Can you tell the difference between 96/24 and 44/16 and mp3?

[chartz]

I repeat, if you mainly listen to compressed rock/pop music, don't bother. The sound is the same. MP3 or Ogg are fine. You don't even need Flac.

The loss of ambiance information is quite obvious if the recordings have natural reverberation, are uncompressed or are careful transcriptions of old analogue tapes, recorded with two or three microphones.

Precisely what you lose for good is ultimate stage depth, the recreation of venue size, quite obvious on 'statics, or other good speakers. But I guess we are a minority looking for that sense of realism.

That's precisely what hi-fi is all about for me: don't you enjoy that Wagner choir standing deep, deep, behind your back wall? That singer in front of the speakers, or hanging half-way between the speakers and your back wall, a little higher than the physical position of the speakers?
MP3 loses that completely.

 

[Julf]

The MP3 standard says very little about the encoder, allowing FhG to be very secretive about their CODEC. The LAME developers believed by testing that there was a high pass in the FhG software and were experimenting with one in LAME

There has of course been many versions of the FhG encoder. I tend to use LAME.

 

[Sloop John B]

I’m ploughing through these files,

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6713

Anyone else taking the challenge?

.sjb

 

[tuga]

I can’t hear any differences between FLAC and red book CD to be honest.

And why would you? It is exactly the same audio content.

FLACs is only a container, it can hold anything from an MP3 to a 24/192.

 

[tuga]

I have a £3,600 cable that transfers 24bit into 48bit. Must admit I dont hear a difference but strangely my dog is looking more interested in music.

Is it a hot dog?

 

[tuga]

If someone really has a noise issue with a device decompressing (lossless) compressed FLAC, why not convert to uncompressed FLAC?

Shouldn't that be the best of both worlds? Useful metadata capabilities and no noisy number crunching?

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)

 

[tuga]

MP3 has a block of 26ms or faster
Anything below 40 Hz is not even a complete wavelength in a slow block.
I also vaguely remember a statement ( a very long time ago) that in some encoders, joint stereo modes forced deep bass to mono

Aren't you referring to vinyl?

 

[booja30]

FLACs is only a container, it can hold anything from an MP3 to a 24/192.

What are you talking about? FLAC is "an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio". Feel free to check the internets. Not a container.

 

[booja30]

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format)

See above. You're not making sense.

 

[tuga]

What are you talking about? FLAC is "an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio". Feel free to check the internets. Not a container.

You said you "can’t hear any differences between FLAC and red book CD".

What is the resolution of that FLAC? mp3 320kbps? Redbook? 24/96?

 

[tuga]

See above. You're not making sense.

You were talking about the best of both worlds.

AIFF is uncompressed PCM like the WAVE but has metadata capabilities. A perfectly viable alternative to FLAC.

 

[Julf]

AIFF is uncompressed PCM like the WAVE but has metadata capabilities. A perfectly viable alternative to FLAC.

Apart from not having content integrity checksums (and being wasteful in terms of storage and bandwidth).

 

[Julf]

You said you "can’t hear any differences between FLAC and red book CD".

What is the resolution of that FLAC? mp3 320kbps? Redbook? 24/96?

FLAC and MP3 are two different things.

 

[Julf]

FLACs is only a container, it can hold anything from an MP3 to a 24/192.

No, FLAC is not just a container. No, it can't hold a MP3. And by the way, FLAC allows anything between 4 and 32 bits per sample, and sample rates from 1 Hz to 655 kHz.

 

[tuga]

Apart from not having content integrity checksums (and being wasteful in terms of storage and bandwidth).

That explains the missing bits then... So annoying, the drop-outs.

 

[tuga]

No, FLAC is not just a container. No, it can't hold a MP3. And by the way, FLAC allows anything between 4 and 32 bits per sample, and sample rates from 1 Hz to 655 kHz.

You didn't "see" what I meant.

So you can't convert an mp3 to uncompressed FLAC? What would you call the resulting file?
People speak of FLAC as if it were a set resolution, "oh, FLAC sounds better than CD"...

 

[booja30]

You didn't "see" what I meant.

So you can't convert an mp3 to uncompressed FLAC? What would you call the resulting file?
People speak of FLAC as if it were a set resolution, "oh, FLAC sounds better than CD"...

Pleaser take a moment to read about it. FLAC is lossless. It can be compressed to varying degrees but it is lossless compression.

MP3 is similar to JPG for images (both use lossy compression). FLAC is like zipping a raw image file, where the unzipped file will be identical to the original.

With FLAC you can turn off compression. So you can have metadata capability without decompression overhead, which is what the OP was talking about.

 

[booja30]

You didn't "see" what I meant.

So you can't convert an mp3 to uncompressed FLAC?

MP3 is lossy! How could you get the original audio data back from it? Are you still thinking FLAC is a container like you said above? It's not.

 

[booja30]

You said you "can’t hear any differences between FLAC and red book CD".

What is the resolution of that FLAC? mp3 320kbps? Redbook? 24/96?

1) I only had one post in this thread before your flurry of comments last night. So that wasn't me comparing red book to FLAC. But it would make sense that they sound the same since a FLAC rip of a CD would contain the exact same audio data.

2) Again, FLAC is lossless! It is whatever resolution the source material was.

If you read the Wikipedia article I linked to above it will clear up a lot. Probably easier than hashing it out here.

 

[tuga]

Pleaser take a moment to read about it. FLAC is lossless. It can be compressed to varying degrees but it is lossless compression.

MP3 is similar to JPG for images (both use lossy compression). FLAC is like zipping a raw image file, where the unzipped file will be identical to the original.

With FLAC you can turn off compression. So you can have metadata capability without decompression overhead, which is what the OP was talking about.

I know all that.
You can apply lossless LZW compression to TIFF files by the way, and it's a better analogy. And you can convert an 8-bit medium-quality JPEG to a 16-bit TIFF.
Just like you can convert a 160 Kbps mp3 into an AIFF, ALAC, WAV or uncompressed FLAC. It won't restore the lost information.

You are missing the point that I am trying to make, which is that many people are commmenting on FLAC as if it were a set resolution when they may be comparing a 24-bit/352.8kHz download with 16-bit/44.1kHz Redbook CD.

I'm not criticising FLAC. I often buy FLAC downloads from E Classical and sometimes from Presto Classical as well (which I then convert to AIFF).