[Vorbis] high bitrate quality?

[Nic Watson]

You can find testimonials all over the place.  You'll find mine below.
However, there's nothing like your own ears to be the final judge.
Simply encode a handful of representative tracks at increasing quality
settings until you can't tell the difference anymore.

I think I have above average ears (music training and such), and on my
best equipment and decent headphones I think I can occasionally tell a
difference at quality 5, but not at 6.  So I archive at q7.  As always,
your mileage may vary.

At the same time, hard drives are pretty cheap these days.  One can
remove the subjectivity from the problem and just encode everything in FLAC.

Nic

Scott wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I used vorbis several years ago because of its freeness and VBR, but
> after playing ha.org and getting an mp3-capable discman, I switched to
> APS and API mp3 encoding.
> 
> Now, I am liking musepack a lot, but the flexibility is more "there" for
> the vorbis format, including players, tagging comments (lyrics in the
> comments - killer idea!), etc....
> 
> However, I am a bit worried about everything I see on
> testing/tuning/optimizing for higher bitrate encoding.  I am wanting to
> do lossy archiving at a q7 level, and my music tastes range all over the
> place but get as dynamic as hard-techno-industrial stuff.  Will vorbis
> let me down with music like this at a 220-300 kbps level?
> 
> Sorry if this has been beat to death elsewhere - I searched on
> hydrogenaudio and googled a bit and everything points to vorbis being
> optimized for lower ranges than what I am looking at.
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Scott
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