4 ms·

you can hear the difference between summing 16 channels of 24bit audio vs. 16bit audio in a daw. 24 sounds better. then when you render it, you can't tell the d

you can hear the difference between summing 16 channels of 24bit audio vs. 16bit audio in a daw. 24 sounds better. then when you render it, you can't tell the difference between a 16bit dump and a 24bit dump. i think the recent aphex twin release was out on 24bit and 16bit, it would be a great test subject matter for the foobar abx plugin. with all types of music, you can train your ear to listen for what mp3 hiccups on. i know nothing about classic music, but i can spot a 320kbps mp3 a mile off due to terrible sounding high hats and crashes in genres where they are prominent. disco records also suffer very badly, just something about how they were recorded. i wouldn't know what to listen for in classical.

swift 12y ago
High hats and crashes are exactly the thing I noticed improved when switching my music from MP3 to FLAC many years ago. The difference is very obvious to me; I really don't think it's placebo. That said, I've heard that AAC handles them much better, and that modern MP3 encoders do a better job. I haven't had a chance to do an A/B test to check that. I'd love to confirm that AAC has solved this problem, because my music collection is taking up way more space than I'd like!
- emn13 12y ago
  Try opus. I was amazed how good that sounds at ridiculously low bitrates. I'd be surprised if you can tell the difference between 80kpbs opus and FLAC (i.e. raw) files outside certainly very rare corner cases. And unlike mp3, those corner cases don't sound terrible, though that's subjective. Even at 64kbps the difference wasn't obvious without careful listening - to me, YMMV :-). If you do try it, make sure to use the 1.1 encoder (which deals with difficult samples by detecting that and upping the bitrate more aggressively than previous versions), and you might as well increase the maximum framesize the maximum (60ms) since you're not interested in low-latency applications.

swift 12y ago

High hats and crashes are exactly the thing I noticed improved when switching my music from MP3 to FLAC many years ago. The difference is very obvious to me; I really don't think it's placebo. That said, I've heard that AAC handles them much better, and that modern MP3 encoders do a better job. I haven't had a chance to do an A/B test to check that. I'd love to confirm that AAC has solved this problem, because my music collection is taking up way more space than I'd like!

emn13 12y ago
Try opus. I was amazed how good that sounds at ridiculously low bitrates. I'd be surprised if you can tell the difference between 80kpbs opus and FLAC (i.e. raw) files outside certainly very rare corner cases. And unlike mp3, those corner cases don't sound terrible, though that's subjective. Even at 64kbps the difference wasn't obvious without careful listening - to me, YMMV :-). If you do try it, make sure to use the 1.1 encoder (which deals with difficult samples by detecting that and upping the bitrate more aggressively than previous versions), and you might as well increase the maximum framesize the maximum (60ms) since you're not interested in low-latency applications.