[vorbis] When will quality increase be unnoticable?

[Øyvind Stegard]

Hi
Thanks for response to my previous reply, it is all appreciated and 
taken notice of, there are many good arguments that counter what I  said 
previously, and I am sure there are lots of people here who are much 
more experienced and have lots more knowledge about this than me, so I'm 
listening(and hopefully learning=).

1. I agree that improving quality makes it possible to reduce data 
amount even more, but I think only up to a certain point.. The original 
audio is lost no matter what, and to a great extent at low bitrates.How 
can mathematics really guess/calculate the original sound that well, in 
the end, with so little to work with ? Perhaps much can be 
reconstructed, but I think that there must be a limit on how much you 
are able to get back, somewhere, when the bitrate gets really low(a 
philosophical thought perhaps)... I admit though, that one should be 
careful predicting how technology will develop.

2. Concerning the evolvement of digital storage and network bandwith, I 
was perhaps a bit far into the future in what I previously said, and 
there was also not enough thought behind this argument. I must agree 
that there will certainly always be constraints and limited resources, 
it's the way it is.
(But at least I know I can stuff lots and lots of high quality audio 
onto my harddrives, that are of sizes I would only dare to dream about a 
few years back:)

3. Am I able to *hear* the difference between a song encoded with -q7 
and a song encoded with -q8 ? (nominal 224 kbps vs nominal 256kbps) With 
the right equipment: maybe, probably not... But when I encode my music 
from CD's, it's also for archival purposes, and thus I would like to 
preserve as much of the original audio as possible, as I consider this 
valuable. It is important to me. CD's eventually start to degrade and 
information loss is the result, I have old audio CD's from the 1980's 
which are starting to sound ...worse(an expensive cd player can, of 
course, do wonders here, but the CD's are still dying). Fortunately I 
have encoded and archived them in high quality on harddisks, and I will 
probably be able to preserve the audio, close to the original, longer 
because of this.

Perhaps I'm just one of those guys who likes to keep too much things 
around, or perhaps I simply have too much diskspace =).

4. I think in bitrate terms too much. How should I think ? Hmm... I 
still can't see anything wrong with referring to a certain bitrate and 
talking about how well it sounds. An OGG encoded at nominal 128kbps is 
not good enough for me, not if I have the chance to encode it in better 
quality.  (As far as I can tell,  when increasing the Quality setting in 
oggenc, nominal bitrate goes up, throughout all levels, so I think 
bitrate can be used, if not for whole truth, at least as a quality 
indicator) Also, I was not talking about how well 128kbps will sound in 
the future, only how well it sounds today. But perhaps I misunderstood 
what you meant.

<p><p><p>--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.