Post by vortex on Mar 27, 2006 20:43:33 GMT
I decided to rip all my cd's and then stream my music to my hi fi by the gift of the "pinnacle media centre". 
It was an interesting exercise in reviewing my cd collection. In fact I found some cd's that I had never played (eg Radiohead OK computer). As its such a tedious job I selected only about 300 cd's to rip. Even so it was a whole day's job and as it was one I don't want to repeat I did some experimention re codecs and bit rate. Before I began in earnest.
This is what I found and thats despite my cloth ears and a significant noise induced hearing loss at 4Khz in both ears (20dB)
WMA once your up to highest quality on the bit rate setting I Couldn't really hear any improvement in audio quality between that and the relatively new "lossless" setting. In fact I think I stopped hearing improvements after the 320 bit rate.
WMP 10 defaults to auto volume levelling and if you don't turn this of you get horrendous artefacts.
Comparing MP3 with WMA at the same bit rate. MP3 clearly sounded much warmer, dare I say analogue, (nope!) compared with WMA but there was much more space in the mix on the WMA. I reckon wma has it at the moment
Ogg vorbis has probably been left behind now in terms of quality.
As it turned out the media center I bought tends to glitch when playing WMA files so my music is archived at MP3 320.
I know some of you out there have pretty good ears. What are your thoughts on audio formats?
It was an interesting exercise in reviewing my cd collection. In fact I found some cd's that I had never played (eg Radiohead OK computer). As its such a tedious job I selected only about 300 cd's to rip. Even so it was a whole day's job and as it was one I don't want to repeat I did some experimention re codecs and bit rate. Before I began in earnest.
This is what I found and thats despite my cloth ears and a significant noise induced hearing loss at 4Khz in both ears (20dB)
WMA once your up to highest quality on the bit rate setting I Couldn't really hear any improvement in audio quality between that and the relatively new "lossless" setting. In fact I think I stopped hearing improvements after the 320 bit rate.
WMP 10 defaults to auto volume levelling and if you don't turn this of you get horrendous artefacts.
Comparing MP3 with WMA at the same bit rate. MP3 clearly sounded much warmer, dare I say analogue, (nope!) compared with WMA but there was much more space in the mix on the WMA. I reckon wma has it at the moment
Ogg vorbis has probably been left behind now in terms of quality.
As it turned out the media center I bought tends to glitch when playing WMA files so my music is archived at MP3 320.
I know some of you out there have pretty good ears. What are your thoughts on audio formats?
