Bob Cain wrote:

So *this* is what a train-wreck looks like! ;-) ;-)

Not necessasarily. I'm still considering the part that says
that mild compression, that I would otherwise avoid, may
have a benefit relative to lossy encoding.

I was merely kidding with that comment - hence the wink, wink...

As for the mild compression... It was not my point to say that
compression itself is beneficial to the encoding but rather the higher
levels of the entire remainder of the song at the expense of perhaps 5
short peak bursts that seem to me to be more due to happenstance than
deliberation.

Then again, I am conducting some tests which do seem to confirm Geoff's
position on how much of a level boost is required before an aurally
detectable difference is produced in the sound of a resulting MP3. At
least with these tests I am getting some "hard numbers and examples"
which may be useful for supporting his position.

At this point I've been using "normalize" to shove the gain down on
copies of that "Sunday Bloody Sunday" WAV in -5dB increments to see how
far down I have to go before it flatlines.

At -40dB it's just barely identifiable.
At -50dB it's no longer there.

Encoding 128kb/s MP3s of it at -5dB, -10dB, -15dB, and -25dB down from
it's original level and then importing the MP3s and amplifying them back
to just under Full Scale with Audacity reveals no appreciable difference
at least to my ears - even though the animated close-ups I've been able
to create from various screenshots of these "loudness-restored" WAVs do
reveal visual discrepancies.

Then again, (1) I'm not listening to these WAVs with expert ears, (2)
I'm probably not using good source test material, and (3) I still don't
know if my version of notlame (which uses the LAME v3.70 engine) uses
fixed or relative ATH positioning.

I downloaded and installed a Linux sine tone generator and have been
able to get it to play some tones, but it's idea of "writing to a file"
on the hard drive involves dumping values to a text file instead of
creating a WAV file with which I can conduct more appropriate tests.

And, yes, I do recall the R.A.P. 5 suggestion...

Myke

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Windows...It's rebootylicious!!!
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