Lossless audio formats compete in quality with a CD?

Can the sound quality of lossless music really be the same as a CD?

With the increase in storage space of mobile phones and computers, and the improvement of hardware sound quality indicators, more and more people have begun to pay attention to lossless music. The mobile phone has already started with 64G capacity. At the same time, it also uses high-quality audio chips such as ESS, and even has built-in op amp chips. This configuration that can compete with HiFi Walkman on paper was unimaginable. in recent years. of. At the same time, more and more consumers are beginning to pay attention to high-quality headphones. In this context, listening to lossy audio formats like MP3 is a bit like killing a chicken with a knife. Playing lossless music on a mobile phone has gradually become an ordinary thing.

Now that mobile phones are equipped with powerful DAC chips, more and more people pay attention to lossless music.

However, there are actually some arguments about lossless music, and these arguments are a bit “metaphysical”. For example, many people argue whether the sound quality of lossless music is really “lossless”, and the “iron proof” is that after restoring lossless music to Wav format, the Hash file finds out that there is a difference. What exactly is happening? Is it really mysticism? Let’s talk lossless music today.

Can the sound quality of lossless music really be the same as a CD?

After the music is digitized, it is often packaged on a CD in PCM format. PCM audio on CDs is generally 16-bit, 44 kHz, and is usually stored in Wav format. The audio on normal CDs is PCM, but PCM is not limited to the specifications of normal CDs. PCM audio can also achieve high-definition audio specifications such as 24-bit and 384kHz. This high-spec audio is relatively common in the audio track of Blu-ray movies. Few people use high-definition audio for music products, but in recent years, Hi-Res Audio also uses the HD Audio specification.

Can an mp3 sound with the same quality as a CD? Yes

The Great Experiment of the bitrate in the MP3.

A programmer decided to check if there was really much quality between different bitrates and the quality of a professional CD.

He put on one side the CD, also a FLAC (without quality loss) and on the other different mp3 with different options of CBR, VBR and 128,160,192,320 kbps.

The encoding of a music file is a balance between quality and size.

Normally using good mp3 encoding it is possible to store 5 to 10 times more music than saving WAV formats from a CD.

In order to measure, he put thousands of people to listen to music files, they are telling them if they were listening to a CD, a FLAC, an mp3 with different boirates, The results:

The absolute winner was the mp3 at 160 kbps VBR.

It was the one that received the best ratings, even above the CD. This is possible to understand because programs like Mp4Gain significantly improve the volume, the quality, they do bass boost, etc.

An Mp3 at 192 kbps is indistinguishable from a CD according to the results of this study.

This comes to destroy many preconceptions of people who, based on things they have read, but are exaggerated, make believe that the mp3 is dead or at least obsolete and this is not the case at all.

As we mentioned, an mp3 with the appropriate settings sounds the same or even better than a CD.

How much does the bit rate affect the sound quality in an mp3? Part 2

Is the bit rate very important?

We had already explained in a previous article that the bitrate expresses the amount of bits or information that an audio file can carry.

We gave an example, using ONE word to describe an object, then 2 words, then 10 words, etc. and we saw how that amount of information is crucial to be able to give detail that will increase quality.

We will now explain the two most important modes used to determine which bitrate a file will use.

CBR

This case is when the bitrate of an mp3 is constant, regardless of the content it contains.
Imagine that we put the highest butrate which is 320 and the file contains only silence.
It will still stay at 320 even if it doesn’t have any data.

We know that this example is extreme, but we want to illustrate the idea that the bitrate will be the same all the time, even when there are notable differences in the amount and complexity of the information.

VBR

Instead we have this other option that will try to regulate or adapt the bitrate precisely depending on the information.
If there is an initial silence, use the lowest bitrate, if there are moments of great complexity, use the highest.

Let’s think and be aware that the bitrate directly affects the size of the mp3.

So with VBR we have intelligent savings, keeping a low bitrate at times when it would be wasteful to use a higher one and increase the bitrate when the information demand requires it.

Mp4aGain is an application that manages all these options very well so that you can obtain the best results. Because we know exactly what we are talking about.

Is the bit rate very important?

We had already explained in a previous article that the bitrate expresses the amount of bits or information that an audio file can carry.

We gave an example, using ONE word to describe an object, then 2 words, then 10 words, etc. and we saw how that amount of information is crucial to be able to give detail that will increase quality.

We will now explain the two most important modes used to determine which bitrate a file will use.

CBR

This case is when the bitrate of an mp3 is constant, regardless of the content it contains.
Imagine that we put the highest butrate which is 320 and the file contains only silence.
It will still stay at 320 even if it doesn’t have any data.

We know that this example is extreme, but we want to illustrate the idea that the bitrate will be the same all the time, even when there are notable differences in the amount and complexity of the information.

VBR

Instead we have this other option that will try to regulate or adapt the bitrate precisely depending on the information.
If there is an initial silence, use the lowest bitrate, if there are moments of great complexity, use the highest.

Let’s think and be aware that the bitrate directly affects the size of the mp3.

So with VBR we have intelligent savings, keeping a low bitrate at times when it would be wasteful to use a higher one and increase the bitrate when the information demand requires it.

Mp4aGain is an application that manages all these options very well so that you can obtain the best results. Because we know exactly what we are talking about.

How much does the bit rate affect the sound quality in an mp3?

Is the bit rate very important?

The bit rate strictly measures the amount of information per second that an audio file can carry.
What does this mean?

That the greater the number of bits per second, the greater the “detail” and the greater the number of details, the higher the resolution and therefore the quality.

Let us imagine an example that would illustrate the matter very clearly:

You must describe an object, but you can only use ONE word.

You say:

-Car

That doesn’t say much.

Now you can use 2 words:

1.- car 2.- red

We already have more information.

Now you can use 6 words:

1.- car 2.- new 3.- red 4.- convertible 5.- sports car 6.- luxury

Now you have a much more elaborate image, thanks to the fact that you were able to provide more information. If you could now use 20 words or 100, it would be a more precise idea each time that you could convey.

Exactly the same thing happens with music and the bit rate is the amount of information that can be transmitted per second.

An estimate like the following is generally known:

8 Kbps Mono: Telephone Sound.
16 Kbps Mono: Better quality than shortwave.
32 Kbps Mono: Better quality than AM.
64 Kbps Stereo: Better quality than FM.
112 – 128 Kbps: Quality close to CD.
160 Kbps: Quality closer to CD.
192 Kbps: Practically CD quality.
256 Kbps: CD quality virtually indistinguishable from an original CD.
320 Kbps: CD quality.

Mp4Gain can help you make your entire music collection the same bitrate.

In a following article we will give more information about this interesting topic. Very necessary if you want to really have quality in your audio and more if you use Mp4Gain.

Audio compression

Well, in fact, the bit rate should be said to be another dimension, it is a compression of audio files.

Nowadays, most of the audio formats that we use regularly are based on the original “WAV” file of the audio CD (44.1khz sampling rate, 16bit sampling precision, 2ch). The original recorded sound data is stored in an array, which is in PCM format, while WAV format is an encoding format developed by Microsoft, and its function is to play the PCM format data through encoding.

Since the data in WAV basically completely restores the PCM data, MP3, AAC and other lossless encoding formats are basically recompressed based on the WAV files. Therefore, we can simply think that WAV is the original audio format and other audio formats are compressed formats.

When it comes to compression, storage and transmission are inseparable. The purpose of compression is to improve storage and transmission. Therefore, before we talk about compression, we need to understand the basic units of computers.

We all know that the computer is a binary number system, and the files stored by the computer are made up of two numbers, 0 and 1. Therefore, the computer’s transmission is based on each number, and each number is called 1 ” bit”. For example, for an audio piece, its basic data is “0,1,1,1,0,1, 1 ,0″, and when transmitting, these numbers are transmitted one by one. The sampling precision mentioned above is this unit.

The storage unit of the computer is ” byte (Byte)”. In the computer, 1 byte consists of 8 bits, that is, 8b(bit)=1B(Byte). In computer parlance, data storage is expressed in decimal and data transmission is expressed in binary, so 1KB=1024B=1024×8b. This is also part of the reason why the hard drive capacity we see does not match the actual capacity.

Go back and talk about audio compression, the bitrate of the audio is actually the compression ratio. So the bitrate really just defines the size of the file, but because under normal conditions the larger the file, the less data you lose, so the sound quality is relatively higher. However, the bit rate itself does not directly affect the quality of the file. For example, if we take a 128kb file as the source file, even if it is converted to a 320kb file, the sound quality will not be better than 128kb. .

So what exactly do the numbers and letters in the bitrate mean? First look at the full name of 128k “128kbps”, let’s try to break it down: 128 is a number, k is a thousand symbol, b is a unit, s is a second, and ps is actually “/s”. Thus, 128kbps is 128kb/s. That’s 128kb per second.

Note that the b here is a lowercase b, or bit. Knowing this, we can calculate the approximate storage space that a 128kb file occupies: 128*1000=128000b/s÷8=16000B/s÷1024=15.625KB/s*60=937.5KB/min÷1024=0.9155 MB/ min. So 128Kb audio file size is about 0.92M or 916Kb per minute, so 128Kb mp3 is about 1M in size. You can test and check it locally.

Before talking about lossy and lossless, there are two words to explain to you, that is, we will see CBR and VBR when compressing MP3. And CBR is constant bit rate, constant bit rate; VBR is variable bit rate, dynamic bit rate. In theory, VBR’s way is to automatically correct some bitrates according to the specific frequency of the sound in the source audio file, to achieve a smaller file with the same bitrate effect.

Let’s talk about lossy and lossless. In a nutshell, lossy compression is about achieving compression by removing some less important data from existing data; lossless compression is about achieving compression by optimizing the layout. Since these compression methods involve deeper technical knowledge, we won’t say more, and we can probably look at it this way: lossy compression is like removing some unimportant particles in an article to achieve the purpose, after decompression, it is you deleted the content cannot be recovered; Lossless is achieved through typesetting. After decompression, complete WAV data can be obtained, just like our commonly used winzip and WinRAR.

What is the difference between 128k and 320k music?

【Preface】

Some time ago, a colleague came across a very troubled client. The mess was said to have been caused by the client asking him to provide song files larger than 100MB-200MB in size. And my colleagues don’t know much about audio formats, so they started endlessly fumbling about FLAC, WAV and audio size. In the end, the colleague did not clearly explain to the customer what was going on.

After that, other things happened that made me feel that in the music industry there are too many practitioners around me who have an extremely poor understanding of music and even lack some basic knowledge related to music. I don’t even have the idea to understand, which makes me very sad. It seems that music has only one product attribute, and our practitioners only need to organize the shelves, encode various products, and recommend products to users with the big data of user purchase records, and they don’t need to worry about why the users users like this. Brands, what features these products have, and provide users with various services with cold data.

Therefore, I think it is necessary to write something. I don’t expect practitioners to become people who really love music. I just hope that even if you still think of “her” as a commodity, you can first figure out what you’re selling. and what is..

PS: The contents of the first lesson are multimedia files. Since the relevant content involves a lot of technical issues, it seems a bit boring, but if you read it carefully, you will see that it is actually very easy to understand, but these basic knowledge can be very helpful.Improve your skill well. Also expect more interesting content about records, musical styles, etc. which I will post soon.

Bit Rate, Sample Rate, Lossless, MP3, FLAC, APE, 320kb, 192kb, 128kb, 44.1khz, CBR, VBR. Does this bunch of various names make you both familiar and unknown?

The higher the bitrate, the better the sound quality. Lossless music is the highest sound quality, right? So, let’s start with the sound collection.

【Audio composition】

Nowadays, when we talk about audio, everything is digital audio. Digital audio consists of three parts: sample rate, sample precision, and number of sound channels.

Sample Rate: Both the sample rate, which refers to the number of samples per second when recording the sound, expressed in Hertz (Hz).

Sampling Precision: Refers to the dynamic range of the recorded sound, measured in bits (Bit).

Sound channel: the number of channels (1-8).

In simple terms, we can think of a sound wave as a curve. We know that the curve is made up of points, and the sampling rate is the number of points in the middle of the length per second (the horizontal axis in the figure above). Sampling precision is the number of points in the dynamic range (upper vertical axis). The finer the positioning of these two dimensions, the greater the true sound restoration and the better the sound quality. Of course, the larger the audio file will be.