[peel] Re: techy. May I borrow your ears?

[Alasdair Macdonald]

On 23/03/2008, Roger Carruthers <roger.carruthers@...> wrote:
>
>    To be honest, I think that .ogg at 1:4 is preferable to lossless compression at 1:2, because the object of the exercise is to get the best quality sound into the smallest file size, and if you can't hear the difference (and not many people of our age can – myself included, and I have 'trained' ears) then the smaller file size wins.
>   As I've said before, the vast majority of the material we're talking about here was recorded to cassette, and you can't improve upon the quality of the first generation; as you're starting from a fairly limited bandwidth and dynamic range, you're pissing in the wind with lossless compression. In short, go .ogg!

There is no logic whatsoever in your argument. You seem to be saying
the source is substandard, so making the closest possible digital
version of that source is pointless.

And your alternative is a knowingly degraded version.

Digital compression slits into two camps - lossless, and lossy. The
purposes of each type are in general rather different.

Typically, an archivist will preserve a lossless version using a
compression format that fits their needs - ie portability, speed of
compression / decompression, and compression ratio.

Those who prefer to make lossy copies - usually for personal use, not
for public archiving - have one additional consideration - a trade-off
- that of file size vs quality. And that's a very personal choice,
which probably depends upon the abilities of the person's ears.

It's my understanding that ogg [vorbis] *is* better a better quality
encoder than mp3 - ie it produces a higher fidelity output for the
same filesize, but that it suffers the same problem as Betamax - it's
inferior relative is far more visible to the marketeers.

It's worth bearing in mind the continuing fall in the price of
storage. Hard drives of over 500GB can be bought for £60ish these
days, and by the time you need to purchase the next drive the price
will have dropped again.