----- 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.
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is
subject to the Yahoo! Terms of
Service.