April fool or real?

Owen Smith owen.smith at cantab.net
Sat Apr 8 08:28:55 PDT 2017


You can't encode at 450kbps FLAC or indeed pick any bit rate with FLAC. It's lossless, it comes out at whatever it needs to in order to losslessly compress the source. With traditionally recorded classical CDs I find that's around 750kbps. A modern loudness wars pop CD comes out between 900 and 1000kbps for me.

But this is rather off topic now.

-- 
Owen Smith <owen.smith at cantab.net>
Cambridge, UK

On 8 Apr 2017, at 10:49, RS <richard22j at zoho.com> wrote:

>> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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