There is no difference between the tracks!!!

Ok. i see there is a poll… I haven’t listened to the tracks, and can’t right now… But I’ve done the coke test in the past. When there are cymbals and electric guitar involved, there is a definite “swishing” sound in the upper frequencies in 128 kbps bitrates. Also, I think it has a lot to do with the algorithm of the particular codec you are encoding with.

i could tell right away when comparing the two… though high quality headphones are always a plus. where are the results of the test?

personally, i rip with the LAME encoder (http://lame.sourceforge.net) at a high quality variable bitrate. -V2 or -V0 depending on the music (0 being the highest, with an average bitrate that hovers below 256kbps).

I normally can tell, but not with this particular clip.
What song is this from?

>> MOD: it’s From Cymande’s “Brother on the slide”. Watch for a feature on Cymande soon!

got it right. you can hear it in the punch and air when you turn it up a lil bit. this is a poor example though. it’s more noticeable in newer stuff that requires more lows and highs and is compressed a little further.

for suggestions: I agree with the other guy who said encode to V0 since it saves a lot of space compared to 320 but really is hard to tell the diff.

I think this test is unfair, being an audio file and a geek, I can tell you that technically and scientifically 320 IS better than 128. Try playing these on a Bang and Olufson, you’ll know why folks like me are agast that iTunes sells tracks below 256k.

What your testing, which is an interesting test, is perception versus reality. I of course know that perception can INDEED be reality.

Good stuff!
Cezanne

Got it. Out of all the tests I have tried, this has definitely been the most subtle. This is the kind of recording I wouldn’t mind having in 128kbps…

Backing up your music collectiong (archiving) in mp3 is a bad idea, because you lose flexibility. The best thing would be do rip it to a some lossless format such as FLAC. It takes up a lot of space but it is CD quality and it allows you to do whatever you want with it.

Want to transcode it to 128kbps mp3 to your portable player? No problem.
Want to listen to it on your high-end speakers without loss of information? No problem.

Ripping to 320kbps mp3 robs you of that. If you want to transcode an already lossy mp3 to a lower bitrate you are going to end up with a worse sounding file than if you ripped CD -> 128kbps directly.

This is an age old debate while the perception of audible distortion at lower bitrates is really dependent on the hearing of any given person, lower bit rates do in fact butcher singal quality especially with lower quality encoders. Having ripped my collection a number of times first at mp3 CBR, then mp3 VBR, then m4a and now FLAC, I can testify that even if your hearing isn’t superb, you can experience a form of hearing ‘fatigue’ over time if you listen to low bitrate mp3s. You don’t notice it first but after some months it tends to get a bit annoying. I find that its best to over-due it a little even if you can’t immediately hear the difference. For tips, check out http://www.hydrogenaudio.org

Weird results… I could tell right away which was better. Maybe people have crappy speakers?

I recommend encoding to 192 bitrate with the ogg vorbis format. Ogg doesn’t work with many portable mp3 players, though.

It was hard to say… maybe it isn´t so noticeable in a short cut, but in the whole song you get the feeling of the 128kbps…

Most of the modern, variable bit rate encoders (MP3, AAC or OGG) have improved dramatically in the last few years. Under most circumstances a 128k vbr encoded file is “good enough.” Hard drive space is so cheap now, the best thing to do is rip you CDs to something lossless (like FLAC or ALAC) and then just transcode to whatever you need. The best of both worlds. I’ve got over 13,000 songs encoded with FLAC that take up around 270GB of space. With 500GB hard drives only costing about $50, why compromise?

I agree with bgs33610 > i´m going with .flac files. And didn´t transcode them.

Good test! I just listened for the lack of punch coming from the drums and paper thin sounding cymbals. I use 320kps VBR on my nano which is plugged into my car radio. Listening fatigue happens to anyone listening to anything and constantly concentrating for many hours. It’s a known fact when working in a studio that to walk outside and take a break from the speakers now and again, wiil keep your ears fresh.

Lossless is overrated. Etc. I chose 1; it sounded better than 2, which had some weird choppiness with the high hats, but other than that they sound almost exactly the same — and I had to use my ATH-M50’s and strain my head to hear it. Also had to turn off the Crystallizer on my Auzentech Prelude to be safe.

Long story short it DOESN’T MATTER even with studio-grade equipment the difference is barely noticeable unless you really look for it — and if you’re just listening to your MP3s to listen for impurities then you aren’t actually enjoying them now aren’t you?

Surely when you bought an iPod or whatever you were actually thinking of enjoying your music and not listening for holes in it, right?

This is also the reason why I say Lossless is Overrated.

My ears are shot, but I could tell. The vocals sounds similar in the two clips, but listen carefully to the background. The hand drums in the 320 kbs clip are much more nuanced…they sound flat in the 128 kbs clip. The drum fill at the end (at 15 seconds or so) also sounds flat and a bit tinny in the 128 kbs clip.

in Logitech z5500 Clip 1 has better diference between bass and trebble, and more clear sound.

Personally, i felt that the extension of both treble and bass is better for clip one than two. But that is like when you focus on the music. If, like multi-tasking, the difference might not be that obvious. And besides, i doubt you rip the cd using window media player. Haha. Because, it would be more obvious in the differences.

Well, if it is a calm song there is not much to encode due to low entropy. If you listen to a rock song at 128 kbps you should here a clear difference due to the high entropy ( much sound at the same time to encode ). Besides mp3 is obsolete, you should use ogg vorbis or AAC (.mp4). All mp3 files sounds bad regardless the bitrate thus its hard to tell the difference of the two songs above, plus its a very low entropy song. If you compare ogg vorbis (128kpbs) and mp3 (128kpbs), same song, you should here a difference.

This track was quite hard to hear a difference I think. It’s very noticable on certain tracks, but not on this.
For this test I managed to guess right because one of them took longer to load than the other

I could tell the difference on my laptop speakers.

i was wondering, i have a file 192kbps and i re-recorded it using virtual dj, but recording in 320kbps, does this make the quality better or does it just make the file bigger in size as its 320 bit rate

I could tell that the first one was 320 kbps because there was an artifact at 0:06 on the second one and the cymbold on the 320kpbs sample had more punch and stood out more, on the 128kpbs sample the cymbols sound more mixed in.

I did not select the correct choice and I am not surprised. Your test is not properly randomized and I have virtually no experience with MP3. If I wanted to bias a test I would set the 320bps rate as the 1st selection as people will sub-consciously expect the lower rate to be 1st. I suspected this is what was dome before I made the selection. Secondly we naturally hear more detail on the second listen.

If you wanted to really do a correct comparison there would be 3 sample, 2 mp3 at different rates and one the actual .wav selection. These would be randomized on each iteration of the test and only the test program in the back ground would know which was which.

You need good headphones/speakers to be able to take advantage of a higher quality song. The difference is really noticeable if you have quality headphones.

The first sample takes more to buffer, so it is obviously the 320 kbps, so the test is not really blind. For the sound, it sounds the same to me.

I got it right, the first one sounded better. Great tune selection, btw, with the Cyamande.

What brought me to the site, however, was a search for how to record mp3’s in 320 kbps format. After reading this board it’s obvious to me now that 320 kb is not the cats meow I thought it was supposed to be. But, to satify my curiosity at least, can someone tell me how to save wave files in 320 format? I have been using Audacity to convert, and it automatically converts to 128.

One second thing, does I-tunes autmatically compress wave files that are imported into the library, or just leave them as large waves.

Thank youuu!

Meh, after listening a few times you *might* be able to tell the diff … but who listens to the same song over and over trying to see if the cymbals really sound as good as they should?

128Kbps more than good enough… nuff said.

Results are obvious on my 7.1 channel surround speakers, the sounds are mostly coming out of about 5 of the channels with very low quality cracking coming out of the rest

This is kind of a set-up. The original presumably didn’t have much high end, judging from these files.

I use the built in ABX testing utility in the geeky media player Foobar to do true double blind testing (it has an integrated ABX comparator utility that takes care of all the accounting and statistical calculations for you) and, for sure, it can be difficult to tell the difference between, say, 192 kbps signals and 320 kbps signals — but it totally depends on the content.

If the source material here had had more high frequency content to start with (it sounded very dull and flat in both files; listen to the cymbals), it would presumably have been considerably easier for those who know what to listen for to identify which was which.

Like most poorly thought out media pseudo-science, this demonstrates little and proves nothing.

There is, however, plenty of good perceptual testing data regarding the general population and differing perceptual encoding data compression schema, maybe it would be better if the author were to point his readers in the direction of something, you know, real.

If you can’t distinguish between 128 and 320, then you don’t need anything above 128. You don’t need to have a good trained ear to notice the difference, probably it is the system that you are playing the songs with. Get some good headphones (audiotechnica, grado, denon, sennheiser, etc) or good speakers, remember that speakers are always the most important part in an audio system.

And for Korn, yor rear speakers are not playing with bad quality, they are reproducing the content of the audio that is not common between channels. If you select hall, or simlar preset in your home theater, it should sound similar. Don’t worry, this is normal. If you want to have the same output in all speakers, select MONO or ALL CHANNEL STEREO in your receiver/home theater.

I could tell right away and that is why I cannot stand listening to anything lower than 192kbps. The 320Kbps had nice depth which the 128kbps one totally lacked.

320 kbs is by far better. I could never go back to anything lower. I have Shure earbuds (ran me 100 dollars) that allow me to hear every little detail in dense music. Your audio comparison for this one song may fool people into believing it has little difference, but if we start comparing post-rock or wall-of-sound songs (intricate, like the minimalist album titled “Music for 18 Musicians”) then we would easily tell the difference.

If I had all of my extreme metal/intricate bands in 128 kbs then guitars would have a horrible ear-piercing screech, bass would be inaudible, and half of the high notes would be smothered in big static mess of sound. Bands like Isis and Opeth are 50% less enjoyable if I can’t hear the details in their dense, otherworldly (atmospheric) wall of sound.

In the end it depends on the quality of your mp3 player, the quality of earbuds, and of course the style of music.