Re: More ranting from me!

[Nigel Orr <Nigel.Orr@xxxxxxx>]

At 11:59 20/06/00 +0100, you wrote:
>journos in the early 90s), and converted it to a 56Kbit .mp3 track. I'm
not
>playing this through my Hi-Fi, with four power amps, big floor standing
>speakers (and directional cables :)), just a Windows pc with Cambridge
>SoundWorks 30 quid speakers.
>
>My verdict: I don't know how you guys put up with it - it is awful!

I've never heard anyone suggest that anything less than 128kbit/sec was
awful.  128kbit/sec is usually used for 'radio' quality, and 256 or over
for 'hard to tell the difference from the original'.  If you really mean
56kbit/sec, I'm not surprised it sounded awful.

Did you 'rip' the CD directly?  Disconnect the CD's connections to the
audio card, just leave the IDE connected, and do it again to make sure you
start with a clean signal.  Then encode the MP3 and decode it again, and
write that to a CD, and write the unencoded track to another track on the
CD, and listen to them on your hi-fi.

Now you can compare them more realistically, instead of with a sound card
and cheap speakers, and try various sample rates to pick the
'optimum'.  It's also worth adding that different MP3 encoders will affect
the quality of the encoding.  I use Blade, but it's not the best rated-
Lame is apparently a better Linux one, dunno if it's available for Windows
too.

Nigel


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