Alexander Dietrich wrote:
> After reading about how horribly bad bladeenc is even in c't magazine,
> I decided to encode a couple of wav files with both bladeenc and lame
> and listened to them one after the other (on headphones) and also
> switching files during the song. Personally, I can't hear the difference
> between the two, maybe it's only noticeable when you listen to classical
> music. c't magazine wrote that bladeenc sounds completely crappy at 64 kbps
> while lame is fairly good, but who encodes at bitrates that low anyway ?
> I use lame because it's said to be better, and I was wondering about one
> thing: is joint stereo degrading or enhancing sound quality ? Again I
> encoded the wav songs with stereo and jstereo and again I couldn't hear a
> difference and all the files were exactly the same size.
Stereo vs. jstereo is a tradeoff, so one can't be said to be "better" or
"worse", just different. Joint stereo takes some of the frequency bands
that are (mostly) shared between the two channels and encodes them in
mono for extra resolution. This saves bits and gives a better overall
sound but loses a bit of stereo separation. Sometimes if I'm listening
VERY carefully to a jstereo encoded track I think I can hear what sounds
like part of the instrument's sound at the proper stereo position and
the rest of the sound sitting in the center; a very strange frequency
split effect. 99% of the time, however, my ears are fooled.
Generally, the encoder will automatically choose joint stereo for
bitrates below a certain threshold (usually 160, but I believe LAME
chooses 192 to be safe). Personally, I always encode at a high enough
bitrate (192 or 256) that the encoder will choose stereo anyway, so I
don't have to worry about it.
BTW, this may be obvious to some of you, but when doing a listening
test, the most important thing, even more important than your choice of
speakers or headphones, is your state of mind. Here's my advice:
Always close your eyes, take a deep breath, and relax as much as
possible. Let yourself go into the flow of the music and imagine the
instruments sitting on a sound stage inside your head (w/ headphones) or
in front of you (w/ speakers). The first things to suffer in MP3 or
other compression are the subtle echoes and other cues that give you the
feeling of listening to a real space. Without them, compressed music
has a tendency to sound slightly muffled or fuzzy, esp. in comparison to
the CD original.
Don't let your concentration be distracted by the world around you, as
you want to give the music your full attention in order to pick up the
subtleties. Do your best to slow your breathing and bring yourself into
an altered, meditative state. Finally, "Just Say No", and "Don't Do
Drugs", but.. if you're an adult and have access to some decent
cannabis, I highly recommend taking a little for heightening sensory
perception and the ability to detect subtle distortions in sound. I
know of no other drug which can heighten the mind's ability to focus and
drill down on a particular sense (taste, touch, hearing, sight) without
actually distorting the senses (at low doses). Even more useful, it can
give the ability to slow down time in one's head, offering even more
"CPU cycles" for your brain to listen carefully to the tiniest and
quickest details of a song, and since music is generally both performed
and listened to in real-time, this ability becomes very useful... hence
its popularity among musicians.
Speaking of drilling down, I should note that it's impossible to listen
to all parts of a song at once, so don't even try! Even if you think
you're listening to every instrument at once, your brain is really
rapidly switching between all of them (this serial nature of the brain
has been confirmed by recent neurological experiments; it's much less
parallel than we once thought). This means that you're not really
giving ANY individual component the attention it deserves. Instead,
focus on one part at a time, let the other parts fade into the
background, and consciously switch your focus between parts. Does the
high hat sound different? How about the snare drum? How about that
acoustic guitar part? Do the instruments sound alive and "bright"
(brightness being the result of high frequency upper harmonics)? If a
choir is singing, can you pick out one or two strong individual voices
with headphones? Focus on the smallest possible piece of the music, and
then focus on the smallest possible component of that. In this way,
you'll increase the musical detail you can resolve, and quite possibly
improve your enjoyment of the music as you'll discover in it worlds of
detail that you might have completely glossed over in the past!
OT: What I said in the last paragraph is equally true for sight. Many
people strain their eyes and eventually require glasses by staring at a
fixed point, or by trying to see everything at once, when in the normal
eye, only the very small point at the center of one's gaze is in focus
and the rest *should* be fuzzy, and you have to shift your eye around to
fill in your mental canvas. There's a method, called the Bates method,
discovered in the early 1900's, with which you can improve your eyesight
by relearning good vision habits: Sketch, Breathe, and Blink. Sketching
involves remembering to constantly shift one's gaze and not let your
eyes stare for too long in one place, and the other two should be
obvious. So, if you have good eyes, think about how you unconsciously
shift your gaze from point to point to fill in your mental canvas, and
then apply the same concepts to your listening. If you have bad
eyesight, like me, and want to improve it without surgery, a book I
highly recommend is "Relearning to See" by Thomas Quackenbush. I have a
user review of it at amazon.com, so if you want to hear my personal
story, please go there.
Another comment: proper methodology is extremely important! The closer
you start listening, the easier it is to start imagining differences
that aren't there. Hmm, this sounds fuzzy, you might think, then
realize that the original CD sounds exactly the same! Keep switching
back and forth between sources as you think you notice differences.
However, when you start comparing two different encoders, you hit a
different problem. If you think BladeEnc is bad, it probably *will*
sound worse to you, because subliminally, you're hoping it'll be worse.
So if you have access to a computer and can crank out some Perl scripts
or a quick VB program to help you, have the computer shuffle the tracks
around, and then try to guess which one is which. Or, set a playlist of
the same song encoded by each encoder you want to compare, then set it
on shuffle play and guess which one is which with your eyes closed
(don't forget to open them BEFORE the player goes to the next track or
you'll never know which track was just played!). Or have a friend help
you tally it up. Either way, make sure you never know what you're
listening to, and try to rate it as objectively as possible. Putting the
CD original as one of the items in the playlist is another good
safeguard, as if you rate a track poorly and then discover it's the
original, you'll know you're doing something wrong!
I hope these observations are useful.. My original post seemed to spark
up some interest in comparing these codecs, and with so many people
saying they can't tell the difference between different encoders, I'm
hoping these tips might be useful in helping you heighten your ability
to be a careful and sensitive listener. It should be obvious by now
that a proper listening test is not something you can just sit down and
do in 5 minutes, especially if you've never done one before! Of course,
my apologies if you suddenly discover that your 128kbps MP3's or your
ATRAC 1 MD's are no longer good enough and you have to upgrade
everything, but if that happens, just think how much more you'll enjoy
the good stuff that you weren't able to appreciate before!
Cheers,
-Jake
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