Not sure if this is the right place to ask... I was listening to some Schubert string quartet pieces earlier and noticed my ears were getting really tired really fast. The pieces were ripped from a CD and encoded in 500 Kbps OGG. I did a side by side comparison with the original from the CD, and the difference was very obvious - the OGG sounds tinny, and the highest and lowest sound components seem to be clipped off. (This is a rather stark contrast to rock, which sounds equally good in OGG and uncompressed WAV. Well go figure, a violin has a lot more going on acoustically than an electric guitar!) Anyway, I was wondering what compression formats might be more tolerable than OGG for classical music. The obvious one is FLAC, but losslessly compressed files are huge. VBR MP3 sounds just as bad as OGG. Are there any better lossy codecs for dealing with acoustic instruments? Or should I just stick with FLAC?
Not sure, but you may wish to try a program like WinABX to statistically test if you really can hear the differences between two samples.
I've been hearing that AAC has been praised for the classical genre by some people. Try both the FAAC and the Nero's version and aim for the highest bitrate you possibly can tolerate. I personally doubt that it will make much difference, but I think it is worth to try.
Gullible Jones, you're welcome! I thought it would work, since I have encoded all my classical music at CBR 320 Kbps, and it sounds great. Take care.
It appears to me that MP3 handles VBR/ABR poorly. Everyone who encodes to MP3 always say they use CBR.
@GrafZeppelin there is no need to use CBR if you use LAME to encode the files. It's just some really old encoders like Xing which do a terrible job of encoding VBR MP3s.
ABR = average bitrate. Not to be confused with the similar but not the same VBR. A lot of people seem to opt for CBR when they encode files to MP3. I'm sure they must've been using LAME. I personally never ever been successful in encoding files to MP3 using VBR, and yes I used LAME as well, although through a GUI that uses it as an encoding engine. That is why I moved to AAC.
Especially, when choosing a high quality VBR Encoder Setting of -V 0. Using this Setting, I was able to achieve an average bit rate of 245 Kbps across my music collection, with the exception of Classical music as stated above, encoding them via an oldie but goodie: Audiograbber. Today, I buy my MP3s from Amazon, and they usually come encoded at 256 Kbps.