From: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org (loud-fans-digest) To: loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Subject: loud-fans-digest V6 #107 Reply-To: loud-fans@smoe.org Sender: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-loud-fans-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk loud-fans-digest Sunday, June 4 2006 Volume 06 : Number 107 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [loud-fans] mp3 quality ["don't mine me" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2006 10:48:24 -0400 From: "don't mine me" Subject: [loud-fans] mp3 quality monsieur dooble eff: > Aren't they also 192K for the most part these days? Much better than 128K. Unless a label's licensing forbids it, they're VBR (variable bit rate) which means that the parts of the signal with the most transients are often at substantially higher bit rate than 192K. Bad Brains songs -- which are so fast the're nothing *but* transients -- seem to average at about 224K. The Jon Auer download is VBR -- it spiked to at least 224K at several points in the very song I was complaining about. Ironically, when I first listened to 128K mp3s, I often couldn't hear any > problem. Evidently my ears became acclimated - because now, those low-res > mp3s sound like crap to me, usually. And in a strange reversal, since I spend nearly 4 hours a day listening to wmbr.org's 64K broadcast stream, 128K doesn't sound nearly as bad to me as it used to. I think the current generation of compressors does a better job of rendering 128K files, too. ------------------------------ End of loud-fans-digest V6 #107 *******************************