Sep 9, 2009
Why mp3s suck, and how to hear it
I hate mp3, and this post will tell you why.
DO NOT read this post if you have a large collection of mp3s, enjoy listening to them and can’t hear any problems with them, because it’ll ruin them for you !
There’s been plenty written on how mp3 works, and why lossy compression sounds worse than uncompressed audio in general. My aim here is to demonstrate how mp3 sounds bad, for all the people who keep telling me there’s no difference.
I’m going to give you clear guidelines and examples on what to listen for and the negative effects of mp3, but there’s no going back – once you can hear the problems, you’ll never stop hearing them.
This isn’t limited to audiophiles, or “golden ears”, by the way – in my opinion anyone can hear this stuff, with a few pointers.
So seriously, unless you’re prepared to start using Ogg Vorbis, FLAC or AAC - stop reading now !
Still here ? Good.
First, I need to make this clear – I have nothing against lossy audio or data compression in itself – I do most of my casual listening on an iPod, using 128kbps AAC files – they sound fine. Not as good as the original CDs, obviously, but OK. And yes, I’m well aware that AAC is just a more advanced version of mp3. But the fact is that mp3 has fundamental limitations – even at higher bitrates.
Next – I’m also a pragmatist. mp3 is a temporary phenomenon, just like AM radio, cassettes and CDs. In the long run, none of those have killed music, and neither will mp3, or lossy compression in general. So, why the rant ?
Because people keep saying mp3 sounds great, or “indistinguishable from CD” and it’s just not true.
mp3 isn’t good enough
It doesn’t matter what encoder you use, it doesn’t matter what settings you use or what pre-processing you apply – mp3 just doesn’t cut it. AAC and later, more sophisticated encoders use more advanced encoding methods, and sound better to varying degrees, but mp3 just FAILs.
How does it fail ? That depends a little on the encoder being used, but some of my own pet hates include:
- mp3 sizzle – the artificial, unnatural swirling metallic noises that sound like someone’s added chime bars to everything, or there’s a mosquito buzzing in your ear. Some people actually say we prefer these noises in mp3s – I say bullshizzle !
- Added distortion – Yet another side effect of the so-called Loudness Wars. mp3 encoders rarely include any headroom for the encoding process itself, so the added processing pushes the music even further over the limits, generating inter-sample peaks and adding even more distortion in the process
- Flat, two-dimensional sound mp3 works by throwing away musical information that we supposedly can’t hear – up to 90% of the original information, at 128kbps. That means all the subtle, delicate stuff, like ambience, space and realism. So a lush, three-dimension original is reduced to a flat, cardboard replica of itself
- Mushiness All but the very best mp3 encodes just sound fuzzy, muddled and – well, mushy !
Hear for yourself
Don’t take my word for it – here are some examples. First, a truly nasty 128kbps mp3 example, from a Deep Purple live album I mixed a while back:
Please install Flash plugin
(Before anyone jumps on me, I’ve heard even a 256 kbps mp3s sounding like this – I’ve just used a low quality version to make the point.)
If that doesn’t sound too bad to you at first, try this - I’ve filtered the file to highlight the high frequencies. You can hear the problems most clearly when the vocals start:
Please install Flash plugin
Some people describe this effect as “sizzle”, or “swirlies”. It’s not just that I’ve removed all the bass, what I’m pointing out is the unatural bubbling, twinkling “chime-bar” type sound, or as my friend and fellow mastering engineer Nick Watson once called it, the “flocks of tweeting ultrasonic birdies”. It also reminds me of someone crinkling up tin foil !
Once you’ve picked it out, listen the first version again. Doesn’t sound so nice now, does it ? Can you ignore the swirlies, now you know they are there ?
Now download and listen to the original file:
‘Talk About Love – Excerpt’ – 5 MB WAV file
Listen to the clarity, punch, and bite of the WAV, compared to the swirly, soggy mess of an mp3. Which one do you prefer ?
The loss of depth, richness and three-dimensionality is more subtle side-effect, but just as unfortunate. Here’s a snippet of a recording I did for the brilliant Hans Koller, featuring Christine Tobin on vocals:
Please install Flash plugin
(This is a much better mp3 encode, with far fewer heinous swirlies. But still…)
Here’s the WAV version:
‘The Great Bear And The Small – Excerpt’ – 11 MB WAV File
Don’t expect the difference here to leap out at you straight away, it’s more a case of feeling it – listen to the swirls of the harp from 30 seconds in, listen to the piano and Christine’s voice – on the wav file, there’s a warmth, and a depth, and a sparkle that in the mp3 has just gone.
Listen to the wav several times over, then switch to the mp3. Do you honestly feel it sounds as good ? The mp3 is OK, but it’s just… meh. I’m not drawn in, my attention wanders, it doesn’t move me.
Something essential has been lost, and you can’t get it back. And once you’ve heard that loss, even cranking the data-rate up doesn’t help. The only solution is a more advanced format, or lossless files.
Try listening to the mp3s in your music collection. Go back and compare them to the CDs you ripped them from.
…Sorry.
Or click here to subscribe to the free RSS feed
Update: I’ve had lots of interest in this post, and lots of discussion, especially on link-sharing sites. There are a few common responses that I want to answer here.
No-one uses 128 kbps mp3s
Wrong. If you’ve made this comment, you probably already know about LAME and the all other flavours of mp3 codec, and you probably do choose to use higher bit-rates, but you’re in the minority. Most “regular listeners” go for the default settings – and even in iTunes this is only 160 kbps.
192/320 kbps sounds fine
Sometimes. This depends so heavily on the material, the encoder and the codec – you simply can’t make blanket assumptions. Ironically one of the factors that makes mp3 so popular – the fact that it’s free and open-source – also makes it far harder to get a decent encode. By contrast, the grip Apple have over the AAC format at least ensures consistently high standards of encoding.
You’re just an Apple fanboy
No. Well alright, yes – I am a big fan of Apple’s products, but there are plenty of other alternatives to mp3 – OGG Vorbis, FLAC etc. The only reason I mention AAC a lot is it’s a format I have deep experience of, and always sounded good (but not perfect !) to me.
And another thing
To everyone who keeps saying “just use 320 kbps”, I say – why ?!? mp3 simply has inherent limitations compared to other formats. The whole point of lossy audio is to save space. At 128 kbps that saving is 90% – well worth having. At 320 kbps though, that saving is only 60% and it still doesn’t sound great – I’d rather go with FLAC or Apple lossless, which can often achieve a 50% saving, and have something that sounds every bit as good as the source.
Image by Roger B
No related posts.
.gif "Dynamic Range Foundation - Active Member")
Good stuff…I remember having a vague feeling that 256-320 VBR Mp3s weren’t cutting it and that a move to lossless (hacking my iPod with Rockbox to play flac) was necessary. Thanks for verifying that for me.
Ian, you are my teacher! I notice the mp3 problem more on my own rough mixes than commercial releases. Is there something about the mastering process that compensates for the mp3 problem? And what about the web? mp3 is (relatively) easy to embed on pages – not sure if you can embed AAC – I’ll try it on my cheap and cheerful wordpress.com site later and report back. WAV is too big to embed for now I guess. BTW there’s an on going discussion on SoundCloud about the cruel nastiness of mp3 conversion on that site – a lot of unhappy bunnies.
@ian No need to hack your iPod, if you are happy to use the Apple Lossless codec ! But you may find that even moving to 256kbps AAC is a big enough improvement.
@pete I think the reason you notice mp3 mulch on your own recordings more is more likely to be:
In fact, mastering actually tends to make mp3 compression artefacts WORSE, in my experience – there’s a common misconception that files should be highly compressed (dynamically) to encode well, but this is false.
Lossy compression throws away low-level information. The more squashed the source, the less low-level information there is, the harder it is for the algorithms to make sensible choices, and the worse the encode sounds. The more primitive the encoder, the more this is an issue.
Fwiw, the most taxing mp3 encoder test I have is an old recording SRT did – The Royal Philharmonic Plays Oasis. (Yes, really – sigh)
I think AAC requires Quicktime for playback, which isn’t installed on everybody’s system, so is probably not a good choice for the web. And, I haven’t found a good way of embedding WAVs in WordPress – if anyone else does, please let me know !
Do you have a link to that SoundCloud debate ?
[...] This post was Twitted by RalphBassfeld [...]
What do you think of Ogg Vorbis? Does it suffer from these problems too?
My only experience with OGG is Spotify, which uses a 160 kbps OGG stream, I believe. There are no obvious artefacts, but I still find it lacks a certain ‘something’. For example, yesterday I got my CD copy of “Ellipse” by Imogen Heap and have been listening to it on iPod (using the same headphones). Hardly a scientific test, but I repeatedly found myself “head-nodding” to it, in a way that hasn’t happened before.
Similarly, I listened to “No Line On The Horizon” by U2 on Spotify and was unimpressed with it sonically – everything sounded gritty and distorted. The AAC from the CD sounds better, to me (although it’s still a flaky album, sound-wise). I wonder if Spotify’s encoder has issues with headroom and inter-sample peaks ?
Any other opinions on OGG ?
Great post! One thing I would like to add to it is a fun little demonstration I learned at recording school — use phase cancellation to hear exactly what you are losing to MP3. Just line up the MP3 and uncompressed .WAV in your audio editor and flip phase on one of them. My immediate reaction was ‘Whoa! That’s where that hi-hat went!”.
I’ve been harping about the suck of MP3s ever since I noticed the horrible “flatness” in mixes that I spent days getting just right.
As for the flaky U2 recording, it is only logical to expect that inferior masters will become more and more common – even from top-notch studios and engineers. The reason I believe this is inevitable has to do with the financial bottom line. Perhaps I am a bit cynical, but since the vast majority of consumers buying music are listing to it on their own iPods or Zunes, labels will question why they should spend the time and money required to create a perfect (or even high-quality) master. Further, since a huge number of these consumers will never again buy music in high-resolution formats, they will never know that a label saved money by cutting corners in the mixing or, most likely, the mastering studios.
In fact, I predict that until sufficient numbers of audiophiles reject the MP3 format and demand to hear what they are missing, studios will engineer recordings for the lifeless, two-dimensional, MP3 format from the get-go. And if this goes on long enough, it will simply become the new standard.
Thank you for being a rare voice in the wilderness who is honest about MP3 suck. Too many people these days are willing to accept mediocrity for convenience. Sometimes I think we’d be better off going back to cassette tapes! (just kidding)
Hey!
Have you sampled mp3 hd yet?
http://www.all4mp3.com/Learn_mp3_hd_1.aspx
Nice post, and spot on as usual.
Best,
m.
Hi Mark,
I hadn’t seen it, but thanks for the link. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s flawed – the files are still as large as FLAC or Apple Lossless – and only play as 320 kbps mp3s except where there’s a plugin installed.
Or have I missed something ?
Ian
@Rob Yes, phase cancelling can be very revealing for all kinds of stuff ! To emphasise the swirlies in that mp3 I found filtering worked better, but what it doesn’t reveal is all the low frequency squelchy mulch !
Actually, maybe I’ll update the post with an example of that, too…
@David Thanks, I’m glad you liked the article. There’s no question that the bottom line is influencing the quality of recorded music, but the good news is that it’s possible to get superb results on a very limited budget – that’s what this site is about !
I choose to be optimistic, and believe that the cycle is already turning in a different direction, and that quality will become more important again.
As an aside, I don’t think the mastering as such is the biggest problem with the U2 album – the worst-sounding track in my opinion is “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight” – apart from anything else it’s heavily distorted – but it peaks well below 0dBFS, which tells me that the engineer turned it down, not up – ie. the damage was done in the mix, not the mastering.
Hm, I think I feel a blog post coming on…
nice of you to moderate out dissenting views
Hi NSS,
I apologise, I didn’t really understand what your comment meant. Please repost it and I’ll approve it.
Ian
Interestingly my last post didn’t last long either… So here’s another:
History shows a format’s existence doesn’t have to be about the sound quality, sadly. MP3′s failings have also been discussed over and over but isn’t it time the recording industry came to terms with it and start optimising? Dare I say it actually engineer/manufacture material to end up on compressed formats so it can sound good!… Different formats used to require different processes due to the physical qualities so what has changed? Did we all get lazy with 16 bits!
If your music sounds shit on our ipod go back and fix it!… Which I suppose brings us back to the U2 tune which I’ve not heard yet. A large amount of records come out with technical issues all the time and this is not a recent thing, and I believe there are lots of reasons for this and not just bad or lazy engineering – or is it?
Having lived with a duh! sound on my 80Gb Ipod for over two years, last night loaded up Rockbox and copied 10 flac albums to do a listening test.
Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Texas Flood” sounds warm with ample headroom… all the “tinniness” and High Frequency jangling is gone… the only trade-off is space, but on an 80GB Ipod, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff (Space for Quality)!
The difference is even more pronounced in pure acoustic sound.
Thanks a bunch for the writeup and lead.
@alex I didn’t even see your other post, which is a bit worrying ! I’ll keep a stern eye on the spam filter.
I agree that audio formats aren’t really an issue, unless they become the standard. But I disagree about optimising for mp3 in general – we should optimise for the highest-quality, widely-accepted format, which is still CD.
Doing a specific master or mix for mp3 as well is fine with me, but not many bands/artists are prepared to invest that much time and effort. So, no, we didn’t get lazy, we got cheap ! ; )
If mp3 were the only option, that would be one thing. But there are other, better alternatives – OGG, AAC, FLAC etc.
Also, mp3 will be gone in a few years time – why optimise for such a transient medium ?
Re U2 – I think I may do a post on this, my issues are not because of technical faults per se, but mixing and engineering decisions.
@suneel I’m glad I could help ! Spread the word : )
As digital memory becomes cheaper, and posts like this continue to circulate the net, sooner or later we’ll see consumers adapt to lossless formats… but only when digital distribution services like iTunes stray from MP3 and adapt WAV files to their library.
One day! And I’m looking forward to it!
Correction… WAV files and other lossless formats.
Yeah it is quite true and that article was enlightening, i really hear it a bit more now, the swirly and weird parts at the high end in mp3s.
But for casual use they sound ok to me.
I have found that a plugin for winamp (and other music players) helped me enormously to improve my listening experience. Its call dfx.
http://www.fxsound.com/dfx/pages/overview/features.php
You can try it free and it really helps to get back a bit more clarity in the sound of mp3s.
I am not an expert but it does help my purpose.
I only use the fidelity part and a bit of the dynamic boost & bass boost in moderation.
I find that this helps in my listening environment, i dont like very loud music for my day to day use, so i listen to it mostly in the background and at very moderate levels.
If i switch it off it sounds like little men playing in a tincan, with it on it opens up the whole sound, without being harsh.
Its only a make do solution because i cant be bother to redo all my mp3s really. I should try some AAC and compare them to the high bitrate mp3s i have… But i already found out and redid many of my mp3s, that the encoder makes a world of a difference with mp3s even at the same bitrates. Which one did you try Ian? i have found that the dbpower amp one worked quite well.
I actually just found this out last night as I was listening to my mp3 rips of the new Beatles Remastered CDs. Playing from my iPod connected to my stereo sounded strangely tinny. I double checked my bitrate (192) and that everything was connected up right, and then played the CD straight in the stereo. Wow! What a difference.
Now I’m going to have to re-rip my more than 500 CDs, and I don’t know if my iPod will have room for all of the files anymore. Ah well, c’est la vie.
@Galen If you have an iPod, try changing the encode settings to AAC in the Preferences, you may find this helps, especially at 256 kbps. If you want a blanket choice to be suitable for all genres, I really don’t think mp3 is up to the job.
@Marlo I’m glad dfx makes things sound a little better to you – personally I prefer to get things right at source, rather than having to patch them up afterwards. And I do understand why people wouldn’t want to re-rip all their mp3s, I feel the same way !
I have tried various encoders over the years – ones I can remember include iTunes, Audacity with the latest version of LAME, Amadeus, Wavelab and QT Pro. The best were Audacity and iTunes. Although neither offer much ability to customise the settings, they reliably produced OK-sounding mp3s.
Thank you, Ian, I appreciate the advice.
@ Ian – the good word is out..
Four new converts already
@ Mario – I have a full version of DFX, and used it extensively till about an year ago.
I had all DFX sliders on “max” at a wild party and the next thing I knew, the output socket of my Laptop blew (I kid you not!) I still have that laptop (an Asus) as my flac recorder… the speakers are fine but cannot use the output jack.
I suspect that using DFX at maximum volume caused a current surge, which probably blew a capacitor or resistor parellel to the sound-out jack.
Dumped using DFX since that day… so please be careful with that software!
Cheers
Thank You!!!! I have been saying mp3′s sound bad for years and I have gotten the same responses. No matter what format or what player, they always sound bad to me. Sooner or later they will find a way to store just as many wav files on a player. That’s when I’ll buy one.
Until then Wav on..
@Ian, so you’d recommend the LAME codec? Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but every time I’ve used that to make MP3′s it’s produced *disastrous* results, absolutely terrible sound even by MP3 standards. Particularly noticeable is some really horrible distortion that happens to transients and/or cymbal-type sounds. Not the subtle swirly stuff, but really offensively bad stuff.
I rather like the MP3Pro codec found in Adobe Audition. It seems to reproduce things quite nicely most of the time.
wow! nice article. the difference between the 128 and the wav is blatant, specially when crashes and high hats come in. i’ve always noticed that, and it really pisses me off when some guy on a bar plays low bit rate mp3s and thinks the people around doesnt even notice… ive seen (and i think we all have) this many times in many different places…
fair enough… i still have a huge collection of 320 mp3s but i will always love and keep my collection of CDs.. (cant stand how people sell their collections saying they ‘move forward’ to mp3s).
Good article. After many rounds, I finally settled on encoding my lossless library to 160 kbps AAC for portable use, with iTunes 8 and the latest Quicktime 7.6.5 (7.6.x has improved encoding fidelity according to Apple, and I can clearly hear an improvement in the lows and the mids; the sound is not as thin as in previous versions).
I think CD’s sound bad too. Everyting digital sounds crap!
Ah, I can’t agree with you there
No question there are some lovely old analogue recordings out there, but there are some lovely new digital ones, too.
Thanks for all the replies, chaps !
@fourvector Sorry, I missed your comment, not sure why ! I don’t really have a codec recommendation for mp3, I suggest you use something else
But the proof is in the pudding – choose whatever sounds good to you. Lots of people rave about LAME but I’ve heard many… well, lame encodes from it :-p
@Mats Interesting about the Quicktime update, I’ll have to check that out.
Enjoyed your article. Nice that someone has finally linked to files so people can easily compare.
I’m over 50 and can only hear up to about 14kHz; starting to develop hearing loss due to age and exposure to high SPLs at work too. However, I can -still- hear the difference between mp3s and AAC files at their highest sampling rates verses verses WAV and CD’s (I like FLAC, but not Apple “lossless” by the way). Granted I have pretty good speakers and headphones, but I believe most people to be capable of hearing the difference with desire and experience.
That being said, I think good compressed formats like AAC are fine for iPods used outside or in places with ambient noise; they’re great!
I heard NPR interview some geek the other day, who claimed to have done “research” that proves there’s no subjective difference between mp3s and CDs. I could only laugh and roll my eyes. A similar debate exists among some audiophiles and electronics engineers, sometimes indignant that the former claim the ability to hear a difference between various high end op-amp integrated circuits, even though the distortion differences are supposedly below the threshold of what’s been established in research literature. My experience has been that much lower levels of distortion can be heard in stereo as opposed to mono program material. To me, differences between mp3s and CDs, are most readily noticed in terms of imaging and perceived ambient space. Given a relatively good audio chain, uncompressed formats will have a sharper stereo location for panned mono sources and a vastly clearer rendition of reverberant field information, allowing one to get a real sense reflective space. Sharper attacks from complex, percussive sounds and distorted, unnatural high frequencies are noticable, but for me, the stereo effects are more profound.
As obvious as it seems those who have heard the difference and who care because they enjoy great recordings, still, the debate blunders on…
Also, a question for Alex:
He posted:
“If your music sounds like shit on our ipod go back and fix it!… ”
How does one “fix it?” What specifically does an audio engineer do to make a recording/mix sound better in the mp3 format?
I’m seriously interested!
I don’t think you need to “know what to listen for”. If so, then the whole exercise is pretty pointless. You enjoy your music much more if you listen to the music than trying to find some imperfections (although I give you the point about not being able to ignore it anymore once you know it’s there). The reason why many people don’t hear it is because of the way they listen to music: outside on their iPod earbuds (with iPods not having the greatest audio quality in the first place), in the car, on laptop speakers, or even at home only in the background while they’re doing something else. If that’s all you want music for, some background tapestry, then you maybe won’t hear the errors and you’ll probably do fine with your MP3s. I see everywhere that it has become a very rare thing for people to actually sit down and *listen* to music on a stereo. As soon as you stop using music to fade out the silence and start to actually listen to it, you will hear what’s wrong about it.
320kbps really are kind of pointless, especially when compared to V0 which are much smaller and usually indistinguishable quality-wise. Just go to lossless directly, 320kbps is a clear loser in the filesize/quality tradeoff. Going from 320kbps MP3 to FLAC (44/16), for example, usually means only 2.5 to 3.5 times the harddisk space. You can’t possibly think that’s not worth it at a time where an external 1 TB harddrive costs $100.
In my opinion, there’s really only 2 ways to go.
FLAC (or AAC for the Apple people) if no other reasons speak against it.
LAME V0 if filesize is an issue. Apart from Vorbis, which I’m not familiar with enough, that’s about the only thing that can get at least a decent quality out of lossy compression.
Personally, I have my whole library in FLAC and a media manager (MediaMonkey 3) that automatically transcodes to LAME V0 when I sync something to my portable player.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks for the reply. You’re right, no-one needs to “know what to listen for” – which is why I put that big warning at the start of the post.
On the other hand, just because people haven’t noticed the artefacts yet, doesn’t mean they aren’t there, or having an effect. For example, my wife complained recently about the sound on an old film, saying it was hard to understand what was being said. I took a quick listen and the soundtrack had been very aggressively de-noised, causing it to sound very stifled and dull, with very exaggerated sibilance. When I pointed this out, she said – “yes, that’s what I said – it’s hard to hear what they’re saying”. So the poor quality was affecting her enjoyment of the audio, even though she wasn’t picking out the reasons or actual artefacts.
In the same way, I believe many people are hearing mp3s that are (at best) lacking in depth, warmth and detail, and at worst are distorted, clipped and full of “ultrasonic birdies”. They aren’t enjoying the music as well as they might, even though they don’t “know what to listen for”.
As far as listening environments go, I disagree – lossy compression artefacts leap out at me in the car, on TV and especially on my iPod – even using the standard crappy earbuds. My favourite example is Bjork’s last album – I bought the CD from Amazon but got impatient to hear it and downloaded a 256kbps lame torrent of it ’till the disc arrived. I loved the music but was disappointed by the sound – flat, two-dimensional and “meh”. At this point I was convinced the 256kbps version should be fine, though, so I was in no rush to rip the CD when it arrived – but eventually I did, simply to reduce the file-size somewhat (I still only had 20 GB to play with !)
The difference was staggering. It’s still not the best-sounding CD in the world, by a long shot – but the 128kbps AAC encode was SO much better it blew me away. I went from not listening to the album because I felt so negative about the sound, to happily listening to nothing else for several days !
Which raises another interesting point – often it’s the worst sounding recordings that come off worst after mp3 encoding, not the best…
Ian
Hi!This is a great topic and just what I was looking for!I have just finished a recording with my band Neosphere and this time we decided to take the tracks home to mix on Cubase.I don’t have a lot of experience with mixing but I do know my sounds!As I am the drummer I was taking particular care in noting problems with my kit sound within the mix and fixing them.we finally got to the end of mixing (before being sent off to be mastered) so I ripped off an mp3 CD of the tracks.as soon as I put it into my car stereo system I knew something was wrong,the cymbals has lost their clarity and became sloshy as if they were being listened to underwater.I have had this problem before with mp3 and I was just wondering whether the problem was because I had ripped it straight onto mp3 without mastering or whether the final copy (after mastering) will still be the same as if it is then I need to try and sort it out!you are the guys to help me so any answers would greatly be appreciated!thanks,Steve
Also there was a massive ‘bass injection’ onto the mix after mp3-ing.it’s just all a bit over my head at the moment!cheers!Steve
boy are you right.I have a nice stero system.And my super audio cd player broke.So I tried downloadig some of my cd’s on my computer and could not belive how bad it sounded.HD RADIO sounds ten times better.I downloaded The new Green Day cd and the bass is boomy sounding.Background instruments are muffeled and the highs are abrasive.But the store bought cd sounds great.I also listen to classical music and there is no comparison.Downloading is a scam.I cant wait to get a new Sacd player.
@ Steve Sorry, I missed your comment before. It’s hard to say where the problems lie without hearing your tracks – sounds like a bit of both, to be honest. Feel free to send me an example and I’ll give you an opinion.
Not much of an audiophile, me, but something I’ve been doing might interest you. I ripped a few tracks from some CDs I own, I called them reference for lack of anything better. I then converted the files in multiple manners to compare certain criteria: size, sound, support. I used FLAC, WMA, several formats of MP3, and did my best to see what I liked. I needed headphones and had to shelf the project. I then just plain zipped all these files into a single archive. And then I saw an incredible result. Plain old zip could do nearly as good as specialty lossless formats, often better. Then I realized (mostly from experiences with recompressing a compressed data archive) that the relic called zip actually implements several compression methods that it somehow selects on the fly (lempel alone? lempel-welch? etcetera). I never tried to go further than that because the implications were so big, I figured it must be me… I must have fudged something and not seen the error. Life has a funny way of burying ones lesser goals. Give it a shot? Remember, pkzip and other computer data compression tools have to recreate files exactly (aka lossless) or program execution fails spectacularly. So, did we have the ultimate lossless codec just rotting away on floppies from the late 1980s?
Also worth noting: I replaced the default OS on my Sansa e260 (personal media player) with an OS called RockBox, I gained support for FLAC and other file formats which Sansa never supported. Rockbox can be installed into many popular media players.
Hi Ian,
Is there any specific flac encoder software(for Windows) that you would recommend ?
I’m encoding all my CDs to flac under Linux, and am looking for an equivalent under Vista.
Any suggestions?
Cheers and thanks
Suneel
This is all based on the comparison fallacy. When I listen to my music hard, in a controlled situation, on the best stereo. Absolutely I can hear the difference.
However. 99% of the time I’m plugging my iPhone into the aux jack of my car and listening half-eared at 70 MPH. Under the typical listening conditions, this point is moot.
The vast majority of music listeners don’t hear the difference, because they aren’t listening for it. Why not? They are too busy with all the other things people do when they listen to music. Like watch TV, talk, Dance, Read, Drive, Sex, so on.
Additionally, MP3 is the most wildly accepted format on devices. They are commonplace, easy to utilize because of ubiquity and sound good enough to not really worry about.
People tend to do what is easy and good enough, not what is best.
I am all for fighting the good fight about dynamic range, but you make some mistakes here which vitiate your cause.
You wrote:
“Ironically one of the factors that makes mp3 so popular – the fact that it’s free and open-source – also makes it far harder to get a decent encode.”
This is completely false. The mp3 codec is proprietary. It is not open source and it is not free to use, but must be licensed by the Fraunhofer society, which owns it.
FLAC and Ogg, on the other hand, ARE Open Source.
And if you are so certain about high quality mp3 files sucking so bad, you might want to try an honest and open ABX test, instead of the rather tendentious approach you have used here.
Dear Ian,
About the MP3s on your website… the levels are lower then the WAVs, making a comparison unfair. Kind of dissapoints me, because you are an audio engineer and should know about these things.
Digital CAN still sound like crap if your system (or the weakest link) is crap. Jitter can completely kill the livelyness of a signal. Master clocks help to prevent this in studio surroundings, but most people will not even realise what a good DAC really is, even if they are staring at one…
Love to read things like this. Im on my 10k$ stereo with high-end dedicated stereo soundcard in my computer. Ill never listen to an mp3 again, unless it the only way I can listen to that one great song (which is doubtful)
I knew mp3 had failed before I read this, but after reading, things stick out a bit more.
Tell me please why people use expensive stereosystems, mini-jack to motherbord soundcard, and listen to mp3?
Is there any reasonable answer to this… Probably not.
@ Norseman – very good question ! Although, I do this myself, and the answer for me is convenience. If I want to listen hard and well, I fetch the CD. But if I just want to stick some music on, I listen to my iPod…
Hi Doedolf,
The mp3s were made from the WAVs, so I’m surprised you say they are different levels. This is absolutely an issue I appreciate – I’ve blogged about it before.
But I have to admit I didn’t check, in this case – how are you comparing their levels ? Perhaps your mp3 decoder is clever enough to pad the output to prevent clipping during reconstruction ?
Ian
@Ian Shepherd
Well, of course, skipped my mind
But I dont think convenience should come before quality
I use my iPod alot at work, but I’m not too picky on quality when rattling around in the forklift.
@ Norseman
Realised I never replied to DampeS8N – fwiw I can hear mp3 artefacts in the car, on my iPod earbuds and over analogue FM radio – no comparison needed. Yes, people use mp3s for convenience (even me!) but we’re losing out as a result…
@ John – I have ABX-ed myself on all kinds of issues, including mp3 vs WAV etc – enough to know the differences are as plain as the nose on my face. Is the argument here tendentious ? Maybe, but so are all the posts out there that claim 128kbps mp3 is “CD Quality”…
I’m happy to stir it up a bit at the expense of some scientific rigour
Hi Ian,
I’ve started my music collection anew with Flac in 24-bit/96kHz, played through Rockbox.
Is it overkill or am I actually getting better sound?
Cheers
Suneel
Hi Suneel,
It depends ! There’s no point in using 24/96 on anything that came from CD, for example. Up-sampling won’t increase the quality and might even harm it.
If you have 24/96 sources, go for it ! Personally I would suggest FLAC at the source resolution – eg. 16/44 for CDs, 16/48 for DATs if you have them, etc.
Ian