----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 5:09
PM
Subject: [ukha_d] First MP3 results in
-
Tim eats his words!
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.
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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