[vorbis] Is Vorbis really THIS good?

[Moritz Grimm]

EdB wrote:
> Recently the 'MP3 to All Converter' was offered on this list, so I tried it.
> 
> I tested converting a few of my 160kbps MP3 files to OGG, and was
> surprised at the sound quality.  Then I noticed the much smaller OGG
> file size and checked the converter bit rate-- it was set to 80kbps!
> 
> Is Vorbis really that good that it can make a converted 160kbps MP3
> sound as good at 80kbps?  Or am I just hearing impaired?

Mmmhhh... :D

Well, I think you must've been lucky to hear no difference. Reencoding
MP3s to OGG is a bad thing to do, because the OGG encoder tries hard
(and wastes Bits) to encode all the MP3 artifacts and then degrades the
sound further due to a different way of determining what data can be
thrown out and what not (both MP3 and OGG Vorbis are lossy codecs that
throw away sound that is inaudible to humans). If you want to enjoy the
full, mighty power of OGG Vorbis, always encode from the original .WAV
files. (This is why I find an MP3 to All Converter pretty stupid ...
making it a "WAV to All Converter" would be more useful and less prone
to misguiding users that have better to do than understand audio
codecs.)

You're propably not hearing impaired. :) One has to learn how to hear
artifacts and things like that. Keep your "bad" hearing, this saves you
from horrible experiences with at least 60% of the MP3s on the net.

But I still would not recommend to reencode any MP3, no matter what the
size advantages of OGG might be... that just would not be right.

Moritz

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