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The point is context. The technology wasn't created in a void. I wouldn't accuse the sentence of being well written, and the point could have been made more cle
by jbump 9y ago
The point is context. The technology wasn't created in a void. I wouldn't accuse the sentence of being well written, and the point could have been made more clearly. Simply saying that the developers used psychoacoustics were tested against the developer's own hearing preferences and tested against their music preferences. A wide range of different listeners were not consulted and a wide range of musical styles were not tested during the development phase. All technology has a context. Pointing out context isn't an attack.
- tjoff 9y agoI agree with your point but how is "western-european men" an appropriate context? What does that imply? Isn't reducing the taste of the developers to their gender sexist?
- pgeorgi 9y ago> A wide range of different listeners were not consulted and a wide range of musical styles were not tested during the development phase Luckily, codec developers aren't totally stupid. File formats tend to be defined through their reading operation, not the writing operation. Fraunhofer MP3, LAME and many others went way beyond the initial mp3 reference codec in terms of deciding what parts of the signal are important or not. Synthetic tests like the "put noise in it, check if it's still evenly distributed in a frequency plot" one the article shows are misleading. I could tweak lame into recreating regular noise sufficiently, while still creating valid MP3 files. The same input probably looks quite different when put through 8hz-mp3 or some early bladeenc (which are similar to the ISO reference codec, and _very_ unlike contemporary LAME's psychoacoustic model). Optimizing your record studio output to any given codec version is futile for that reason, too: Do you optimize for 1998's MP3 encoding? or 2015's? or Vorbis, AAC (and which of its 2 dozen profiles?), Opus, ...?