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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: 320 mp3 or wave, another look

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Another opinion can be read here.
 
Inviato Fri 19 Feb 16 @ 6:39 pm
A sound system is only as good as it's weakest link, so as a dj, you don't want to be the weakest link by playing poor quality files.

He says he remembers the first time he heard my3's at carnival and said they sounded weak, then at the end of his post he seems to be encouraging their use by saying, "let’s embrace the rushed, the punkish, the low quality, and the alive."

I can appreciate the immediacy of music, being able to make a track in the morning, and play it at an event in the evening. But if you have the ability to record you own track, surely you want to record it in the best possible quality, So why not WAV or FLAC, at least for you mater copy.
 
I think you missed his point. When he first heard an mp3, it was 60kbps which of course sounded terrible. What he is saying is, can the average Joe tell the difference between a mp3 at 320kbps and a Wav in a club, can you?
 
I'm pretty picky and have tested this in many scenarios. 320 mp3 is fine for me compared to CD or WAV.
 
i find 320 mp3 is fine for the clubs but for a studio set i want higher quality files 2 completely different situations. :-)
 
wickedmix wrote :
i want higher quality files

You want them, or you need them?

In other words, can you actually hear some detrimental elements within 320k files that's making you say "OMG that sounds terrible" or do you just want higher quality files because you know that 320k is compressed?
 
There have been plenty of listening tests to show that the difference between uncompressed and 320kbps mp3 cannot be heard by 99% of the people for 99% of the music.
There are some samples that when compared side by side in optimal listening condition can reveal some differences, but even that will not be how you typically listen to music.
For most music and most people even 192kbps will already be transparent for normal listening.

I haven't been following listening tests as closely as I used to in the earlier days of mp3, but I believe many of the shortcomings of mp3 have also been much improved in other formats such as ogg vorbis and more recently (and probably more compatible) mp4/aac.
 
I agree that in a club situation you can't hear a difference, unless it's a very low bit rate mp3. And when you are in a club you are there to dance not scrutinize the music fidelity.

When I first hear about mp3's I thought they were the best thing ever. Like many others, I ripped all my cds to mp3, then proceeded to burn those mp3s onto cdr discs. 30 songs per disc, 60 songs per disc, the more the merrier, I didn't really think about audio quality. I just thought that if I was doing a gig I could take 1 case of cds with me instead of 5.
As time went on, and my equipment got better, and I strived for better sound quality, I realised it was my mp3s that were letting me down. When I went digital, all my cds were ripped as WAV.

I realise that under most listening circumstances you can not hear a difference, but I just can't get my head around the fact that an mp3 file is smaller than a WAV file, so my brain is telling me there must be something missing.
 
i just want them :-)
 

Here is a simple blind test comparing a 128kbps mp3 and a 320kbps mp3, I was able to identify the 320 because I know what to listen for. The results show that a slight bias towards the 128kbps file sounding 'better', when I presented this test to a bunch of DJs on my facebook page (many of them semi audiophiles who only buy WAVs) failed the test! The point is, if you struggle with this, or at least acknowledge that you had to listen several times, to identify the 320, you've no chance in hearing the difference between a 320 and a WAV. What determines quality is first the production value (many songs sound bad regardless of bite rate) and then the trueness to source which is determined by compression and generational loss (caused by transcoding), of course trueness to source is compromised if you're ripping audio from soundcloud or youtube.

Anyway here's the test, now be honest if you want to report back your results:

www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3-sound-quality-test-128-320/
 
I had to listen to the clips several times. Listening out for different instruments and sibilance on the vocals, but in general I couldn't hear a specific difference, but one of the clips just sounded a bit clearer. I think this is what the audiophiles call "more open"

So that was the one I picked, which was the 320 bit mp3.

This is an interesting test as more people have chosen the lower bit rate as sounding better. It's worth noting that I am listening to those clips through my laptop sound card, and on a pair of dj headphones, so nor what you would call hi fidelity.
 
I got it wrong :-(
However the 128 mp3 Bit rate I have, has a clearer lower "High" pitch compared to those of 320 bit rate.
Interesting test though.
 
When mp3's first came out everyone was saying rip to 192 as its the standard, wish i'd done mine at 320 now as I am always striving for better quality.
 
Charlie Wilson wrote :
When mp3's first came out everyone was saying rip to 192 as its the standard, wish i'd done mine at 320 now as I am always striving for better quality.


I had ripped my CD collection at 320. I wound up being the 1% that can hear the difference on my system. I re-ripped my whole library to Apple Lossless. Then I found that some other software didn't support that. So, now it's all AIFF. All of the software I use supports that and it allows tagging.
 
I use FLAC - it's lossless and fits my needs ;-)

Greets, Heiko
 
+1 flac.

DJ's manipulate sounds nowadays, by this I mean key, and tempo change a song plus on the fly remixing. This reduces the quality of the song, hence it's desirable to start off with the best.

Backward companies like Pioneer don't support the flac open format forcing trapped users like myself to continue using mp3. They deserve to be consigned to the past.

+1 for AmazonFlac ..I wish.

Being cynical, the music companies like to resell their product as many times as possible..record, tape, cd, mp3,..what's next?
I don't think it will be .wav because of its lack of tags, nor one of the Apple owned, or dominated formats. They don't want flac because its an open format. What a dilemma for the music moguls.
 
fyi the new pioneer cdjs 2000nsx2 support flac
 
I'm hoping they will be shamed / forced into supporting flac. Maybe firmware updates might enable the use of flac on other Pioneer equipment. It's generally very good, although often a little large for mobile use.
 
djservices wrote :

I realise that under most listening circumstances you can not hear a difference, but I just can't get my head around the fact that an mp3 file is smaller than a WAV file, so my brain is telling me there must be something missing.

MP3 is a lossy compression algorithm. So yes, something is missing. Only that the MP3 algorithm depends on psycho-acoustic models to loose information that your mind won't understand they are not there.
Generally speaking the psycho-acoustic model of MP3 for bitrates equal or greater from 192kbps CBR produces results that your mind can't tell the difference unless it knows what to look for...
What does the last sentence means ?
It means that you can only tell the difference if you know which source is the "uncompressed" one and then you try to understand what's missing from the compressed one. That's a biased test of course but even then most people fail to find the differences...
A "blind test" where you listen two sources without knowing which one is the original file and which one is the compressed gives more interesting results... 98% of the people will just take a guess because they can't tell... From the remaining 2% that can spot differences only a mere 20% can identify the original source with complete confidence.

Now:
I quoted your message for a specific reason:
Compression can be lossless as well. For instance FLAC that was mentioned already here uses a lossless compression algorithm. So yes it produces smaller files than WAV, but NOTHING is missing! Try to think of it as the "zip" or "rar" equivalent for audio files...
The fact that a zipped file is smaller than the original does not mean that something is missing from the file, right ?

PS: I'm not trying to convince anyone use anything... I'm just stating some facts. Something that a lot of people (and even some audiophile related blogs) forgot to mention is the encoder used to produce the mp3 file and the decoder used to play it back...
Nowadays all encoders produce almost excellent results. However in the past an encoder with the "right" settings could produce better results from another encoder with "wrong" settings even if the second had higher bitrate... In other words a 128kbps file produced with a good encoder and right settings could sound closer to the original than a 192kbps file produced with a bad encoder and wrong settings.
 


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