On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 21:22 -0700, Scott Paul Robertson wrote: > [1] Notice can be taken to mean that with classical, about -q 9 on > ogg's, and about -q 6 for 'modern' music, is where I stop noticing.
Agreed. Modern recordings *suck* for technical reasons. Sound engineers have decided that it is cool to have a much louder-sounding recording[1]. Put on a record from the 70's (as in LP) and watch your little db meter. It will peak at 70% of the scale (not sure what that is maybe 0 db?). Put in a modern CD (say coldplay) and you'll find that 90% of the time the db meter is maxed out. So basically we have a medium (CD audio) that's actually quite capable of storing a very high-fidelity and wide amplitude range of sounds and sound engineers compress all our music to fit just into the highest 20% of the amplitude range. This means that instead of using 20 bits to represent the amplitude, we're getting maybe 6 bits of real variance. This really lowers modern CD audio quality dramatically. This is a real shame. But the good news is that when you encode into lossy codecs, there's so much noise and distortion there already that you don't even know that most of the underlying harmonics are stripped out because you can't hear them anyway. But take a good, clean classical recording and encode that with a lossy codec and suddenly you become very aware of artifacts. The classical recordings are recorded with a much greater range of amplitudes and typically don't have as much compression[2]. Anyway I found the first link I give here to be a real eye-opener. I have a wonderful CD that's by Scorpions and the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra that's full of great music but it's recorded as such a high level that I can't hardly even hear the orchestral sections because they are distorted right out by the singer and the electric guitars. Very sad. Michael [1] http://georgegraham.com/compress.html -- must read for anyone interested in sound recording and music production [2] http://sound.westhost.com/compression.htm > > -------------------- > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > > The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their > author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
