In what format is it better to listen to music? Part 2
The reference value of the audible range for humans is 16 Hz to 20 kHz, but you cannot hear and be aware of all incoming sounds simultaneously.
Hearing is discreet and your hearing sensitivity is not linear.
Modern psychoacoustic models accurately assess human hearing and are constantly improving. In fact, despite the guarantees of music lovers, musicians and audiophiles, to the inexperienced middle ear, the initial appearance of MP3 in maximum quality has become extremely noticeable. There are exceptions, they cannot cease to exist. But they are not always easily noticed by blind listening.
Formats using psychoacoustic compression models
There are many of these formats for lossy audio compression. The most common today are the following.
OGG (Vorbis)
In general, a file with the * .ogg extension is a “container”: it can contain multiple sound recordings with their own tags and characteristics. Most of the time, the files stored in it are compressed with the Ogg Vorbis codec, although others can be used, including MP3 or FLAC.
Its main advantages include a wide range of possible parameters during encoding: the audio sampling frequency can reach 192 kHz, the bit depth is 32 bits. By default, OGG uses a variable bit rate (although this is not shown on the properties screen), which can go up to 1000 kbps.
MP3
Unlike the free OGG, MP3 was developed by the Fraunhofer Society, an association of German institutes for applied research, which is very important for modern acoustics. Among audiophiles, by the way, this is an extremely respected office, yet they don’t like to admit it. But its developments are closely watched.
Unlike OGG, it can have variable (VBR) and constant (CBR) bit rate. By the way, it was thanks to MP3 that it was discovered that not all recordings can be encoded with high quality with a variable bit rate (see the above reasons, the encoding algorithms and their results in this case may be different when encoding the same source ).
