Jonathan Blow's presentation

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d]

On 05/09/2017 02:10 AM, Patrick Schluter wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 May 2017 at 02:13:19 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>> On 05/08/2017 03:28 PM, Jack Stouffer wrote:
>>>
>> Uncompressed? Seriously? I assume that really means FLAC or something
>> rather than truly uncompressed, but even still...sounds more like a
>> bullet-list pandering^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hselling point to the same
>> suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"classy folk" who buy Monster-brand cables for
>> digital signals than a legit quality enhancement. Take a
>> top-of-the-line $$$$ audio system, set down a room full of
>> audiophiles, and compare lossless vs 320kbps Vorbis...in a true
>> double-blind, no WAY they'd be able to consistently spot the
>> difference even if they try. Let alone while being detracted by all
>> the fun of causing mass mayhem and carnage. Unless maybe you just
>> happen to stumble upon some kind of audio savant.
>
> Don't need to go that high. c't did a double blind study some years ago
> with the help of her sister magazine for audio equipment. So they made a
> very good setup. What they discovered is that mp3 with 160 kbit/s CBR
> was already undistinguishable from CD for 99% of people for almost all
> kind of music. mp3 is much better than its reputation, due to really bad

Interesting. Any links? Not familiar with what "c't" is.

Although, even 1% is still a *LOT* of people. I'd be more curious to see 
what encoding it would take to get more like 99.99% or so.

> encoders at the beginning (Xing was awful and was the widest used at the
> beginning, Fraunhofer was excellent but not free, lame took years before
> it was any good) people thought that the crap they heard was inherent to
> the mp3 format but very often it was bad grabbing, over eager lo-pass
> filtering and crappy psycho-acoustic models (Xing). So you make a good
> point that uncompressed audio for a game is completely nuts.
>

Fair point. Also, I've heard that the big quality improvements that 
aac/vorbis/etc have over mp3 are mainly just at lower bitrates.