joatca;186844 Wrote: > More testing and I still can't tell which I prefer. However, I just > played with Audacity to subtract an encoded/decoded MP3 waveform from > the original WAV, so what's left should be the differences. I have two > 30-second FLAC examples of the same piece, one the difference between > 320Kbps CBR and WAV and one of VBR and WAV: > > http://qqqq.ca/files/difference-320-short.flac > > http://qqqq.ca/files/difference-vbr-short.flac > > Just to be sure, I did the same experiment with decoded FLAC, and there > is no difference... so FLAC really is lossless. :-)
That is VERY interesting. It seems that the difference is almost exclusively confined to the very high frequency range. On the VBR comparison, you can hear bursts of some much lower frequency content differences at the start of the track. Which leads to what a lot of people have posted about - that MP3 compression artifacts are concentrated in the high frequencies, and if your playback system can't resolve differences in high frequencies, you may not notice the differences. Also, you will never be able to tell in a moving automobile, where such small high-frequency sounds would be drowned out. This may contradict what some say about portable players though - some earbuds are pretty good at high frequencies. With only one 30-second section of classical music, this isn't definitive, of course, but it's the first such comparison I've heard. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32576 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
