On 14/02/07, Michael A Peters <mpeters@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 14:16 +0100, Gérard Milmeister wrote: > On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 14:26 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: > > > > The quality won't be questionable- it will be terrible. > I did not try it, but there is no reason that the quality will be > terrible. There will be some reduction in quality, but it is certainly > not the case, that each conversion will reduce the quality by a constant > factor. You lose some quality with each transcode - but I agree, it is not terrible. I have some songs that went 128 aac (Apple DRM) to 192 lame vbr mp3. On a quality sound system, I can hear a slight loss. On my iPod, I can't tell. I went Apple .m4p to Audio CD (using iTunes) and then ripped to 192VBR with cdparanoia encoding with lame.
We're no audiophiles in my house, but both myself and my wife could tell which file was the uncompressed wav and which was the cd->mp3->ogg. An experiment with cd->ogg->mp3 which was not double blind (as the first test was) yeilded similar results: we could both tell. We were using Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral album as the test case. The ogg was quality 6 or 7, and the mp3 was 128 bps. Note that the file was still playable, but the noticeable loss in quality made listening to it frustrating, not entertaining. Dotan Cohen http://technology-sleuth.com/long_answer/how_can_i_be_safe_online.html http://what-is-what.com/what_is/ram.html