Joint Stereo MP3s:The Myths and the Realities. A link for all those monkeys who are getting into mp3s, but aren't as advanced as our resident music fanatic forksclovetofu.
Distracting web design makes this a very difficult to read site - and an overly long rambling explanation doesn't aid his argument.
1. Joint stereo tries to improve compression by noticing redundancies between the L and R channels.
2. There are a number of ways of doing this.
3. In general intensity coded joint stereo is not as good as Mid/Side encoded joint stereo
4. Done properly, with sound sources with similar sounds in the left and right channels, mid/stereo encoding should produce better quality than normal stereo encoding for a given bitrate.
"mp3 was the third of the 3 layers developed" - correction: they were all developed at the same time, and released in the same document (ISO 11172-3:1993). mp3 was just the most complex encoding method and it wasn't until processors became faster that it became popular
Excellent article!
I've been ripping my CDs at 192, variable bit, ogg format, joint stereo, and they sound great!
I am very attuned to the artifacts introduced by compression. I can often hear it on radio play and easily pick it out in badly encoded MP3's... kinda of one of those things that you never really perceive until it is pointed out to you, and then you can't stop perceiving it.
There are a -few- times I can here it in my setup, but very few and far between.
lemearse:
Distracting web design makes this a very difficult to read site - and an overly long rambling explanation doesn't aid his argument.
I didn't find article too long, rambling, and I'm not sure what is distracting about his page design. Simple text based page with a few breaking section headers: how is that distracting?
I tend to use aac, so I guess this is implicit in it. Sometimes I can hear artifacts produced by compression, but I find that a variable bit rate mp3 at ~192 kbps or a 192 kbps aac file does just fine, so long as the original source was decent. A good remaster of a scratchy original is far more worthy of a rerip than a marginal increase in bit rate or format, IMO.
lemearse:I didn't find article too long, rambling, and I'm not sure what is distracting about his page design. Simple text based page with a few breaking section headers: how is that distracting?