First MP3 results in - Tim eats his words!

["Timothy Morris" <timothy.morris@xxxxxxx>]

First thanks to Phil Harris for connecting up the analogue cables on the back of my DV88 yesterday. I had hoped to use my Meridian 561 to do the decoding for both CD and MP3, but while the Meridian will decode 5 channel mpeg (the original standard for PAL DVDs), I've since found out that .mp3 is a different thing!

 

I've been doing some reading, and have used a separate ripper, and encoder - both free.

 

For ripping I used Exact Audio Copy, which recognises errors in the bitsream, and re-reads the CD until it gets a perfect copy. All of my CDs (with a few exceptions which have been "borrowed" by young hands) are in pristine condition, so It may be overkill. It takes longer, but at least I'm guaranteed that the .wav files on the hard disc are a perfect representation of what was on the CD. http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

 

For encoding I have used the latest LAME encoder (3.88), together with a windows front end (Razorlame).

For some reason the files were unreadable when using high bit rates unless I selected ISO compatibility.

 

Razorlame is available from http://www.dors.de/razorlame/ and the Lame DOS executable from http://dkutsanov.chat.ru or http://www.jthz.com/~lame/

 

The first thing I discovered is that the type of source material makes a vast difference (I know you all already know this, but for me it is a voyage of discovery!) I encoded "Miss Otis regrets" from the "Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter songbooks" boxed set, which is vocals plus light piano accompaniment, and that sounded quite respectable down to 128K. I then did a quick an dirty test on some material with wider dynamic range that I've been listening to quite a lot recently - the 4th track on Whoa Nelly by Nelly Furtando, and with this one compression was fairly obvious at the same bit rate.

 

Overnight I set up the whole Nelly CD to be encoded at 320Kb/s, and have just finished an A/B comparison with the original CD switching back and forth between the two. There is a very slight muddiness to very low bass, but you really have to try hard to hear it, and to be fair I think that has as much to do with the fact that the DACS in the Meridian are superior to those in the Arcam as anything else.

 

I realise that 320Kb/s is too high a bit rate for ripping an entire CD collection - so now that I have found (for myself) that .mp3 can produce very good results even when played through a very transparent HiFi, I'll experiment with various encoding settings to find the best trade-off over the next couple of weeks and post the results.

 

Many of you may be thinking that it is all irrelevant, as your HiFi/listening room is not capable of revealing the difference. Well your current set-up might not, but what if you splash out further down the line? Do you really want to go through the hassle of re-encoding all of your material?

 

I'm not going to go through the process of ripping my entire CD collection purely because I'm happy changing a CD every hour or so, and I live in a single story open plan building so there is no need for multi-room audio - I just turn up the volume, but it has given me food for thought!

 

See Mark, I said I'd be honest!

 

Tim.

 

 

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