Goofball_star_dot_etal wrote:
On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:34:19 -0400, Marty wrote:

Larry wrote:
Marty wrote in
:

Larry, at what bit rate do you encode your MP3s?


Whatever bit rate they're in when I download them from
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.(many genres here) off usenet. Tonight I'm
stripping alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.jazz for a while.

Most are 128Kbps, but sometimes they go crazy with variable bit rates far
above that. As the bit rate for the CDs was 44.1K to begin with, it's all
over kill above 64Kbps, anyways. Human ears aren't near that good....no
matter what the hypers say. Sceptics only need see an audiologist to get
their own personal bandwidth tests to confirm it....

FLAC, while really cool, is crazy.


Gawd almighty Larry, your ears must really suck, you can use whatever
piece of crap speakers you like. CDs are 44.1Ksamples/sec, usually at
16 bits per sample, corresponds to 1.044Mb/s. Your 128Kbs sample, even
at 8 bits per sample corresponds to 8ksamples for each channel, Nyquist
theorem tells us that the highest frequency that will be recorded with
this is a mere 4Khz.

No cigar :-( Nyquist theorem not applicable in this way to non-linear
processes such as compressed audio signals, particularly lossy
perceptual audio coding.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coding

Nyquist still applies, lossy perceptual encoding just lets you throw
out a lot of audio information and claim that it's imperceptible. This
may be true for some listeners, perhaps many listeners. Like people that
think that a Pioneer 707 is a professional quality deck. I've got an
Ampex 440C, I take my sound seriously, I wear hearing protection, when I
was younger I wore hearing protection to concerts, now I just don't go.

I don't think even Boobsie would listen to an MP3 at 128K.

Cheers
Marty