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

lollygagger lollygagger@...
Mon Mar 24 16:21:20 CET 2008


The idea of  having multiple backups is because if there is a single fault 
with a 500gb hard drive all is lost as I recently found to my cost.

I am thinking of using OGG as my 3rd back up after WAV on hard drive and 
DVD's. If my home was every burnt down or burgled everything else could be 
replaced  but not my collection so it's useful having a 3rd back up I can 
leave with someone else if only for peace of mind.

So has anyone else other than Roger compared their original recordings with 
a compressed of OGG at 350kbs using dbpoweramp?

Ye Roger thanks for that. Our ears might not be as sharp as they were in the 
olden days but they can't be that bad if I can still make an audible 
distinction between MP3 WMA & OGG lol

Play nicely boys. My initial message was just to ask if others had or could 
make a similar audible comparison with OGG at 350kbs and their original 
recordings :)



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alasdair Macdonald" <wewalkforonereason@...>
To: <peel@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2008 9:49 PM
Subject: Re: [peel] Re: techy. May I borrow your ears?


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.

------------------------------------

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