[vorbis] new MS codecs

[Steven Bailey]

Say WHAT?!?!
Okay, so my ears aren't as young as some people's and they've gotten a
bit of abuse from reckless use of the volume knob.  But there is no way
they've gotten bad enough to make WMA sound decent at *any* bitrate.  If
you up MP3's bitrate far enough, it can fool me.  It will sound close
enough to the original that I don't notice unless I'm trying to find
artifacts.  But WMA...

Okay, here's a story for you.  I was playing the album Wish by the
Cure.  I had encoded it in VQF, I thought.  (As I've mentioned earlier,
VQF doesn't sound all that bad to me because I have a hard time hearing
good stereo seperation.  Part of that "abuse of the volume knob"
thing.)  Now I'm listening to these songs and something is just
bothering me.  I'm not even paying close attention, mind you.  I'm
trying to wrap up a semester-long project on a PID controller. 
Nevertheless, something just doesn't sound right.  I finally in
exasperation call up the ID3 tag, trying to find out what the heck went
wrong when I encoded these songs!

Well, they were WMA's.  At 128kbps, not VQF's current maximum of 96kbps,
mind you.

Now, I KNOW what most people think about the quality of VQF's vs. any of
the high-bitdepth capable formats out there, so you'll pardon me if I
guffaw at anyone trying to tell me that WMA of all things actually
sounds good when matched bit for bit with an mp3!

Steven

Chun-Yu wrote:
> 
> Well, actually, WMA isn't that bad.  I would say that it's definetely
> better than MP3 at equal bitrates.  However, at 192 kbps, the highest
> possible setting, it still doesn't sound EXACTLY like the original CD, but
> it's extremely close.
> 
> Chun-Yu
> 
> On Thu, 14 Dec 2000, Aleksandar Dovnikovic wrote:
> 
> > "JD Conley" <jdc at malibuboats.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Oh yeah, they have some samples on their site.  Interestingly enough, they
> > > don't compare any of their sounds to MP3 or OGG, only Real, which we all
> > > know is inferior in quality...  Although the original WAV does give you a
> > > good idea as to the degredation in quality.
> >
> > I remember that Microsoft has compared their codec with MP3 (one of the
> > earlier version of wma) - to show that 64kbps wma sounds as good as
> > MP3 - but they used stereo 128kbps MP3 and 64kbps mono wma !!
> >
> >
> > Greetings,
> > Aleksandar
> >
> >
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