On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 22:36:14 +0000 Colm MacCarthaigh <colm at stdlib.net> wrote:
| On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 08:07:31PM +0000, fuzzbucket wrote:
| > Colm Buckley wrote:
| > >>I'm sure AAC is fab (it doesn't rate well in reviews I've read,
| > >>however I have no first hand experience)
| > >FUDditty FUD FUD.
| > Top rebuttal - I'm convinced. Provide a blind listening test where AAC
| > outperforms both Vorbis and Musepack and I may consider using it.
| A month ago, Richard Bannister created such a blind test, and posted it
| on the IIU mailing list [1]. It was a well-encoded 10-second clip,
| *tough*. I was the only person stupid enough to take it [2], and Vorbis
| won [3]. It was definitely the best encoding. AAC came last. But that's
| to my ears.
And that's just it. For certain parameters, quality is in the ear or
beholder.
If I wanted to be really pedantic, I could point out that AAC is _not_
lossless. No digital encoding scheme is. There are those who would claim
you get a better sound by dragging a chip of industrial diamond through a
plastic groove, and that any noise you may hear as a result actually makes
the sound "warmer".
Now to be honest I find it implausible that the human ear would be able to
detect the quantitisation noise, and I'd suggest that for high enough
bitrates, most lossy compression schemes will be hard to tell from the
lossless ones. I'd also suggest that decompression is a processor
intensive task and the less work a device has to do to play back
something, the less opportunity for glitches in the sound.
For my part, for portable audio, the weak part of the chain is not the
compression scheme, rather it's going to be the analogue side of the
operation, pre-amp, amp, headphones and general environment.
Moving from the mobile to the static for a moment, has anyone tried
hooking up the SP/DIF outputs on a Soundblaster Live to a CO-AX input on
an AV amp?
Did it work? What did you use? What is the maximum cable length?
I've tried making it work, but I tend to wind up with a somewhat fluttery
playback.
Paul
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