[vorbis] Am I insane?

[Martin Fontaine]

> New to the list, figued I'd introduce myself and ask if anyone else even
> uses the --quality 10 setting.

        Yeah, I use that too...  Mostly for test purposes...  To me, when at 
home using a 5.1 receiver with either DPL2 or CS5.1 setting (Which 
fakes 5.1 sound out of stereo) I found that when encoding at lower 
bitrate (q3 and down) it sounds acceptable to the naked ear (Using 
small desktop speakers or Walkman-Style Headphones) but when you kick 
in one of those modes on a receiver, the rears sound all distorted!

        And that distortion is present with MP3 at ANY bitrate all the way 
to 320, while with Ogg, at q6 it's barely noticable and up, it's 
totally gone.  So I figured that for my main collection at home, q8 
was probably the best compromise and at work (Where disk space is 
more limited and I only use headphones) I chose q4.5 but I have a few 
q3 files there too and they sound great.

        When I make compilations on CD, I usually try to figure out what's 
the highest bitrate that can fill the disk.  A friend of mine lent me 
some classical music CDs, I ripped them and then encoded them to 
Ogg...  I encoded all files at q9.6 which took about 697 megs and 
then reencoded everything at q9.61 just to see if it fits on a 700 
Megs CD!

        Oh, and you should see the look on people's faces when I play them a 
q-1 Mono file and then ask them to guess the bitrate!  Some people 
even thought that Your Sort Of Human Being by Emm Gryner encoded at q-
1 Mono (Avg BR of 36kbps) was in 192kbps!!!

> Ogg quality is pretty amazing to me at 10.  I ripped all my CD's using
> this setting with the plan that the quality would be good several years
> down the road, but most mention I see on the net of people who encode in
> ogg are only encoding at about --quality 5.

        Actually, most of my songs are at q4.5 at work, but my favorite 
band's songs are at q10 so you are not alone!

> Let it be said, that after some intensive listening tests I did myself
> on my own media & equipment, I deleted ALL my lame --alt-preset extreme
> encoded MP3's and started over with ogg --quality 10.

        I used to have my songs encoded with Xing (AudioCatalyst) in VBR at 
the highest quality!  At work, I saved nearly 2 gigs by converting to 
Ogg and I improved sound quality!  One of my coleague who I converted 
to Ogg is also a believer!  He went from Xing VBR Highest Quality to 
Ogg q3 and he thinks it sounds better for about half the space!

+--------------------------------------------------+
|      Martin Fontaine     mfont at videotron.ca      |
+--------------------------------------------------+
| The Braids Bonanza: http://braids.cjb.net        |
| Mel D.'s Good Gifts: http://come.to/meldoane     |
+--------------------------------------------------+
| "Why do people change, when hearts still beat    |
|  the same?" -Heather Nova                        |
+--------------------------------------------------+

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