If you were Bill Gates...

[AndyD]

In truth 320kb is not that wonderful for mp3’s please try 192kbs and you will find that some sounds are actually sharper.

I generally encode my CD's to 320kbps mp3's for playing in the car or on my multimedia PC. I'm not sure why you would think 192kbps, which is a lower bitrate encode would be 'sharper'???

In the days when drive space was an issue I used to encode at lower bitrates such as 192 to reap the benefit of smaller file sizes but for the last few years I'm encoding at 320kbps as a standard across the board.

[tec0]

Most music 192kbs compared with 320kbs will not matter because there is not enough peaks to identify loss. That said music like melodic metal, death metal or just normal metal along with classical music will benefit a noticeable difference between 192kbs and 320kbs. 320kbs being the better option. That said it comes down to the decoder in the equipment mostly.

But in all truth in most “standard” sound systems you will find an audible difference only at peaks. That said the industry standard for the actual CD is about 1228.8kbit/s again not bad but again the decoders are a let-down and that is the problem.

[tec0]

Not to change the subject, but how does the blue-ray disk’s and decoders perform when it comes to sound?

[AndyD]

Not sure I understand your question Murdock, are you talking about the movie audio streams contained on a BR disk?

The audio of HD movies on BR disks can vary and the formats aren't straight forward. The audio could be anything from raw PCM down to Dolby Digital (audio codec 3 or AC3). Other common audio formats include DD+, DTS, DTS-HD, PCM etc and there's multiple configurations of each. Codecs also vary between manufacturers of the BR players but nowadays most will internally decode to at least 5.1 spec.

It's a bit of a mess to say the least but if you have a specific question or problem I'll try to answer it, I'm familiar with the basics of audio although my specialty is more on the video side of things.

[adrianh]

The 2 bit encoding that you quote is not quite accurate. The manner in which the music information is encoded is a lot more complex.

The Red Book specifies the physical parameters and properties of the CD, the optical "stylus" parameters, deviations and error rate, modulation system (eight-to-fourteen modulation, EFM) and error correction (cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon coding, CIRC), and subcode channels and graphics.

It also specifies the form of digital audio encoding: 2-channel signed 16-bit Linear PCM sampled at 44,100 Hz. This sample rate is adapted from that attained when recording digital audio on a PAL (or NTSC) videotape with a PCM adaptor, an earlier way of storing digital audio.[7]

An audio CD can represent frequencies up to 22.05 kHz, the Nyquist frequency of the 44.1 kHz sample rate.

The audio bit rate is 1411.2 kbit/s:

2 channels x 44,100 samples per second per channel × 16 bits per sample = 1,411,200 bit/s = 1,411.2 kbit/s.

As each sample is a signed 16-bit two's complement integer, sample values range from −32768 to +32767.

On the disc, the data is stored in sectors of 2352 bytes each, read at 75 sectors per second. Onto this the overhead of EFM, CIRC, L2 ECC, eight subcode data channels, and so on, is added, but these are not typically exposed to the application reading the disc. Because of this overhead, the raw bitrate (at the optical pickup) is considerably higher than the audio bitrate.

CD audio uses a sample rate of 44.1 kHz and for stereo audio this requires 176,400 bytes per second (or 1,411,200 bits per second - there are 8 bits per byte) of data storage. This equates to about 10.09MB per minute of audio in CDA format.

Nee ou broer, the guys that devloped digital recording techniques are no fools: I quote

Analog warmth

Some audio enthusiasts prefer the sound of vinyl records over that of a CD. Founder and editor Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound journal says that "LPs are decisively more musical. CDs drain the soul from music. The emotional involvement disappears". Dub producer Adrian Sherwood has similar feelings about the analog cassette tape, which he prefers because of its warm sound [6].

Those who favour the digital format point to the results of blind tests, which demonstrate the high performance possible with digital recorders[7]. The assertion is that the 'analog sound' is more a product of analog format inaccuracies than anything else. One of the first and largest supporters of digital audio was the classical conductor Herbert von Karajan, who said that digital recording was "definitely superior to any other form of recording we know".

Music DVD & Blu-Ray offer much higher sampling rates which would of course improve sound reproduction. The problem remains that speaker cone response speeds are limited and our ability to hear in the vertical plane is also limited. I suppose the best answer is more speakers but then Dolby 5.1 digital figured that out long ago. Analog recording does not come near the performance of Dolby 5.1

We must also not confuse data compression technologies with the real data. Music data compression techniques are very similar to the techniques used to compress images. BMP may be an accurate representation of a picture in say 24bit but it is also very inefficient. JPG is a lot more efficient as each bit is not represented in the same manner that a vector line can be compared to a bitmapped line. Although they represent the same data, at 24 bit straight line between two finite points take up a hell of a lot more space than a mathematical vector representation of the same line.

Just as our eyes are very inefficient so are our ears. Another problem of course is that we do not see or hear reality as such, we see and hear information that has been processed within our hard wired circuitry and also compared to our sub conscious recollections. That is exactly why we know that there is something wrong with a song that we know when it is sung slightly off-key (or too fast or too slow). We can't necessarily put our finger on the problem but we know that there is something wrong.

Our brains / minds are wired and programmed to notice differences, not similarities and remember sounds to be better / or worse if the memory of those "mental recordings" were formed when we were in an hightened emotional state.

What's the bottom line:

It's simple to prove - perform a blind test on yourself using the same sound equipment. Have somebody play a song (Even better - a song that you've never heard before) on an LP and have them play the same song on a CD. Do this say 10 times in a row without there being a pattern to which is being played. If you can recognize the LP more than 50% of the time then there might be something to it...You could even do a double blind test - do the same with another two groups of people and tell the one group that the CD will be played more often and tell the other group that the LP will be played more often - I bet the results will be skewed accordingly.

[Superscenic]

"If I were Bill Gates?"

I would invest in a working operating system and ensure all software runs on any system always.

[ColinK]

Travel the world hey,6 months in a country until i die

[adrianh]

The best one I ever saw on TV was on Who wants to be a millionaire. Fiona asked the contestants if they could choose to be anybody who would they like to be. The one guy said that he would like to be George Bush. She asked the contestant what he would do if he were George Bush. The guy said that he would commit suicide....

[Justloadit]

Would he require to have a truck license?

[tec0]

Just as our eyes are very inefficient so are our ears. Another problem of course is that we do not see or hear reality as such, we see and hear information that has been processed within our hard wired circuitry and also compared to our sub conscious recollections. That is exactly why we know that there is something wrong with a song that we know when it is sung slightly off-key (or too fast or too slow). We can't necessarily put our finger on the problem but we know that there is something wrong.

All respect to the clever people that design digital sound equipment. That said electronics 101 suggest that you will never have a perfect digital wave. In analogue you do get the perfect wave and most people would actually think the sound is not pure because of all the tiny little background noises.

I don’t know, there is something about Long Plays it may well be that it is because my record player is of better quality then my CD player and that is a real possibility in its own right. That said there are scattered reports that Vinyl is slowly making a come-back, so here is me hoping.

That said I will never deny the technical side of encoding, it is really incredible stuff!! It really is, but I would like to have the option to buy a Vinyl at my local music store. I think a lot of people would.

As it was pointed out, it is most probably just a mind thing but maybe that is enough to allow vinyl to be a permanent part of our entertainment industry.

Blast from past: LPs make a comeback (Feature)

[adrianh]

The word perfect is a misnomer. In all thing one needs to decide on a reasonable degree of accuracy. If you are to measure the distance from Cape Town to JHB you do it in km. If you measure the length of your nose you use mm. By the same token, if you measure a sine wave and then interpolate the points measured you already have a fairly good representation of the wave. If one considers that speakers can only respond at finite speeds and that audio equipment can only respond to certain inputs, it stands to reason that one enters a point of diminishing returns when the sample and reproduction rate is increased.

Yes, there are people with acute hearing, and maybe you are one of them, but in general our ears are quite doff.

I must admit, I can still see the covers of many LP's in my minds eye - especially the ones that my girlfriend liked :-)

[Justloadit]

Just remember the main problem with vinyl was static. Pull a piece of metal over vinyl and you have a Van der Graaf static generator.

[wynn]

If I were Bill Gates I would hire the best suite on the best cruise ship and just live there permanently.

Imagine new places to see new people to meet every three weeks or so and mostly the same staff to look after you.