April fool or real?

[RS]

>From: Owen Smith
>Sent: Saturday, April 8, 2017 01:26

>Read the fine print. In a later post BigShot says his 256kbps AAC for 
>transparency was mono and you'd have to double the bit rate for encoding a 
>stereo >track. I'm not sure whether you can go above 320kbps with AAC, 
>certainly a fair number of codecs and transports impose that limit for 
>various reasons (I >think it goes back to Dolby Digital on 35mm film using 
>just one side gaps between the sprocket holes gets 320kbps because that's 
>what the optical >squares can encode).

>Anyway, even if you could use 512kbps AAC I can't see the point. You might 
>as well add another couple of hundred kbps and use FLAC.

That is not what he said.  In post #9 he said it was a mono recording which 
he recorded in stereo because that made the artefacts more apparent.  He 
said if he had recorded it in mono the bit rates would have been halved.  It 
seems to me his concept of the point of transparency as explained in #7 and 
#11 does add something useful.  Professor Eric Laithwaite used to say that 
an engineer was someone who could do for sixpence what any fool could do for 
half a crown.  In bigshot's tests he has concluded the point of transparency 
is 256kbit/s for AAC and 320kbit/s for LAME MP3.  Obviously larger scale 
tests are needed to confirm or deny his results.  Another important point is 
that some encoders are poor, and that poor encoders have given MP3 a bad 
name.

IgorC's results at 128kbit/s in #6 and #13 are also interesting.

You are right that encoding in FLAC at maybe 450kbit/s does not incur too 
large a penalty compared with 256kbit/s iTunes or Nero AAC or 320kbit/s LAME 
MP3.  Another advantage of both FLAC and MP3 is that players are able to 
play them, whereas a lot of players seem to have difficulty with AAC.

After posting my comment I thought I ought to have drawn attention to the 
other posts, but I assumed everyone would read the rest of the thread, as 
you have.