----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, April 14, 2001 5:09
PM
Subject: [ukha_d] First MP3 results in
- Tim eats his words!
First thanks to
Phil Harris for connecting up the analogue cables on the back of my DV88
yesterday. I had hoped to use my Meridian 561 to do the decoding for both
CD
and MP3, but while the Meridian will decode 5 channel mpeg (the original
standard for PAL DVDs), I've since found out that .mp3 is a different
thing!
I've been doing
some reading, and have used a separate ripper, and encoder - both
free.
For ripping I
used Exact Audio Copy, which recognises errors in the bitsream, and
re-reads
the CD until it gets a perfect copy. All of my CDs (with a few exceptions
which have been "borrowed" by young hands) are in pristine condition, so It
may be overkill. It takes longer, but at least I'm guaranteed that the .wav
files on the hard disc are a perfect representation of what was on the CD.
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
For encoding I
have used the latest LAME encoder (3.88), together with a windows front end
(Razorlame).
For some reason
the files were unreadable when using high bit rates unless I selected ISO
compatibility.
The first thing
I discovered is that the type of source material makes a vast difference (I
know you all already know this, but for me it is a voyage of discovery!) I
encoded "Miss Otis regrets" from the "Ella Fitzgerald sings the Cole Porter
songbooks" boxed set, which is vocals plus light piano accompaniment, and
that sounded quite respectable down to 128K. I then did a quick an dirty
test on some material with wider dynamic range that I've been listening to
quite a lot recently - the 4th track on Whoa Nelly by Nelly Furtando, and
with this one compression was fairly obvious at the same bit
rate.
Overnight I set
up the whole Nelly CD to be encoded at 320Kb/s, and have just finished an
A/B comparison with the original CD switching back and forth between the
two. There is a very slight muddiness to very low bass, but you really
have to try hard to hear it, and to be fair I think that has as much to do
with the fact that the DACS in the Meridian are superior to those in the
Arcam as anything else.
I realise that
320Kb/s is too high a bit rate for ripping an entire CD collection -
so
now that I have found (for myself) that .mp3 can produce very good results
even when played through a very transparent HiFi, I'll experiment with
various encoding settings to find the best trade-off over the next couple
of
weeks and post the results.
Many of you may
be thinking that it is all irrelevant, as your HiFi/listening room is not
capable of revealing the difference. Well your current set-up might not,
but
what if you splash out further down the line? Do you really want to go
through the hassle of re-encoding all of your material?
I'm not going
to
go through the process of ripping my entire CD collection purely because
I'm
happy changing a CD every hour or so, and I live in a single story open
plan
building so there is no need for multi-room audio - I just turn up the
volume, but it has given me food for thought!
See Mark, I
said
I'd be honest!
Tim.
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