Mp3 Quality

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zophas

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Can you hear the difference between a mp3 coded at 128kbps and one at 320kbps? I'm trying to explain to a non-techno friend how mp3 encoding works. So now I've encoded a song at 12 different rates ranging from 8kbps to 320 kbps plus the .wav off the cd hoping to demonstrate the differences. I can hear how bad the lower rates sound but I can't hear the difference between the ones above 128 kbps. Is this where an "educated ear" comes in handy? Oh, yeah the song I used was "Behind Blue Eyes" by the Who. Would some other song have highlighted the differences?
 
play it louder, then you wil hear the difference.
320 is near enough cd quality that you ownt be able to tell the difference.

128 will have muddy bass and compressed high range...ok for normal listening volume but if you crank it up you will hear the problem, especially if you compare it back to back with the original cd
 
When you play it loud, maybe....
It all depends if you are an audiophile or not.

192 is the PERFECT bit rate IMO
 
It depends on a lot of things, including sound card, cabling, speakers,
their position, room ambience, type of music and your own ears. It also
depends on whether you use LAME or another codec to encode
the song and whether or not you use Joint Stereo or just Stereo.
 
192k should be good enough for general stuff, above that its harder to tell differences.. vbr also helps with file size.
 
Yeah, the amp & speakers are important.
I'm sure you can hear it on studio monitors. (the 128kb one)
 
PeterCH said:
It depends on a lot of things, including sound card, cabling, speakers,
their position, room ambience, type of music and your own ears. It also
depends on whether you use LAME or another codec to encode
the song and whether or not you use Joint Stereo or just Stereo.
Click to expand...

Audiophiles....
 
On very bassy music, the difference isn't always as obvious. 192KBps is good enough for most people. I tend to encode around 192KBps VBR which is enough for me. Lately space isn't as much of a concern, so you'd be hard pressed to justify 128KBps CBR.
 
It also depends on what you're listening to. The first thing that goes in encoding is the low and high extremes, and the mids (mostly of lesser importance in most pop/rock) get all screwed. Try something with real acoustical instruments. Orchestral, jazz (think Stan Kenton) or something similar.
 
zophas said:
Can you hear the difference between a mp3 coded at 128kbps and one at 320kbps?
Click to expand...

I find that any song that has someone playing the cymbals always turns to crap at lower rates.

Ends up sounding like someone throwing a bag of nails onto the ground instead of a clear sound.
 
@128kbps you'll still be able to hear encoding issues if you listen *carefully*....should be fine for normal use though.

Using CBR will make it more obvious.
 
As a production standard I only render in wav as surprisingly many people can (or claim at least) to still be able to tell the difference between a wav and 320 mp3. When I distribute to fellow audiophiles I use 320, however I will be honest and tell you that I cannot tell the difference on most occasions between a 320 and 192. I can most certainly tell the difference though encoded any lower - and I also dont encode from wav, I render the source file as mp3 as this also affects quality.

You can tell the difference on the top end (treble) easily with bad encoding or poor quality encoding. The reason that the lower end also distorts easily though is because the lower sample rate means that is can turn a larger sine wave for instance into more of a square wave or with squarer attributes which is distorts speakers easily. At higher levels it will distort on the speaker or the amp. It is also because of the way that our ears work and how they reproduce frequencies...
 
The difference is obvious especially on a surround system when using dolby pro logic, channels get split into a matrix and artifact's can clearly be made out on the rear channels, even 320kpbs can sound crap... just use a program like AC3 filter to increase the surround matrix and you'll hear the garbled lossyness.

Only lossless is truly close to CD because it's an exact copy
 
Last edited:
boramk said:
Audiophiles....
Click to expand...

Not at all. There are just so many factors. You can encode with
LAME at 128kbps J-Stereo HQ VBR and you can encode in say iTunes or
Windows Media Player at 192kbps CBR in Stereo and the former
can beat the latter.
You can listen to a 320kbps MP3 on crappy PC speakers
or listen to a 128 on a good hi-fi plus speakers, and you'll
hear that there second one sounds better.
It all depends on many factors.

Most importantly I think it also depends on the audio volume
compression used employed. Most pop/rock music
is heavily mastered to sound good on cheap stereo
speakers - that it sounds bad on anything decent
or atleast it sounds really bad when you compare it to
the source material.

So the story is quite complex.

Listen to the audio yourself, if you enjoy 128kbps (as I usually do)
you will probably stay with it. Arguable with good equipment
higher bitrates do sound a bit better but then you
really need to compare the 2.

Oh and in cabling above I wasn't referring to high end monster
cable vs coathanger (both sound the same), I meant thin cable
with high resistance powering low impedance speakers.
 
d0b33 said:
using dolby pro logic, channels get split into a matrix and artifact's can clearly be made out on the rear channels
Click to expand...
And you are probably right...but thats not comparing apples & apples. The point is whether one can hear the difference on the number of channels it was designed for.

It's like taking a screen output @85hz refresh rate and showing alternating frames on two different screens. And then pointing to the flashing on screen 1 (42hz) and taking it as proof that 85hz is horrible.

Same with DVD upscaling....you can't upscale a DVD output 4x and expect it to look as crisp as a BlueRay without upscaling. Simply because the DVD was not designed to be upscaled just like Stereo mp3s were not designed to be split into 5.1

PeterCH said:
high end monster cable vs coathanger (both sound the same)
Click to expand...
That debacle did a lot to instill some sanity into the audio scene.:D
 
128k is CD quality. I DJey in spare time. I play my MP3s very load. 128 and above sounds the same. it depends on the media encoded from. 128k from vinal is a bit lower than the one that is encoded from a CD.
 
bakwena said:
128k is CD quality. I DJey in spare time. I play my MP3s very load. 128 and above sounds the same. it depends on the media encoded from. 128k from vinal is a bit lower than the one that is encoded from a CD.
Click to expand...

Huh? This post contradicts itself from the outset all the way to the end. I mean no offense here at all and hope you take this the right way, but if you would like a lesson in both dj'ing and production, and the various attributes associated with each, then please PM me. I only hope to help you out, not ridicule you, but this post of yours is far from accurate. There is only one sentence which is accurate here...
 
PostmanPot said:
Mp3 is a lossy format, and most certainly not near CD quality, which is lossless.
Click to expand...

CD is 16bit sized samples, sampled 44.1 thousand times per second.
That's far from being lossless.

DAT is 24bit at 96KHz and as you can imagine will still be lossy, but less lossy than CD-Audio (Red Book).
 
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