[vorbis] trying to get better ogg quality for this clip

[John E. Leon Guerrero]

hi folks, in my (unlucky) first test of ogg vs other encoders, i found a
case where wma and mp3pro sound much better than ogg at 64k.  can anyone 
suggest a setting that i haven't tried yet that can rival the wma and 
mp3pro samples at 64k?  it's the "gravel effect" that is troublesome.

the part in question is the first 15 seconds of this wave file:
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple.wav

this piece starts with a stereo guitar that is rich in harmonic content 
(like chimes) with some flanging/chorus/delay type effects.  way in the
background, there is some high frequency delay/reverb that goes easily 
unnoticed unless using head phones.  it sounds like the guitar pick 
scratching against the strings.

using decent (but not top of the line) headphones for evaluation, i
found that wma and mp3pro did a very nice job of encoding the file where
the differences from the raw wav file were practically imperceptible to
me.  however, when encoded with ogg q0-q2, the sounds is noticeably
altered and the "high frequency guitar pick noise" sounds like someone 
walking through gravel.  at q3 it starts to sound better and at q4 it is 
about equal to the others.

by my ears, the 64k wma file does the best job at avoiding the "gravel 
effect".  it also seems to add some presence & volume that doesn't exist 
in the original wave but *does* sound good...at least for this clip.

focusing on streaming, i also encoded using the options:
"-b 64"
"-b 64 --managed"
"-b 45"
"-b 45 --managed"

(dunno why, but i couldn't get it to do 32k nor could i get the 
--advanced-encoder-option bitrate_average_window=3 option to work either.)

the directory isn't browsable but here are the links for my test cases:

http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple.wav
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_64k.wma
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_pro.mp3
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_q0.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_q1.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_q2.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_q3.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_q4.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_b64.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_b64managed.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_b45.ogg
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_b45managed.ogg

dunno if these are really 40k and 48k since the encoder only processed 3 
seconds of the clip.  they sound good though.
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_48k.wma
http://qa01.live365.com/jlg/VH_simple_40k.wma

thanks,
jlg

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