mp3 is indeed not perfect, there will always be isolated cases were it shows its limitations.
Just go to Hydrogenaudio and look for several reports about samples that add smearing to transients. Not hard to find this on music with many hard transients, especially some synthetic stuff. For example the member "/mnt" there has several samples brought up because his equipment/ear combination seems very sensitive at picking that. His favourite genre is deep in the darks of Metal unfortunately so i had problems listening this samples to often :) Also with that there comes into play the way the mp3 encoder acts. The free Helix mp3 encoder for example does really good on these transient pieces while lame often has some more problems. Lame has other advantages as keeping more HF information in the upper bands. Also the latest lame alphas look promising in the transients regard. Nonetheless it is absurd to call this a common problem with mp3. On +99.9% of all music this is not a problem. I delivered several samples myself over time that were used for testing lame and i was happy with helping a tiny bit the devs until the end of lame 3.98 developement. Somehow the interest in mp3 lost me after that because lossless fits everywhere. You may even wonder about all the reports that mp3 softens the sound and disarms the bass, especially with old FHG encoders from the first hour. Now these very same attributes are quoted by DSD fans correlating to superior sound. I really would love to see some results about what is prefered as sounding better when no one has the original as reference and no obvious defects are audible. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wombat's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4113 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96407 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
