[mdlug] DRM Wal-Mart

[Dan Pritts]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 10:45:00PM -0400, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> Try listening to an original recording on a good stereo system
> Then listen to the best MP3 of the same material on the same
> system.  

Have you actually done this, Aaron?

I've done it and I was really shocked...because I couldn't tell
the difference.  

I used my home stereo, with b+w speakers, adcom poweramp & preamp,
and a cheap kenwood CD player.

I used david bowie's Young Americans as the source material.
I think I used something else, too, but I can't remember what.

I took freshly ripped WAVs, encoded them at various bitrates,
decoded them back to WAV, and burned them all back to audio CD along
with the original uncompressed wav.

I did a blind test, putting them on CD in random order and only looking
at which was which after i did my listening.

the rips were done with cdparanoia, from a reasonably clean, unscratched
disc.

I encoded with LAME, probably 3.91 or thereabouts.

Once I got the MP3 bitrate down to 96K it became obvious, because at
that point lame gave up on 44100Hz and downsampled it to 22050.  
*that* sounded like crap.

but I could not tell the difference between 128K CBR, ~192K alt-preset
standard (now known as V2), and the original uncompressed file.

I thought I had sensitive ears.  I can sure hear differences between
different sets of speakers, different sets of headphones.  But I really
couldn't tell the difference.

I can think of 3 possibilities why:

1) I am just a half-deaf luser.

2) I chose poor source material.  

   However, I'm 99% sure that i used the rykodisc remastered version
   of the CD; bowie was out of print on CD for several years and I
   was waiting the whole time.  So it wasn't a horrible A-D transfer
   or anything like that.

   I've recently read that what you really want is something with a 
   really fast tempo, staccato rhythms.  that is where an encoder will
   break down.

3) the generally accepted wisdom that MP3 sounds like crap is overblown.

I'm leaning toward #3 but I'm willing to believe #2.  #1 is hard for me
to stomach, because I really can hear the difference between various
high-end stereo equipment all playing the same source. 

thoughts?