Ableton Forum

if you cant tell the difference between a 320 kbps mp3 and its corresponding wave file... you might as well get out of the audio field cause your hearing is fucked

try it yourself. most noticeable difference to me is in the hi hats. they become slurred ever so slightly, yet so much in comparison...

jujst to clarify the original post i submitted.
all my mp3s and wavs are all purchased from online stores. i work as a dj so i need the best quality i can get,
as far as my suggestion of the apple graphic eq. i have found it a bit hit and miss.so u may find it wont help all tracks.
ive purchased the vintage warmer recently which i like.its warm and beefy, but im trying too find a way of warming the sound without the bass becoming to fluffy.ie tightening the bass. any suggestions would be great.

oh and to clarify further. if u go on stompy.com and order music. certain tunes sound exactly the same.whether ordered as mp3 320kbps quality or wav, which must mean the original file is average. which can be frustrating as both versioins sound nvery little like the vinyl you would buy. dont know yso many dload store try to sell shit files, which would sound hot on vinyl. and to clarify furhter. i love vinyl but ive found my fair share of dloadedd files that that sound kick ass.
also .some of u guys need to chill out. i sent this original post to help, and some people got a bit heavy.hmmm.

Moody wrote:I never understood lossless compression either. That is kind of like me being a pessimistic optimist. Of course, I am usually far from being understood.

The idea of lossless compression is easy to grasp. For example you can compress the string

"aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb"

to "40a40b" and expand it again without any loss. This is called runlength coding. There are other lossless algorithms which are not so easy to understand like e.g. Huffman coding or LZW.

MrYellow wrote: Double-blind surveys/studies show that humans can't perceive the
difference of a 320k MP3. That's just the bottom line of it. Not gunna
bother finding the URLs, google.

That's not true for humans in general but only for a subset of humans: those with"normal" hearing. Grow older and you will probably perceive a difference one day.

DeadlyKungFu wrote:

Funkstar De Luxe wrote:You can't hear a difference between 320kbps MP3 (no matter what encoder was used) and .wav is lossless. You mean the original recordings were poor? You should be buying music anyway.

CDs are completely transparent, however. You can't hear the max frequency produced by CD. You can't hear the full dynamic range. CDs are better than your hearding. They have no 'sound', no artefacts. Vinyls do.

There is no such thing as lossless compression ESPECIALLY WITH A PERCEPTUAL ENCODER
The dynamic range of the undamaged human ear is 130dB, 16 bit CDs have a dynamic range of 96dB.

CDs DO have artefacts due to aliasing, the lack of ideal filters in the real world and a host of other factors, there are thousands of web pages explaining this.

Sorry, inaccurate technical audio advice drives me nuts. I don't want to start a flame war but feel free to reply, I'll read it.

I'm having a bad day too . Time for a drink, a doobie and Live!

You made so many mistakes and presumptions I don't know where to begin.

No one listens to music in an anechoic chamber. Also, music today is so heavily compressed that an 8bit system could almost handle it flawlessly. 96DBFS is far more than required. No one needs to be taken from silence to the threshold of pain by volume.

There is such a thing as lossless compression. There are many specific music lossless compressors and there is also good ol' Winzip. All of these compress the sound files but give you back exactly, bit for bit, what you put in.

A good LAME encoded MP3 will surpass transparency in 99% of cases at 192Kbps. Thousands of listening tests have been done on this subject, by people more informed than you or I. If you think you can tell a difference there is one of two factors working. 1) You don't know how to encoded a MP3 2) Placebo.

CD's do not have any audible artefacts. None. I'm not sure how you came across this info, but you are massively mistaken. When CD technology was first conceived there were problems. It took people a long time to understand it and develop the tools needed to use it properly. However, it was, in the most part, perfected about 15 years ago.

I can qualify any of my answers with conclusive studies, or go into more depth if need be. I've studied audio for about 5 years now and professionally in the 'industry'.

For really good info on audio check out hydrogenaudio.org It's a really nice resource with many knowledgeable people, and best of all, it's all based on ABX (blind testing).

dirtystudios wrote:The first time I ever noticed the difference between 24/96 and 44.1/16 was when I was ripping vinyl and downsampling.

There's a lot more to the sound of vinyl than dynamic range and high end.

k

Yes, there is distortion.

What your other statement says is "I can hear greater than 130DBFS and higher than 22.05Khz". That's placebo or poor respampling to blame.

You guys are all WRONG....when using the 33.40XG steinway encode gateway, WITH 30 second vermillion interspersing, the human ear experiences a -300db bass trap codec froth. Now, that being said, you should always look for trans-lock frequencies and top-down 67Mhz high range artefacts. Ok?? Cool. Hope that helped. I'm not gonna make any music with Live, I'll probably just hang around this forum all night, rattling off useless data with my pants down. It's so much more exciting than being creative or just producing a catchy track.
man, I love this place.
Best wishes,
Cocky McDoodoo aka Ronald Feces aka Jan Michael Vincent.

Peter Doubt wrote:You guys are all WRONG....when using the 33.40XG steinway encode gateway, WITH 30 second vermillion interspersing, the human ear experiences a -300db bass trap codec froth. Now, that being said, you should always look for trans-lock frequencies and top-down 67Mhz high range artefacts. Ok?? Cool. Hope that helped. I'm not gonna make any music with Live, I'll probably just hang around this forum all night, rattling off useless data with my pants down. It's so much more exciting than being creative or just producing a catchy track.
man, I love this place.
Best wishes,
Cocky McDoodoo aka Ronald Feces aka Jan Michael Vincent.

Actually, that's "31 second vermillion interspersing".

JohnnyDeep:

Just wondering what you are monitoring through. After using a number of plugins and finding the Mac default to be the best, I'm curios to know your listening situation. Is your room treated at all?

I've had the same experience with the lowest common denominator being the best thing for the job.

When i export a track, the track have a less volume comparing with other tracks...
What can i do?
Is about mastering?

Yes. http://tarekith.com/assets/mastering.html

johnnydeep wrote:hi. just a quik tip. ive downloaded a lot of music both 320kbps and wav over the net to use inn live and i ve been shocked at how poor the quality is at times, which is heart breaking when the tune is good. ive messed around with a demo of psp vintage warmer, tried the free w1 limiter, saturator etc, but i was suprised to find the greatest tool in my own back yard.
its the AU grapphic EQ that comes with the mac. or at least my mac g4 anyway. it has a 30 band eq and gives u heaps of control over pulling down certain freqeuncies and boosting others. im fairly fussy with sound yet ive managed to turn average mp3s into a sound that imitiates a vinyl feel(ok not exactly vinyl), but tidy none the less.
i reccomend taking an average file, and work your way thru he eq . i do it from right to left.

alas, u can polish a turd!!!

the fact that you are using a free plugin on your mac to 'fix' audio tracks that (most likely) were professionally produced and mastered with much more robust plugins and/or hardware is troubling to me. wav files are lossless, which means the files you are getting are the 'best' quality masters that exist. if you are, in fact, improving the sound quality of these professionally produced/mastered tracks with the AU plugin, you should be mastering.

i suspect that is not the case, though.

I would best testing these supposedly poor mixes on as many systems as possible. If they sound good elsewhere then it is your monitoring environment that is the problem. And if that is the case, what your doing to them is not necessarily a good thing. On a side note, if you're an iTunes user, iTunes Plus offers DRM-free mp3s at higher bitrates (i thought it was 320kbps but i think its actually 256kbps). If you indeed the highest possible quality, then I certainly wouldnt be using mp3s in the first place. A crazy idea, but you could buy the CD

Jim

TheAnimal wrote:

MrYellow wrote: Double-blind surveys/studies show that humans can't perceive the
difference of a 320k MP3. That's just the bottom line of it. Not gunna
bother finding the URLs, google.

That's not true for humans in general but only for a subset of humans: those with"normal" hearing. Grow older and you will probably perceive a difference one day.

??? The older you are the less likely you are to hear a difference. Trust me, I have first hand experience.