Re: Why bother with lossy encoding?

Seems like sound quality is very individual. Some people swallow
everything, some hear defects that don't exist, and I guess most people are
somewhere in between.
I grew up with vinyl and audio cassettes (those very common ones by that
time, 3.175 mm (⅛") wide tape, 47.625 mm/s (1⅞"/s) speed. I hated the
background noise, the ”wow & flutter", defects from those noise reduction
systems and so on. And I hated the vinyls as well, but for different
reasons. I was just annoyed by the sound.
Then I upgraded to a reel to reel tape recorder (a TEAC A-3440 4 channel
thing). Still a lot of tape hizz, but less wow & flutter and so on. Still
annoying, though, even at highest speed 380 mm/s (15"/s).

First time I had something that didn't annoy me was actually when I bought
my first CD player. I also upgraded my mixdown possibilities from a
cassette to a HiFi Video recorder. It sounded a lot better, but had some
annoyances as well. Only about a year later I bought a DAT recorder and was
very happy with it until it broke many years later.

These days I use the FLAC format for documenting my music recordings. I
find it easy to deal with. I can manage tags with my own bash-scripts and I
use that to enter everything I know about the songs I record. Title (all of
them if they are more than one, for instance songs that are translated from
another language, like ”Reflections In A Palace Lake (京都慕情 – Kyoto Bojo)”
or ”Manchurian Beat (На Сопках Манчжурии)”, composers (even when I'm the
composer…), original artists, who plays what instrument, where we recorded
it and exactly when. I also use those tags to automatically upload them to
a link page of mine, for the other musicians to be able to download them
and give me feedback about the mixing and more. I know that most file
formats supports tags, but I find them very easy to work with in FLAC
files. And I like the Open Source idea in this case.

After listening to lossy formats I found that the result depends a lot on
the original sound. If the original sound is a poor noisy old recording
from the 60's or even earlier, not even 256 kb/s (mp3) is enough to avoid
audible artefacts. A good original however, may sound good enough at 160
kb/s (mp3). With Ogg/Vorbis files at least one step lower bitrate may be
ok. Hiss sounds seems to be very tricky to handle for those psycho acoustic
data reducing algorithms.

I guess I could write about this for several days, but I also have a life,
so…


Kind regards

Johnny Rosenberg



2017-03-09 18:40 GMT+01:00 Allistair Bywater <[email protected]>:

> No, not multiply. You get 2.3" X 3.9" X 0.6" - roughly the size of my
> mobile phone, only thicker. More or less the dimensions given on the
> Fiio website -  http://www.fiio.net/en/products/65
>
> I get confused when I think about it....
>
> On 09/03/2017 16:38, L A Walsh wrote:
> > Billy Geiger wrote:
> >> "Player is 6 x 10 x 1.5 cm (divide by 2.54 for inches)"....is that
> >> MULTIPLY instead?
> > ----
> >      What do you get for the dimensions of the unit, in inches, if
> > you do that?
> >
> > ? ;-)
> >
> >
> >
> >
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Announcing the Oxford Dictionaries API! The API offers world-renowned
dictionary content that is easy and intuitive to access. Sign up for an
account today to start using our lexical data to power your apps and
projects. Get started today and enter our developer competition.
http://sdm.link/oxford

*********** ASKING FOR HELP *************

When asking for help on this list, please include the following information, so we can 
help you properly: 

* What operating system you are using (for example, Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.5.1)   

* Exactly what three digit version number of Audacity you are using (Help > About 
   Audacity, or Audacity >  About Audacity on a Mac computer)   

* If this is a recording problem, what equipment you are recording with, and how is it 
   connected to the computer?

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