[vorbis] When will quality increase be unnoticable?

[Luke Usherwood]

>
>be THAT much bigger, and at least to me q10 is like ... whoah damnit,
>i'm getting lost between original and encoded version at -q 5 to -q 6
>already. I don't think it's stupid to be that quality hungry, even if
>oneself can't notice any difference. 
....
>  Something between -q 8 and -q 10 will suit you forever
>(unless you grow golden ears, and from what i've heard that's more like
>a curse :( ), 

<p><p>Now this is interesting as I'm fairly new to the world of OGG.    A number of people have mentioned hearing differences way up at quality level 5 or 6.   Currently, I don't hear differences at -q2, but errors in MP3 stick out like a sore thumb.

Here's a small tale of my experience with MP3.   I started out encoding at 128kbps (that must have been, what, 7 years ago.  Man, I'm getting old!).  I would listen to all my music, and if I was able to hear a problem, I'd re-rip my CD at 256.  I ended up re-ripping about 10% of my music back then.  Over the next couple of years, I did, as you say "grow goldern ears".  I could no longer bare to listen to many of the songs originally recorded at 128kbit.  They sounded aweful.

This bit might interest people doing .OGG comparisons.  If now days, I sit down and compare the original .WAV and the .MP3 file side-by-side, switching back and forth, I often cannot hear a difference, even though at other times (such as having silence for 10 minutes then starting an MP3 mid-way through) I can pick out problems.  For example, if a MP3 is playing along (say 160kbit), I might hear a snare drum beat that sounds swishy.  If I go back and re-listen to it, it sounds find again.  What I think is happening is that the brain knows what the sound is meant to sound like, and so it fixes it up again.   [is this the pre-echo effect that people talk about, that the brain can ignore???]  Also, I have noticed that when I am very tired (eg. late night coding sessions), I seem to be more prone to hearing MP3 errors in files I normally think are fine.

Eventually, I settled on 192kbit, using AudioCatalyst (with the Xing encoder) to do my ripping.  This is now the bulk of my collection.  When doing direct comparisons to the WAVs, these always sound great to me.  However, if a song encoded at 256kbps (using old franhoffer encoder) comes up on the playist,  I always think "Wow, that sounds REALLY good".  I pop up Winamp, and almost always i'm right, it's a song at 256kbps.  Weird.  Maybe one's Joint Stereo, and one's Stereo or something.  I don't normally pay attention to that when encoding.

So, back to the world of .OGG  I'm keen on trying OGG because of the promise of good VBR encoding (which many MP3 encoders are crap at IMHO).  So far I have been encoding everything at -q3 because I can't hear a difference.  What do other people think, should I jump up to -q5 or -q6 in case I grow golden-OGG-ears later on and regret it?

<p><p><p><p>--- >8 ----
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