"Lord Hasenpfeffer" wrote in message ...

So if the ATH has such tiny effect, which element of lossy compression
is the one most responsible for so much destruction?

The entire basis for the development of the codec, that's "which element."
Booting out frequencies from the source is how the codec's compression
scheme works. You cannot stop this from occurring. I'm sorry.

And what are the "very low levels" you cite? Or what webpage is there
that has these levels spelled out for one all to clearly see?

Screw a buncha' web pages. ;-) I thought you said you had read up
on the codec principles and taken in a lot of FAQs already.

Again, compression from the codec's point of view, makes it's OWN
decision as to what is or is not below the ATH at any given instant in
time during the encoding process. It will make the same set of decisions
based on what at that particular instant, is either in front of, or behind,
other more dominant frequencies. The codec scheme determines at
that instant, which frequencies are too low to bother encoding. You can't
change that without modeling a new data compression codec that operates
in a different manner on different principles.

I don't deny your word that ATH affects "very low level" frequencies.

You just seem to consider 'low level' a product of overall volume.

"Very low level" as implied here and as applied by the codec, does NOT
mean average RMS amplitude before encoding, but is rather the level of
frequencies that are compared to the remainder of the program content
at any given instant in time during encoding. This has been explained
several times by several different contributors.

By the way, I haven't thanked you for pushing me into a little research.

--
David Morgan (MAMS)
http://www.m-a-m-s.com
http://www.artisan-recordingstudio.com