[Arny Krueger]

"Steven Sullivan" wrote in message

wrote:
The current stereophile online has an article of the
subject line. It addresses in part the question of if
it is possible to distinguish 320 and cd sources.
Reading between the lines me thinks the owner of Naxos
really does not think one can but bows to the author of
the article so as not to dissuade readers of the mag
from becoming customers. He wants readers to consider
themselves the 2 percent, which is part of the self
defined and self admiration fringe of the hobby with the
golden ears of course. Here is the relevant part:

Even Naxos founder Klaus Heymann acknowledges the
inaccuracy of the claim, in a Naxos press release,
that, at 320kbps, "speed and quality make MP3 files
indistinguishable from CDs."

"To the average consumer," he told me via telephone
from his home in Hong Kong, "320kbps is virtually
indistinguishable from CD sound. You would be
surprised how many people listen to 128kbps
selections from the Naxos Music Library played back
through my computer and hi-fi system and ask, 'Where
is the CD player?' 128kbps is not wonderful. The
overtones are missing, and the bass is not well
defined. But at 320kbps, I believe that 98% of people
think it sounds like a CD. I personally think it is not
exactly like a CD, but it sounds damn good."

All Mr. Heymann would ahve to do to cap this, would be to
present some ABX test result.s

If he did, I suspect he'd characterize the audible degradation differently.

The statement that the overtones are missing is IME completely bogus.
Perceptual coding does not remove audible overtones, as a rule they are
among the sonic entities that are preserved the best. Again, bass defintion,
requiring a relatively low data rate to reproduce effectively, is unlikely
to be harmed. The usual artifacts of audibly inaccurate perceptual coding
take the form of a loss of articulation in the middle and high frequencies
during complex passages.

Even when there are audible problems, almost all of the musical work is
audibly accurate.

And even Mr. Heymann shoudl realize that there is no such
thing as '128 kbps' monlithically; there are different
codecs that can compress to 128kbps
with different levels of success, also dependent on the input music.

The myth that is purpounded here is that all perceptual coders operating at
a certain bit rate sound the same.