sized collection. When I go somewhere, I don't know what music I'm going to want to listen to - so I want to have all of it with me. Which is why I never used a flash MP3 player before the touch - I used hard drive iPods, and before that CD/MP3 players with several CDs. Anyway, the size of your MP3s may not matter if they're on your computer (although in my case they do - I already have to store mine on a USB drive), but it still does for the player.

When the _cheapest_ iPod hits 16 gigs and the cheapest laptops have 200 gigs, then we won't need to worry about the size of our MP3s. We're not there yet. A couple more years and we'll be good.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[r4b1d]

Is it? The ~128kbps multiformat test proved that MP3 held its own with Ogg Vorbis and AAC, and that many people found ~128kbps to be transparent. For this reason 128kbps is still an important bitrate to test. I can only assume that the reason Ogg Vorbis is not being tested is that this is an MP3 listening test.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.

There is not much to improve at higher VBR settings. I think the main goal is to achive transparency at a certain setting. Since the higher VBR settings are already transparent to most users in most cases, lower settings are tweaked to become better.
If you have problems at higher VBR settings, you might wanna post your ABX test results+sample at HA, this might help to improve things further.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what leads you to believe that you NEED to use the highest quality VBR setting? Did you carry out any blind listening test to determine this?

VBR at ~175Kbps (-V3) is more than enough to achieve perceptual transparency for the vast majority of listeners on the vast majority of equipment. Did you blind-test or just blindly assume that it wasn't sufficient for you?

Once perceptual transparency is reached, it's pointless taking the bitrate any higher, therefore, for the majority of listeners for whom ~175Kbps (or even ~128Kbps) in VBR is more than sufficient, it's effectively equal to CBR320.

It's highly likely that some MP3 encoders WILL produce perceptual transparency for the vast majority of listeners nowadays at ~128Kbps in VBR. That's the whole point of holding a blind test at ~128Kbps in VBR.

Giving us a history lesson is interesting from an historical POV, but it tells us nothing whatsoever about what's happening NOW and bears no relevance to NOW. That's what the listening test is for. Open your eyes/ears! :)

Re:Popups on Slashdot?

[HBI]

Firefox+Noscript works nicely to avoid these.

Re:Popups on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you immediately left and didn't come back for at least a week to make sure they got the message.

Re:Why are we still focusing on 128kb? Streaming

[frednofr]

lossy audio is very useful for streaming. Many of us have stopped storing mp3s and just listen streamed music on websites such as deezer.com.

you didn't say anything about the effect on sound

[Trepidity]

You said that if you look at a spectrum as an image you can spot degradation in a lossy encoder. That's entirely irrelevant, since mp3 is a perceptual encoder; it deliberately loses information that, according to its predictive model, listeners cannot actually hear. To show that it fails to do this, you need to conduct a blind listening test with the encoded and un-encoded version, and actually reliably (i.e. significantly more than 50% of the time) pick out the encoded one.

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

Who should take the test?

Anyone interested in lossy audio quality, or people who have no interest but would like to help making this test better are invited. You don't need excellent hearing, but some good gear is welcome. Headphones are a must-have.

Emphasis mine.

Several reasons

[rtollert]

First and foremost, there's a practicality issue here. Listening tests are very hard to conduct - but they become considerably easier at lower bitrates. Everybody would love to see a 192kbps test or a 256kbps test or whatnot, but actually ABXing differences at those rates becomes so rare that it largely becomes a contest of which encoder outwits a set of brutally difficult problem samples that hardly ever occur in reality (or which encoders favor the artifacts heard by a very selective set of golden ears). The meaning of the results is thus compromised. At 128k the differences are significant enough to accurately compare encoders amongst themselves with more samples.

Second, low bitrates still matter for cell phones, flash players, iPhone/iPod Touches, etc... Applications shift as storage space increases. There will likely always be devices out there with under 30GB of storage space, and there will always be people who want to put 1,000 albums on said devices at high quality. So there will always be a use for low bitrates. (Heck, I don't even think my music collection would fit on my 60GB iPod at 256k!)

Third, bandwidth still matters for online music distribution. MySpace does most of its streaming with 96kbps CBR (blech!). While this test specifically isn't that useful for MySpace encoding, the general question - of how to eke out maximum quality for nominal bitrate - will be important for as long as bandwidth costs money.

Re:Several reasons

[MtViewGuy]

However, why are Apple's iTunes Plus store and the Amazon MP3 Download store use 256 kbps variable bit rate encoding? The reason is obvious: near-CD sound quality without requiring a long download time for the music file with lower-speed broadband connections.

It is a blind test; they've tested aac, ogg, etc

[jensend]

HydrogenAudio has done all kinds of listening tests over the years with various different codecs, including multiple encoders and rates for all of the major lossy formats. Their public tests are well designed blind tests-they give you the various samples but don't tell you which is from which encoder, and you're asked to use ABC/HR which is a program designed specifically for blind testing of audio.This one just happens to be 128 kbps MP3.

This is particularly of interest to a lot of people because

• MP3 is still the most popular and most compatible lossy format out there
• with the best encoders, 128kbps should be very close to perceptual transparency for most listeners on most samples while still being very usable for portable devices
• MP3 encoder comparisons based on valid scientific and statistical principles (blind tests, ANOVA, etc) aren't too common; as the title says, it's been 4 1/2 years since Roberto Amorin's test.

Hey, let's do a feces taste test!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see....I know how this test turns out.

Ummmmm....They all suck, but one or two suck less.

Certain kinds of music program compress better than others. Certain kinds of music program display far more audible artifacts.

ho, hum...

dwoz

Re:Popups on Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

On linux? It's worse than I thought. /. hasn't just become evil, Linux has been defeated.

Interesting, but...

[NinthAgendaDotCom]

I wonder what the point is. I guess it'd be good for determining which encoder is good for streaming/net radio purposes. But other than that, who listens to 128 kb/s anymore? On my site, I offer options to download at 160 and 320. With broadband connections these days, I can't see why you'd want anything lower.

128 vs 192 cymbals

[spineboy]

Pretty much why I use 192 bit encoding, since the cymbals in music sound like crap to me at 128. Well actually all the cymbals sound like Zilgian "China boy's" instead of different crashes, etc at 128.

I'm a musician, and most of my friends are too. None of us listen to music on "audiophile" equipment. That seems to be something that non-musicians tend to buy. My favorite test was when audiophiles couldn't tell the difference on a high end system between expensive Monster cables, and coat-hanger wires when connected to speakers.

Crap

[PenGun]

You can only listen to this truncated time shifted garbage through crappy equipment. Your little ear buds and horrible ipod amplifier deals at the very best just smooth the crud so it don't bite.

  I don't like even CDs much but I'm spoiled. I know what good sound sounds like.

  If you have to squeeze it use flac, the full CD file is just a 44100hz sample at best. Yeah nyquist yadda yadda but the overtones cannot resonate and all kinds of nasty timing events roil the mix. A good record with a nice cartridge will do 100,000 hz right to your tweeters. All the overtones to that level makes the sound you can hear much more real. Go to a live music event and pay attention. Your stereo should come close.

  Ah I'm wasting my time, you are all already deaf.

Re:Irrelevant

[r4b1d]

Hmm. Troll much?

Pro sound tech chiming in

[dontmakemethink]

MP3 is optimized for best performance at 256kbps. MPEG-4 AAC is optimized for 128kbps. Trying to determine which MP3 codec works best at 128kbps is like figuring out whether Jimi Hendrix or Jimmy Page would be better if they lost two fingers off their left hands. Similarily, MP2 is optimized for 384kbps, and beats MP3 at bitrates beyond 256, which is why it is widely used on DVD's at 384kbps.

Here's how it plays out:
Lossless codecs obviously are best when bandwidth isn't an issue
MP2 (MPEG-1 layer 2) is best from 320kbps upwards
MP3 (MPEG-1 layer 3) is best from 160 - 256 kbps
AAC (specified initialy in MPEG-2, finalized in MPEG-4 [they skipped MPEG-3 not to be confused with MP3]) best from 128kbps downwards

MP2's at 384kbps sound better than MP3's at 256kbps, which sound better than AAC at 128kbps. None of the codecs sound any better at higher-than-optimal bitrates, i.e. an MP3 at 320kbps cannot sound better than a 256kbps MP3 encoded from the same source.

Simply put, it's the codec that determines the optimal bitrate. Given a 128kbps bitrate, who cares how an inappropriate codec performs?

Re:Pro sound tech chiming in

[Chris_Jefferson]

MP3 is optimized for best performance at 256kbps.

You claim. Where is here any evidence of this?

Also, many people can't distinguish modern 128kps MP3 encoding in an ABX test.

an MP3 at 320kbps cannot sound better than a 256kbps MP3 encoded from the same source.

Total rubbish! Where are you getting these things from? Do you think the LAME people put in these options just for fun? Are the extra bits just hanging around not being used at all?

Certainly there is a case of diminishing returns, but 320 is still better.

Re:Pro sound tech chiming in

[dontmakemethink]

MP3 is optimized for best performance at 256kbps.

You claim. Where is here any evidence of this?

Here is an example test where 256kbps MP3 was shown to reproduce accurate fidelity up to 16kHz with a mild drop-off beyond that, -8dB at 20kHz. Now before you say that top 4kHz is of crucial importance, the interval between 16kHz and 20kHz is three semi-tones, or three frets on a guitar. No MP3 bitrate offers those frequencies with reasonable fidelity, and three semi-tones is a minute sacrifice to pay for a 5:1 compression ratio.

Also, many people can't distinguish modern 128kps MP3 encoding in an ABX test.

Also, many people are accustomed to crap sound reproduction and computer speakers. And subjective arguments don't support an objective hypothesis very well. I speak in practical terms and industry standards.

an MP3 at 320kbps cannot sound better than a 256kbps MP3 encoded from the same source.

Total rubbish! Where are you getting these things from? Do you think the LAME people put in these options just for fun?

No, I just think the people that use them are lame ;) Seriously, they are included because the average consumer does not understand the concept of diminishing returns in digital audio. If you really want to get into it, jump onto the 96/192kHz sampling debate. There is absolutely no benefit to digital audio beyond 48kHz. Still, if you do a blind A/B test and ask them which sounds better, you get the exact same result as a blind A/A test. They say there's a difference, but they can't pick the higher sample rate with any consistency.

Here is a white paper on the subject written by Dan Lavry, the developer of many the world's best digital audio converters.

"The optimal sample rate should be largely based on the required signal bandwidth. Audio industry salesman have been promoting faster than optimal rates. The promotion of such ideas is based on the fallacy that faster rates yield more accuracy and/or more detail. Whether motivated by profit or ignorance, the promoters, leading the industry in the wrong direction, are stating the opposite of what is true."

There is no white paper on the diminishing returns of MP3's because they are toys that aren't worth that time of anyone qualified to give a definitive assessment.

Re:Pro sound tech chiming in

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if you claim to be a "pro sound tech", you are obviously not a mathematician or developer with audio codec expertise. While you are somewhat correct about target optimizations, the statement that

"an MP3 at 320kbps cannot sound better than a 256kbps MP3 encoded from the same source."

Is simply dead wrong, and mathematically demonstrable. There is more audible data stored in a 320kpbs MP3 than a 256, and the quality difference, though slight definitely exists.

Why on earth would all major VBR schemes use 320 as their cap if it didn't?

Re:Pro sound tech chiming in

[dontmakemethink]

There is more audible data stored in a 320kpbs MP3 than a 256, and the quality difference, though slight definitely exists.

There may be more data derived from the source audio, but it is not audible by any practical measure. Try this - take an uncompressed audio file, encode it to separate 256kbps and 320kbps MP3's, decode them back to WAV or whatever, put them in an audio editor, and invert both sides of one of them to isolate the differences between the two. Yes, the difference is audible when it is isolated, but it will be more than 32dB lower than the original audio, which is 100% completely absolutely indiscernible by human ears, except perhaps trained ones on professional monitors, the absolute last place on earth that MP3 compression could have any practical value.

The human auditory system is not a set of mics wired to an oscilloscope. Your ears are more like pianos with 20,000 keys from which your brain synthesizes sounds prioritized by their pertinence to mostly survival-related issues. The difference between 256kbps and 320kbps does not chart on that list. That is dead right, and mathematically demonstrable by the correlation of a sound tech's income and their ability to manipulate sounds so they prioritize properly on that list, a.k.a. "sit right in the mix".

Why on earth would all major VBR schemes use 320 as their cap if it didn't?

Because 320 is higher than 256, and the target market for MP3's thinks that translates to better sound. Sorry, commercial practices are no defense for audio compression using extra data to capture what we can't hear. I may be no codec developer, but I thought removing what we can't hear was the entire point.

Re:you didn't say anything about the effect on sou

[4D6963]

Yeah but on the other hand the spectrogram of the sound in question can tell you what went wrong with the sound better than listening to it can.

Missing samples

[x78]

What? No MIDI sample test?

Agreed

[default luser]

I have a cabinet, in which I keep all my CD's. In the computer, I have the lossy version of every one of them, recorded in variable-bit-rate mp3. Until I can tell the difference between them and the original, even if I have enough disc space, I won't use it for lossless audio.

Yup, my CDs are my backup, but I haven't touched the things in years. I use the same Lame VBR V5 encoded mp3s at home (on my computer speakers or on my Grados) an on my car stereo. In all cases, I can't tell the difference.

Do you want to know the REAL reason why there hasn't been a 128k listening test at Hydrogen Audio recently? It's because they already did this three years ago, and the winner(s) were already imperceptible from the source then.

128k is conqured territory. This is mostly an update to see where encoders have gone in the last four years (if anywhere).

Just what the Doctor ordered

[Quatermass]

Let's hope that before anyone does some serious tests that they go to their Doctor and get their ear channels cleaned. Nothing like a bit of wax in there to upset results.

Still relelvent?

[hhr]

Is this kind of test still relevent? All formats sound great at 192kbps and 192kbps seams to be the new default.

Yes there are challenging passages that do not sound the same as a CD at 256kbps. But, I didn't say "sound the same" I said sound great. When you consider that most digitial audio is listened though less than stellar speakers hooked up to less than steller equipment, played in a less than stellar room, any format at 192kbps is great. The endoder is moot.