Do Higher Bitrates Payoff?

[brad1011a 10+ year member]

Interesting article on people's inability (not a scope's) to detect compression in music (not in a car, but with high-end headphones):

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/do_higher_mp3_bit_rates_pay_off

"The Upshot

With the possible exception of the USB Key that survived a washing and drying cycle, no other Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to tell the difference between an uncompressed track and one encoded at 160Kb/s, the bit rate most of us considered the absolute minimum acceptable for even portable players.

Some follow-up testing confirmed our suspicions: variable bit rate encoding makes a tremendous difference in the audio quality results, certainly enough to justify—many times over—the slight file size increase. Capping the bit rate at 160Kb/s in MP3 files can be pretty harsh on a track, but allowing the bit rate to wander upwards during more complex passages—as variable bit rate encoding does—and throttle down during quieter sections captures an astonishing amount of complexity while keeping file sizes down to an impressive minimum."

Click to read more...

 

[Buffalohed 10+ year member]

I can clearly tell a difference between the FLAC and 192kps on albums which I have both versions. Anyway, my preferred mp3 type is VB0. Not enough room to hold all my albums in FLAC, only my favorites.

 

[60ndown 10+ year member]

Interesting article on people's inability (not a scope's) to detect compression in music (not in a car, but with high-end headphones):
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/do_higher_mp3_bit_rates_pay_off

"The Upshot

With the possible exception of the USB Key that survived a washing and drying cycle, no other Maximum PC Challenge has ever surprised us as much as this one. It’s downright humiliating, in fact, that in many cases, we were unable to tell the difference between an uncompressed track and one encoded at 160Kb/s, the bit rate most of us considered the absolute minimum acceptable for even portable players.

Some follow-up testing confirmed our suspicions: variable bit rate encoding makes a tremendous difference in the audio quality results, certainly enough to justify—many times over—the slight file size increase. Capping the bit rate at 160Kb/s in MP3 files can be pretty harsh on a track, but allowing the bit rate to wander upwards during more complex passages—as variable bit rate encoding does—and throttle down during quieter sections captures an astonishing amount of complexity while keeping file sizes down to an impressive minimum."

i listen mostly to mp3s, but recently a true audiophile sent me some well recorded disck, the difference is,

NIGHT AND DAY

 

[Immacomputer 10+ year member]

I have done this experiment many times with people and myself. Even a couple of my friends who claim to be true audiophiles can't tell the difference in bitrate above 192.

I have a lossless recording of the album by NIN that is wonderfully recorded. I took samples of a few tracks and scaled them down. People can hear the difference between the lossless track and the 128 but not the 192.

Many times, people would hear a difference only if they thought the should. If I told them that this was the lossless track and played a 192 track then played the lossless track right after, they would claim that the first track seemed more "vivid" and "alive" and shit like that. Pretty interesting stuff.

 

[wu36ca 10+ year member]

Bit rate only says so much. All the bit rate in the world won't matter if the encoder is crappy.

 

[tommyk90 5,000+ posts]

I can DEFINITELY tell a difference between 128 and 320. Night and day.

 

[BassAddictJ 5,000+ posts]

192 is the minium ill listen to if i want it quality. i setlle for 160 on many downloads when a 192 isnt present......but ya dude this isnt shocking to me at all. higher bitrates ftw //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[newusername 10+ year member]

It's very easy to say that you can hear the difference. But ask yourself this: have you ever sat in a vehicle and been able to guess what the compression rate is? Have you ever achieved at least a 70% pass rate on an ABX test with a sample greater than 10?

It is also worth noting that 192kbps does not always equal 192kbps. It can be much easier to tell the difference between a transcoded 192kbps mp3 and a single encode, multi-pass 320kbps than it would be if the 192kbps mp3 was not a transcode.

And what do you guys do when you're listening to something ripped in VBR?

 

[Buffalohed 10+ year member]

It makes a big difference what you are listening to the mp3 with. In my car I can't tell the difference between any mp3 or lossless, but on my Senn HD600 'phones I can. If your stereo isn't up to par you won't notice shit.

 

[CaliforniabOY5 10+ year member]

I can DEFINITELY tell a difference between 128 and 320. Night and day.

x2

 

[TD89 10+ year member]

I can tell the difference between a 128 and a 192 or higher, but honestly I can't distinguish between 192 and 320 with very much accuracy even on a good set of headphones. When it comes to mp3s it seems like the most difference comes between 128 and 160, and a little bit more at 192 but not as much difference.

 

[Buffalohed 10+ year member]

Some lower bitrates will have lowpass filters at 16khz so if you have good speakers you can usually hear that if you know what to listen for.

 

[Immacomputer 10+ year member]

There is very little attenuation at 18khz and higher with 192kb. Actually, I don't think there is any. There is slight attenuation above 16khz with 128kb and that can be noticeable.

 

[Ku-sama]

to me, yes, there is a difference....

sooooo with my large hard drive room.... Lossless ftw //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/smile.gif.1ebc41e1811405b213edfc4622c41e27.gif

 

[newusername 10+ year member]

There is very little attenuation at 18khz and higher with 192kb. Actually, I don't think there is any. There is slight attenuation above 16khz with 128kb and that can be noticeable.

That's a tough blanket statement to make if you're looking at a transcode, which an extraodinary number of mp3's (particularly from p2p programs like limewire, ares, etc.) happen to be.