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« on: Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 19:02:15 PM »
Here's my little rant on my opinion of audio tech globalization.
Oh btw in Guily's post, the woofers in those speakers look like a pair from Aurum Cantus.
The MP3 compression scheme adds a special type of high shelving filter to reduces the range of higher frequencies. Higher frequencies (that is frequencies above approx. 15,000 in most MP3 cases) impact the size of a file much more than lower frequencies. A single hi-hat can span between 15,000 and 20,000 hertz. While a bass note can literally be one sine wave. In the case of bass guitars, a single note has harmonics up to about 1,000 hertz (because you usually hear a quick pluck while the rest of the note is bass harmonics below 500 hertz in most cases). The important thing to note here is that because the way music/instruments is/are, there is much more high frequency information than low frequency information quantitatively. So for MP3's, high frequency information is lost to lower file size.
Okay cool, but then you can boost high frequencies to get it back just like creative does right? LOL NOPE. The MP3 codec has been in development for years to figure out the perfect filter to compress music so that humans have a hard time distinguishing between the original and compressed copies. It is a very complex formula and it's quite amazing how we can store music digitally at such low file sizes and still have acceptable quality. 128kbps is not acceptable quality depending on the material. But a variable bit rate V0 file is quite excellent quality and many will not be able to tell the difference. 320kbps is unnecessary between file size and performance. If you're gonna do a 320, you might as well have it in FLAC. A 320kbps file is the best example of the misleading "bigger is better" belief. Once you at the FLAC level you really only benefit from it by having very expensive speakers. There is the belief that frequencies above 20,000 affect the perception of sound even if we can't hear it. I agree, but this is only gonna be useful and valid for you if you're listening to music created by live instruments in an expensive studio and listening with expensive speakers with a huge range. Nobody I know, or anybody on this forum is at that level. Nobody has that kind of system. And if you did, you would be listening to vinyls.
These days nobody really pops in a tune, mixes some drinks, and listens to it. We're all mostly less than 3 feet from our computers listening through some cheap chinese/japanese sweat shop factory trash while companies will tell us, "HEY THIS IS THE BEST QUALITY BROOO". These days, our cheap equipment and cheap music is enough for us and thats perfectly okay. But it's nice to have that classic feel of live instruments recorded in a truly pro studio listening through some excellently engineered speakers at a distance with all the dynamics and everything.
And for the record, if you really wanted quality audio, it would come from a company you never heard of that never advertises because it caters to an elite level that doesn't need to be told what is the best. There's nothing hipster about that statement.
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