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lossless sound quality

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lossless sound quality

The principle of these audio compression methods is to keep as much as possible the parts that are easy to hear for the human ear.

In the main constant bit rate (CBR) mode, audible data in the audio is removed and it is easier for the human ear to hear. The more information that is retained for the part, the less information that is retained for the less audible part. As sound complexity increases, the degree of sound quality degradation becomes more apparent. For example, when listening to pure human music voice performances and performances combined with background music, pure The degree of degradation of the compressed music of the human voice is less obvious than that of the original file.

As for the lossless sound quality provided by today’s streaming platform, there are many formats, but strictly speaking, these formats, including flac and ALAC, belong to lossless compression (non-destructive data compression) rather than quality. lossless sound in a narrow sense, but due to its performance it is almost the same as WAVE, but the file is small, the decoding speed is fast, and it can be used in streaming services, so it is also a representative format of lossless sound quality that has entered the era without CD support, and it is also the current music streaming service.

Also, MQA like Tidal is a more controversial format, because although MQA is lossless audio compression in a broad sense, it focuses on driving high-quality music files that are above CD quality at a size similar to those of CD quality flac files. , but it can also be restored to the original high-quality audio format, but the controversial point is whether the higher compression ratio can maintain the same real auditory sense as the original high-quality audio has always been controversial. At the same time, MQA requires a specific device to perform hardware decoding. Yes, many devices can only decode MQA through software.

▲Currently called Hi-Res Audio generally refers to sound quality higher than that of a CD, but to be certified, the device must support the processing capability of the 24-bit 96kHz format.

However, since MP3 and AAC are previously planned destructive music compression formats, their purpose is to compress CD-level sound quality into smaller files, so most encoding specifications are presented in one presentation. CD-level 16-bit 44.1 kHz or 16-bit 48 kHz; but MQA is a format with a small file size that locks in high sound quality requirements. Basically, the MQA format will be music equivalent to 24-bit PCM or higher.

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lossless sound quality

Although lossless sound quality and high-quality streaming services have appeared on the market for a while

Like Apple isn’t the first to make true wireless earbuds, but it has ridden the wave of the market, with Apple’s launch of so-called hi-fi. compressed sound quality in Apple Music. In fact, after the lossless compression commonly known in the audio industry, lossless sound quality and high sound quality have instantly become a hot topic for many people to discuss, but whether the benefits of quality Lossless sound systems are really Obviously, the author will devote some space from theoretical concepts to practical levels. The difference is a simple overview, but the following arguments focus on easy understanding, so some of the descriptions are not entirely accurate.

What is lossless sound quality? What is the sound quality of the music we usually listen to?
The photo mentions * Introduction to KKBOX sound quality (including format), release year, sound quality, including numbers, KKBox, streaming media, Hi-Res Audio and Hi-Fi

▲ Both AAC and MP3 are destructive compression, while FLAC and ALAC are lossless compression

Before we get into the details, let’s talk about what is called lossless sound quality; From the author’s concept and cognition, the so-called lossless sound quality is a relative word rather than an absolute word. The main source is the relative word born due to the appearance of the MP3 music compression format; after the music industry went digital, digital music files were generally recorded via PCM encoding, and WAVE files were generally used on CDs. The time and space situation that MP3 was born into was because hard drive capacity was generally small at the time. To store a large amount of music data in storage space, you probably need to compress the files.

The reason why MP3 cannot be called a lossless format is because it essentially compresses the original WAVE in a way that limits the bitrate by combining concepts like the psychology of sound. The bitrate compression mode, compared to the bitrate of the original WAVE file, compresses at least in a range of 1:4 to 12:1. The higher the bitrate, the greater the amount of retained information. For example, AAC format also adopts similar audio psychology for compression, but the efficiency is better than MP3. Therefore, most of the lossless sound quality of most streaming platforms currently uses AAC as the mainstream.

Detailed music format

classic wave

As the most classic Windows media audio format, the WAVE file is widely used, which uses three parameters to represent sound: the number of sampled bits, the sample rate, and the number of channels.
The channels are divided into mono and stereo, and the sample rates are generally 11025 Hz (11 kHz), 22050 Hz (22 kHz), and 44100 Hz (44 kHz). The capacity occupied by the WAVE file = (sampling frequency × sampling bits × channel) × time/8 (1 byte = 8 bits).

traditional mod

MOD is a wavetable-like music format, but its structure is similar to MIDI, it uses real samples, and the volume is small. In the earlier DOS era, MOD was often used as background music for games. Modern mods can contain many audio tracks in many formats, such as S3M, NST, 669, MTM, XM, IT, XT, and RT.

midi music computer

MIDI is short for Musical Instrument Data Interface. Records the sound played by the instrument digitally (each note is recorded as a number), and then synthesizes these records via FM or wavetable during playback: FM synthesis is the sound of the instrument is simulated by mixing the multi-frequency sounds; wavetable synthesis consists of storing the sound samples of the instrument in the wavetable of the sound card and extracting the sound from the wavetable as you play.

Boss Boss MP3

It can be said that MP3 is famous, it uses MPEG Audio Layer 3 technology to compress the sound with a compression ratio of 1:10 or even 1:12, with a sampling rate of 44kHz and a bit rate of 112kbit/s. .
MP3 music is music stored in digital form. If you want to play it, you must have a corresponding digital playback and decoding system. Generally, MP3 digital music is decoded by special software and then restored to a waveform sound signal for playback output. This type of software is called For MP3 players, such as Winamp, etc.

Overlord RA series online

RA, RAM, and RM are Real’s mature network audio formats, using “streaming audio” technology, making them well suited for network streaming. Information such as copyright, singer, producer, mail and song title can be added during production.
RA can be called the supreme lord of multimedia communication on the Internet. It is suitable for streaming on the Internet and is currently the best format for listening to online music online.

VQF with high compression ratio

VQF or TwinVQ is an audio compression technology developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone and Yamaha Corporation.
The audio compression rate of VQF is almost twice that of standard MPEG audio and can reach approximately 1:18 or even higher. And popular compression formats like MP3 and RA are usually only around 1:12. But it still won’t affect the sound quality, when VQF compress music at 44kHz-80kbit/s audio sampling rate, its sound quality will be better than 44kHz-128kbit/s MP3, when compress at 44kHz-96kbit/s , the music is close to 44kHz-256kbit/s MP3.

MD minidisc

MD (ie MiniDisc) is a comprehensive portable music format released by SONY in 1992. The compression algorithm it uses is ATRAC technology (the compression ratio is 1:5). MD is divided into Recordable MD (Recordable, with two heads of magnetic head and laser head) and Single Play MD (Prerecorded, only laser head).
The powerful editing function is the strong point of MD. You can quickly select tracks, move tracks, merge, split, delete and edit track titles. It is more personalized than CD and you can have your own MD album at any time. MD products include MD Walkman, MD bedside audio, MD car audio, MD recording deck, MD camera gun and MD driver, etc.

What are lossless file formats

Whether it is image, music or video files, it is important to understand the difference between different types of formats and when to use them. Using the wrong format can ruin the quality of a file or make the file size unnecessarily large.

file audio differenze

Some types of media file formats are “lossy” and some types “lossless”. We will explain what these terms mean for the benefits of each type of file format and why you should never convert lossy to lossless formats.

Compression explained.

We use compression to make files smaller so they can retrieve faster and take up less storage space. For example, when you take a photo, your camera captures all the light you can get and collects an image. If you save the image in RAW format, which retains all the clear data that the camera sensor receives, the image can reach 25 MB. (Depending on image resolution: A multi-megapixel camera provides a larger image.)

comprimere i-grandi-audio

If we upload these files to a social network or put them on a website, we don’t want these image files to take up so much space. A photo gallery with RAW images could take hundreds of megabytes of space. RAW formats can be used by professional photographers to maintain high image quality during the editing process, but they are not intended for the average person.

Instead, our camera or smartphone converts the image into a JPEG file. JPEG files are much, much smaller than RAW images. When you convert RAW to JPEG, some of the image data is “discarded”, which produces a much smaller file. The conversion process uses a compression algorithm that works well for photos, so they can look pretty good despite compression. You can still see compression elements, depending on the quality settings.

Note that lost formats generally have a setting that controls their loss. For example, JPEG has a variable quality setting. Low quality produces a smaller JPEG image file, but the image quality is significantly poorer. Below is a close-up example of a lost JPEG: various “compression artifacts” can be seen.

We call RAW a “lossless” format because it retains all the original data in the file, while we call JPEG a “lost” format because some data is lost when we convert an image to JPEG. However, these are not the only design and loss-free formats.

Images: RAW, BMP and PNG are all image formats without data loss. JPEG and WebP are lost image formats.
Audio: WAV is a container file that is often used to contain lossless audio, although it is also capable of containing lost sound. FLAC is a lossless audio format, while MP3 is a lossless audio format.
Video: Consumers use few lossless video formats as they involve video files taking up a large amount of space. Common formats like H.264 and H.265 are all lost. H.264 and H.265 can deliver smaller files with higher quality than previous generations of video codecs because it has a “smarter” algorithm that is better at choosing which data to discard.
Some of these lossless formats also provide compression. For example, a WAV file generally contains uncompressed audio and takes up little space. A FLAC file may contain the same lossless sound as a WAV file, but it uses compression to continue creating a smaller file. Formats like FLAC provide no data: they store all data and compress them intelligently, just like ZIP archives. However, they are still much larger in size than MP3s that throw a lot of data.

A conversion can be a loss, even between formats without data loss. For a conversion to be effectively lossless, the data in the original file must fit within the destination file. For example, loss without FLAC files only supports 24-bit audio. If you converted a WAV file containing 32-bit PCM audio to FLAC, the conversion process must generate some data. The conversion process between a WAV file containing 24-bit PCM audio in FLAC would be lossless.