[vorbis] When will quality increase be unnoticable?

[Øyvind Stegard]

David Tenser wrote:

>
>
> Øyvind Stegard wrote:
>
>> 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...
>
>
> Personally, I encode in quality 5 and I haven't yet heard any 
> difference from the original and the OGG file although I'm using audio 
> equipment worth over $3,000. Of course, the sound card in my computer 
> has its limitations, which affects the signal. And I admit that I 
> haven't done a real test comparsion, I've just encoded files and 
> listened to them.
>
>> 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.
>
>
> My initial point was: Why did you choose q8, when you could might as 
> well choose q7, as I'm pretty certain you can't tell the difference? 
> Or you could flip the question and ask why you stopped at q8? The 
> guidelines are actually very logical: Increase the quality level until 
> you can't hear the difference from the original end the encoded file. 
> Most people will probably go up to 5-6 and some up to 7. I doubt that 
> anyone hear the difference between a q8 and the original, but if 
> anyone has really tested that, please let me know of a good song to 
> test with.
>
>
>
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Hmm... I'm a bit of a perfectionist with too much diskspace at hand. 
But, say I wanted to copy a song encoded with OGG to my minidisc player 
(I have to do this the analog way, from PC to MD), I end up with a 
better result even though the sound is decompressed (with excellent 
quality), converted to analog signals, transferred with analog signals, 
converted back to digital data, and then recompressed to MD(atrac). It 
will be nearer a CD -> MD analog transfer. Of course quality is lost 
during this process, but I still got lots to take from :). I want the 
source of my audio to be the best possible, for all purposes(My source 
is my computers). I like encoding at high bitrates, call me a nut ;).

When I compare bitrates, I encode the same song(same wav) at different 
bitrates, decode all these small peices and merge them all into a wave 
file. Then I listen, quickly switching from one bitrate to another one, 
listening for changes and such, and generelly how rich I feel the sound 
is.This is all very subjective, of course, so discussing it too much is 
a bit hopeless.

I don't know of any song that is particularly suited for this purpose, I 
just use my favorite music.

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