[vorbis] When will quality increase be unnoticable?

[Moritz Grimm]

Luke Usherwood wrote:
> 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.

Your problem is Xing. It's the worst encoder on earth. If I have to make
an MP3 for some odd reason, it's always use 'lame --alt-preset standard'
which sounds best to me and averages around 220-230 kbps. I find FhG
makes the best CBR MP3s, but (a) I never make CBR and (b) FhG doesn't
sound good unless encoded on "highest quality", which turns out to be 1x
realtime encoding on my Athlon TB 1GHz. I find only these slowly encoded
FhG files at 192kbps sufficient, otherwise 192kbps and below is simply
*blegh*.

> 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?

Vorbis doesn't have those typical MP3 oddities, which is why it might
sound pretty much like the original even at very low quality levels. But
there IS a difference, I just don't find it annoying. If you're like me
some day (I don't have those golden ears, I'm just a bit trained in
listening), -q 4.99 and -q 5 to -q 6 should be okay forever. -q 4.99
works great on music that doesn't live off great stereo effects (so it's
ok for me in 80% of the cases), for everything else I use -q 5 or -q 6.

<p>Moritz

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