Summary:
Can anyone help me set up a test/demonstration that will leave a specific person happy and confident with some level of audio file compression, knowing that it's personalized to the satisfaction of his ears and equipment?
Background:
So the local kid just got a new Iphone but is slightly unhappy that he wasn't able to afford the one with more storage space on it because his old mp3 player is about the same size and is already full.
He's explained he can't pare the collection down because what he wants in a music collection is to have a ton of songs he's never even heard and so is always listening to a wide variety of new things. And the Itunes management format makes it a big pain in the butt to manage this in other ways like removing songs that have been randomly played and adding new unplayed songs from the library on the computer.
So we've suggested making another library for his Iphone, where all the music is encoded with more compression to make the files smaller. "But that will make it sound bad!"
SO...
OK, so this thing can play AAC and MP3, encoded anywhere from 8 to 320 kbps. I gather from the internets that at 320 kbps hardly anyone can guess it's compressed at all, at 256, very few people seem to notice, 190 seems to be the 'acceptable' cutoff for a lot of people, and by the time you get down to 128 it's really obvious.
The biggest factors besides actual compression rates are what you use to encode, what you use to play back, and what the music is actually coming out of at the end. In this case the player will be Apple's current software and the headphones are some nice high end consumer grade earbuds. So, pretty good, but not audiophile studio quality or anything.
I'm still going to have to research what actual AAC and MP3 encoders get the best results at the first step here, since a slapdash encode is going to sound worse than a sophisticated encode even with the same file size. If anyone has some advice there I'd be glad to hear it.
THE ACTUAL QUESTION THOUGH:
I want to set up a classic full on blinded experiment for him to determine where on the compression scale he personally notices a degradation in quality. I'm just not sure how to actually go about it.
Maybe something like ten second chunks of songs encoded at various bitrates, separated by a quarter second of silence, with a little worksheet for him to mark down whether they sound great or ok or bad, which can be checked against the track list later (so that I am not present during the actual listening)?
In short, can anyone help me set up a test/demonstration that will leave this kid happy and confident with some level of compression, knowing that it's personalized to the satisfaction of his ears and equipment? Or in general impart more knowledge of what's generally up in this area?
Can anyone help me set up a test/demonstration that will leave a specific person happy and confident with some level of audio file compression, knowing that it's personalized to the satisfaction of his ears and equipment?
Background:
So the local kid just got a new Iphone but is slightly unhappy that he wasn't able to afford the one with more storage space on it because his old mp3 player is about the same size and is already full.
He's explained he can't pare the collection down because what he wants in a music collection is to have a ton of songs he's never even heard and so is always listening to a wide variety of new things. And the Itunes management format makes it a big pain in the butt to manage this in other ways like removing songs that have been randomly played and adding new unplayed songs from the library on the computer.
So we've suggested making another library for his Iphone, where all the music is encoded with more compression to make the files smaller. "But that will make it sound bad!"
SO...
OK, so this thing can play AAC and MP3, encoded anywhere from 8 to 320 kbps. I gather from the internets that at 320 kbps hardly anyone can guess it's compressed at all, at 256, very few people seem to notice, 190 seems to be the 'acceptable' cutoff for a lot of people, and by the time you get down to 128 it's really obvious.
The biggest factors besides actual compression rates are what you use to encode, what you use to play back, and what the music is actually coming out of at the end. In this case the player will be Apple's current software and the headphones are some nice high end consumer grade earbuds. So, pretty good, but not audiophile studio quality or anything.
I'm still going to have to research what actual AAC and MP3 encoders get the best results at the first step here, since a slapdash encode is going to sound worse than a sophisticated encode even with the same file size. If anyone has some advice there I'd be glad to hear it.
THE ACTUAL QUESTION THOUGH:
I want to set up a classic full on blinded experiment for him to determine where on the compression scale he personally notices a degradation in quality. I'm just not sure how to actually go about it.
Maybe something like ten second chunks of songs encoded at various bitrates, separated by a quarter second of silence, with a little worksheet for him to mark down whether they sound great or ok or bad, which can be checked against the track list later (so that I am not present during the actual listening)?
In short, can anyone help me set up a test/demonstration that will leave this kid happy and confident with some level of compression, knowing that it's personalized to the satisfaction of his ears and equipment? Or in general impart more knowledge of what's generally up in this area?
via JREF Forum http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=264067&goto=newpost
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