[vorbis] Lossless/lossy hybrid?

[Aleksandar Dovnikovic]

"Wilson" <defiler at null.net> wrote:

> Can you point me to a blind listening test that shows a difference between
> 320kbps LAME and the original WAV? I'd be very very very very surprised.
> Individual people can say anything they like.. "I wrapped tinfoil around
> my power cables and now there's so much more "depth" to the music!",
> but only a blind listening test can really sort this kind of thing out
> from sheer fantasy.

If you are using standard hard-to-encode samples like castanets.wav, you
should be able to hear the difference easily.

Now with "plain" music, I can't tell the difference between 320kbps LAME and
the original WAV. But some people say that they can, and although some are
probably imagining things, I do trust some people like Matt (Monkey's
Audio). He did some blind listening tests to see if 256 (and 320kbps) is
"transparent" like r3mix says, but he could still pick the lossy copy. Here
is the message he posted on Monkey's Audio board:

(Read the entire tread here:
http://members.boardhost.com/monkeys_audio/msg/3278.html)

________________________________
Lossy is Lossy...
Posted by monkey on 5/14/2001, 6:44 pm

Lately I've been hearing a lot of people say that lossy compression sounds
"perfectly transparent" when done right. Places like r3mix.net say that you
must have "failing music equipment or ears" if you can pick a 256 mp3 out
from the original. A guy at an audio board corrected me when I said that
lossless compression was the only truly transparent way to encode.
Anyway, I recently scored a new set of Sennheiser headphones and decided to
do some listening tests with a bunch of lossy formats just to see if I
really couldn't hear a difference like everyone says.

What I found is that I certainly CAN tell a consistent difference between
mp3, ogg, or WMA at any bitrate when compared to the original.

When blindly comparing the original and compressed tracks, one of the two
just feels a little "wrong" and it's almost always the lossy copy. The
differences are subtle, but certainly detectable.

Anyway, just figured I'd share. Lossy is still lossy... it HAS to sound
different.

Now, is that difference worth keeping files that are tons bigger? Not sure
on that one.

-Matt


---
Aleksandar @ Vorbis Xtreme | http://solair.eunet.yu/~aldov
Ogg Vorbis is the free, open source alternative to MP3

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