Next-gen music format unwrapped

Umm... I'd hardly call 16-bit 44.1KHz audio (i.e. CD quality) High Definition audio.

I think I'll stick to OGG Vorbis & Flac thanks very much.

Rob

"A four-minute song encoded at 876 kbit/s will equate to 26 Mbytes, according to Thomson."

So Captain Obvious now works for Thomson, eh? A 4 minute song encoded at 876 kbps will be 26 Mbytes, regardless of codec used.

Interesting (BTW it should read kHz). It seems there is still an industry that actually wants to improve the quality of digital music. I am still waiting for the day when we can enjoy a concert in 5.1 surround with true high definition quality, stored on an 8cm DVD (for those lovers of classical music who did not go 100% virtual, yet).

Now, are there any patents involved? DRM infestation? How about a comparison with FLAC?

Any attacks from the MAFIAA yet?

Apparently, which explains the lack of FLAC support...

SWEET...

At the end of the day, with storage as cheap as it is now, we should all just be thinking of lossless formats now, like flac.

It's pretty irrelevant though as long as long as the loudness war continues. Music is currently being ruined by the music industry through hyper-compression, limiting and clipping. After you've got the CD with the resulting distorted, flat mess that they've produced, a few lossy MP3 artefacts are the least of people's worries right now.

None of that patented lock in crap again thanks. FLAC and OGG are just fine

Why doesn't FLAC get used more for a lossless format instead of some proprietary format like MP3? It's out there, it works, and it's free to use. Maybe I am slow, but I don't get it.

Lossless compression produces files that are too large for casual P2P downloading of ripped CD's.

The casual user is not able to hear the difference in sound between a FLAC file and a high-quality VBR mp3 file.

Try to search for a non-mainstream CD on eMule (it won't be available on Bit Torrent): you'll find 3 sources for a 400 MB FLAC-encoded archive, or 65 sources for a 90 MB VBR mp3-encoded one.

Why not a codec for lossy 24-bit 96 kHz audio? Would probably sound better than lossless CD-quality.

It's a simple fact that when doing properly controlled double-blind tests virtually nobody can tell the difference between an MP3 encoded at 256kbps and a CD at 44.1Khz 16 bit. Now if somebody did some proper human perception studies on how to store music rather than just witter on about loss-less as if that's some sort of magic wand, we might get somewhere. For instance, the use of more channel, increased sampling, increasing the bit depth and so on. (Incidentally, for analogue fans, it is pretty well always possible to distinguish vinyl recordings precisely because of the flaws in the medium - some people just plain like the sound of the inherent character of the medium).

As it is, much of the work that goes on in studios destroys much of the original sonic effect. Generally speaking, on non-classical recordings, producers will compress dynamic range just to give more immediate impact. It's easy to see - just rip a track off of most modern productions, put it in audacity or something similar, and analyse the output. Most likely you will see that the track has been squeezed into a fairly narrow DR band. Whilst producers continue to do that, there isn't much point in some of these fancier recording schemes.

As usual with much talk of audio quality, objectivity goes out of the window and we are into matters of faith. Flanders and Swann had it right many, many years ago in their song "High Fidelity" lampooning the obsessions of many audiophiles.

First off I needed no special player as xmplay and foobar played it just fine. Second off, I could not figure out how to use vbr best (-br 0 1 ??), so ended up testing a 40.6 MB wav to 256 cbr mp3hd. Resulting mp3 file was (@24.5 MB), larger than the flac file it originally came from (22.3 MB). Using standard lame 3.98.2 vbr best new in foobar gave me a 7.06 MB sized file!!. Needless to say I will not bother with it's vbr capabilities. Oh and just in case u are wondering, it is not the ears that matter but the eqpt u push it through which makes the difference-I could give a wit for another's 'perception'.

with a pair of grado rs-2s and a head amp, i can, and regularly do, distinguish between mp3 256 vbr and a lossless cd rip. sometimes the diference isnt immediate, but i tend to spend a lot of time with music.

i have therefore, virtually, destroyed your simple fact.

audiophiles complained about radio, the mp3-format, and now you.

192Kbps VBR MP3 properly encoded is proven indistinguishable from the original 100% of the time in blind listening tests.

Why waste storage on making it bigger for no reason, unless you want those dazzling hi notes to impress your pet bats...

I can not tell the difference with 128K unless I listen very closely when Pop music is involved. I think this is because, as someone else mentioned, the music is all compressed anyway to remove anything extra.

I can tell the difference with certain instraments when I listen to classical music. Kettle drums for instance sound flat and muted. So those I would encode higher, but I definitely can not see using a 872 mb/s format, when I can barely tell the difference, if at all using 192 with VBR

This article makes a bit more sence if you're reading complete specifications.

- lossless
- backward compatible to mp3
- .mp3 extension
.. now that makes no sence. how will my mp3 player recognize this HD lossless audio?

Here's the answer:
- Embedded mp3 track ..

And there's more info about bitrates. It's ~870kbps for pop/rock and ~600kbps for classical music

Anyway, I just wanted to say that it makes sence because of this backward compatibility. You can rip & encode your audio in MP3HD, and when listening with proper equipment it will be lossless, and when used with normal players it will just play embeded mp3 that's same as any other mp3.. you just get it in one file.

With FLAC you have to have one file for lossless, and separate MP3 file for your MP3 player.

That's probably reason why file size is larger than FLAC as well..

mp3 is a joke. my friends didn't believe me that i could hear the difference between mp3 and wave. put me to a blind test. on relatively cheap speakers. took me 4 seconds on average to tell wav <- mp3256VBR apart. i was right 90% of times.

Yep, i can tell about 90% of the time the quality difference between lossless, and a 320 mp3. People who properly listen to music on decent audio equipment and with it set up properly, should avoid using MP3. Period. hard drive space is now up to 2TB, i have a 1.5TB with over 2500 albums in Lossless format, and still have space to spare. Lossless is the future. Paid music sites realize this, and FLAC is now available for downloads. Blu Ray use lossless and once you heard a movie in lossless on a great system, you'll never want to go back. so for the average and serious listeners, do yourself a favour, get a decent pair of headphones whack on your fav album in lossless and immerse yourself. might not be immediate, but you'll notice it after a few minutes, and you are enjoying the music again.

When encoding Mp3's, I found playing back the encoded audio through a sound card that had a "karaoke" mode (which removed vocals) made it easier to tell if it was a good encoding.

A bad encoding would sound garbled and metalic.

It's also wise to be patient and use the Very High Quality encoding settings (which take more time to encode, but product better results).

If you can't hear the difference between mp3 and CD-Audio in the blind test then you've got a serious hearing problems...sorry

If you cant make out the difference then you dont need to waste money on hi-fi hardware!

audio hardware is the least wasteful way to spend money but girls. this stuff doesn't drop in price every few months. there's mics from the 60s that are worth a fortune now, 1/4" magnetic tape, vinyl are amazing. my genelec speakers cost the same now as in '94 when they were released, kick the shit out of anything logitech will release until 2124. Music & musical equipment are developed artforms, love, feel. most things digital are the opposite, a huge step back.

It'll probably be as successful as MP3Pro.

(Why isn't OGG supported on all players, considering it's free?)

The good of this is the backward compatibility. mp3 is a hit because it is convenient and universal. Sound quality don't matter much to the majority of the public. I have an excellent hifi and I can readily hear the dullness of mp3 sound on it. Regardless of bitrate. I keep my records in lossless as, as was commented, space is now cheap and abundant. Internet transfer rates are high these days and down and up loading is also not a problem. In short, lossy compression is outdated. In time it'll just be gone and everyone will have better sound. It is true that music producers, of pop and rock at least, compress mixes hard these days -but that is a response to twenty quid speakers on fifty cent integrated sound cards and ipods. They just don't sound very well and more compression makes the flaws more bareable. Hopefully this new format will lead to better sounding files to begin with, perhaps giving the public an incentive to spend a bit more on speakers. When I was a kid having a thousand quid stereo was a matter of course, now it is a matter of course to have a thousand quid gaming rig with cheap Creative speakers. The backlash will come, eventually, but the real problem here isn't with codecs or compression rates. The problem is dynamic loudspeakers. Good ones can't be made neither cheap nor small, it's physics. And that won't be fixed untill technologies that dispense with mechanical movement mature. Like, say, ionizing speakers. No moving parts, no distortion, perfect sound forever. Combined with clever DSP these can be situated anywhere. Ionizing speakers don't work now, very well. They rust in contact with air(!) and require massive amounts of watts to produce sound. However, good sound won't be everpresent untill mechanical speakers are history. And sure, my loudspeakers sound very nice, they require a lot of space -sound rather poor crammed into a corner, and they require a big power amp to sound at their best. They weigh 50kgs each and are hardly convenient, they are also expensive. They will never be in everyones home.

And by the way, these blind tests that get bandied about -I see no links, no testing methodology, what bitrates were used, what kind of people listened...

Gee. May they be urban legends perhaps... And I wonder, why does someone feel the need to support an inferior fileformat as a superior one becomes available. Is it not time to rejoice?

Here is a link to a study that compared the sound quality of various different codecs at bitrates up to 192 "Report on the MPEG-2 AAC Stereo Verification Tests":

http://david.weekly.org/audio/iso-aac.pdf.

In this paper, the listeners would have been disqualified if they couldn't hear the difference between compressed and uncompressed music (section 10.2). None of the 30 listeners had any problem picking out the uncompressed music. I don't know of any studies about 256 or higher bitrate lossy compression.

At any rate, this is very easy to test for yourself. Rip a CD in various formats and listen carefully. If you're like me, you won't waste any more time with lossy formats.

Nobody seemed to notice that mp3HD will have multiple channels for surround sound.

Traditional mp3 was only 2 channels.

Of course you need a much higher overall bitrate for 4 more channels.

I'm wondering what, if any, new DRM scheme will be built into it.

Some audiophiles in this thread have complained about others' inferiority in hearing music properly. But maybe they should step off of their high horse and maybe educate others instead of getting angry.

I have just recently started getting interested in high quality music and now most of my classical/more tasteful music are now uncompressed wav files.

I have tried to do blind tests and distinguish between my wav files and 128kbps AAC files. And i have been right over 50% of the time, but not close to the 90% others claim. Now i may be deaf or something (probly not), or maybe im just not looking for the right things.

Question to audiophiles --- What specific differences should we look for? How do you distinguish accurately?
And i did my tests on a 30gb ipod video. Does it provide the necessary power to reproduce the music well?