I think you or anyone else would be very hard pressed to reliably tell the
difference with any competently encoded track.

(enough weasel-words there?)

Mark Z.

--
Please reply only to Group. I regret this is necessary. Viruses and spam
have rendered my regular e-mail address useless.


"Jase" wrote in message
...
Are 192kbps MP3s of a high enough quality that they can stand up to
playing
on a monster club sound system? I've heard recommendations of a higher
bitrate but would 192 suffice?

TIA.

"Scott Dorsey" wrote:

I've never heard actual loss of bass with the LAME encoder, but I have
heard
a substantial loss of bass definition. Stuff goes from being clean and
well
defined to being flabby and centered on one note. But then again, on a
club
system you probably can't tell.

This is particularly evident with real percussion recorded without serious
processing. I have tried several encoders and algorithms and they all
suffer in this respect, regardless of bitrate. I doubt it would be as
noticeable with dance music, regardless of the system, as the percussion is
generally electronic and centred on one note anyway.

W

In article , Old Fart at Play
writes
citronzx wrote:

You all must go to pretty fancy clubs where everyone is quiet and the music
is played softly enough that you can even understand what the singer is
singing. The acoustics in most clubs combined with the ambient noise makes
for such a poor listening experience to begin with that I doubt anyone would
notice the difference between an MP3 and a CD. You might notice a loss of
bass with some tracks though.

Excuse my ignorance but how are you going to lose bass
with any bitrate of mp3?

Last time I made some mp3s I used LAME and tried various
bitrates until SWMBO said it was ok. We settled on variable
bitrate with a minimum of 128kbps.

--
Roger.


Suppose SWMBO's vary a bit!. NPI!. Mine can reliably tell if stuff's
been MPEGED unless its 256 K or higher.....
--
Tony Sayer

In article , Scott Dorsey
writes
citronzx wrote:

To tell you the truth I don't know enough about the compression algorithm to
say why. My evidence only anecdotal. If I rip a cd and compare the mp3
ripped version to the original off the cd both played from my computer there
seems to be a reduction in bass in the mp3 version. Now, I am very willing
to admit that this my just be a psychological effect but that is way that it
seems to sound to me.

I've never heard actual loss of bass with the LAME encoder, but I have heard
a substantial loss of bass definition. Stuff goes from being clean and well
defined to being flabby and centered on one note. But then again, on a club
system you probably can't tell.

And forget about bass imaging. But then, few playback systems have any real
bass imaging anyway, let alone club rigs.

I think what you'll notice first is weirdness on the top end, but it might
be just fine for dance stuff.
--scott


Yep that's it!, lower the rates till they notice. Lets never, ever,
promote better quality sound 'tho, no that would never do!.

The new digital age dawns.

Never was so much promised and so little delivered!.....
--
Tony Sayer

In article , Codifus
writes
me wrote:

On 10 Feb 2004 19:02:08 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:


citronzx wrote:

To tell you the truth I don't know enough about the compression algorithm to
say why. My evidence only anecdotal. If I rip a cd and compare the mp3
ripped version to the original off the cd both played from my computer there
seems to be a reduction in bass in the mp3 version. Now, I am very willing
to admit that this my just be a psychological effect but that is way that it
seems to sound to me.

I've never heard actual loss of bass with the LAME encoder, but I have heard
a substantial loss of bass definition. Stuff goes from being clean and well
defined to being flabby and centered on one note. But then again, on a club
system you probably can't tell.

And forget about bass imaging. But then, few playback systems have any real
bass imaging anyway, let alone club rigs.

I think what you'll notice first is weirdness on the top end, but it might
be just fine for dance stuff.
--scott

I'm interested in this weirdness in the top end aspect of MP3s,
because I was tasked with replacing some museum systems (originally
minidisc) with CF card MP3 players. The thing is that these systems
used left for mono sound and right for 20KHz tones to sequence the
lights. Even the highest quality LAME VBR completely failed to work
the lights wheras 256k fixed rate LAME worked just fine. How much
information is lost in the squishing ?
M
It depends on the bitrate. 320k MP3 seems to be generally accepted as CD
quality, 128K is about the equivalent of FM radio.

192 or higher thank you!. Don't tarnish FM with all this digital rate
crap thanks!...

I record FM
broadcasts and make them into 192 MP3s simply because I think the lower
bitrates take too much life out of the music. I don't even bother with
320K, I just keep my files in WAV or AIFF in that case. Takes up lots of
space, I know, but CD-Rs are cheap

CD

--
Tony Sayer

just my 2cents worth but

vinyl still offers the best sound in a club environment, in terms of
impact and depth. i've seen mp3 dudes drop sets after vinyl ones, and
seen the atmosphere vanish and people leave the floor.
mp3 sounds a little thin for big club tracks - just because something
has the same SPL doesn't mean it has the same 'bounce'
still, all things being relative, if all the other djs on the night
play mp3 too, noone will ever notice...


vib


ps. if you're getting paid to dj i hope you're buying the music you
play and not just kazaaing it
karma is a bitch ; )

On 11 Feb 2004 01:11:51 -0800
(vibrations) wrote:

vinyl still offers the best sound in a club environment, in terms of
impact and depth. i've seen mp3 dudes drop sets after vinyl ones, and
seen the atmosphere vanish and people leave the floor.

either ****E encoding or dj.

dont blame the format.

--
Spyros lair: http://www.mnementh.co.uk/ |||| Maintainer: arm26 linux

Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are tasty and good with ketchup.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Dorsey"
Newsgroups: rec.audio.pro,rec.audio.tech,uk.rec.audio
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 11:02 AM
Subject: 192kbps MP3s on a big sound system?


citronzx wrote:

To tell you the truth... (snip)

I think what you'll notice first is weirdness on the top end, but it might
be just fine for dance stuff.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

IME, they just sound harsh, with no depth- which fits with what the encoder
does, i.e. throw away the 'unimportant' information- lower level detail that
you CAN hear on a big thumping system. Try out an mp3 & wav. (or CD)
comparison somewhere with a big system if you can, & don't listen too
closely, i.e. don't overanalyse it. Just decide which one hurts your ears.
You WILL hear the difference, even with an ordinary domestic CD player.
I think an audience listening to a night of loud mp3's would finish up
feeling exhausted (read More exhausted than usual), perhaps without knowing
why. Mp3's are just fatiguing.

Jase wrote:

Are 192kbps MP3s of a high enough quality that they can
stand up to playing on a monster club sound system?

First of all two points that are semi-made in other comments already: it
depends on encoder and decoder quality and on sound system quality.

I've heard recommendations of a higher
bitrate but would 192 suffice?

I have decided on archiving the content of my compact cassette drawers
in that format becasuse it - with the available encoder and played back
via winamp or the audio application used - seems to be the optimum
combination of qualify vs. space.

There are caveats, some encoding and decoding software sounds less good.
A "monster system" somehow suggests to the that it is "loud crap", in
which case it really might not matter, but spl-control as a safety
measure may matter, the more so as the highly compressed variants of
music come with high long term average values that may make peak levels
that would be "fairly safe" at a REAL (x) concert unsafe.

As for the bass issues mentioned it appears to be that they could be
caused by improper playback options selected in windows. It may come as
a complete surprise to you, but windows generally knows best, and it
knows that if you select desktop loudspeakers then they need "just that"
undocumented eq. It has all kinds of other weird ways of bend the sound
and maxbass it and whatever.

For perceived linear and high quality playback choose the playback
option headphones. I have tried to get documentation of what all those
settings actually do via asking in the relevant newsgroup on microsofts
newsserver, but to no avail.

(x) no, not something to do with realmedia .... something to do with
real sound and/or real sound rendered in unprocessed ways. Using the
realmedia format would btw. be one of the ways of *not* getting
acceptable results in the context in question, they are great for very
low bitrates but less great at higher bitrates.

TIA.

YMMV

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

--
*******************************************
* My site is at: http://www.muyiovatki.dk *
*******************************************

In article et,
says...

You all must go to pretty fancy clubs where everyone is quiet and the music
is played softly enough that you can even understand what the singer is
singing. The acoustics in most clubs combined with the ambient noise makes
for such a poor listening experience to begin with that I doubt anyone would
notice the difference between an MP3 and a CD. You might notice a loss of
bass with some tracks though.

You must go to clubs that have crappy gear. Loud distortion sounds like
loud distortion. You can hear it, just louder. Most of the clubs I have
been to have sound systems that play clean and loud. So unless you are
really drunk, you can hear the lousy sound.
-------------
Alex