Re: Re: [Harp-L] Re: music and perception

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Very nearly no harp content.  Then a raindrop or two of it.  Not much, really.

Garry wrote:

> > M4a sounds so vastly much better - to me - than MP3 and WMA now that I can
> > often tell which type of file I'm listening to in a couple of seconds, and
> > MP3 and WMA just bug the heck out of me quite often.  M4a absolutely never
> > sounds lousy to me.
>
> without knowing bit rates, constant vs. variable bitrate encoding, etc, 
> it's not
> useful to compare two encodings.

Good thing to point out.  My mistake was thinking that in 2007 the bitrate 
stuff was common knowledge, and there is no reason to presume that, so it's 
good that you brought that up.

So I will rewrite.  M4a at 160kbps sounds better than MP3 at 256.  To me. 
This could hardly be more subjective.

And, as this was a discussion about music and perception, my point, so 
awkwardly misstated, was that once I heard the results of a 'better' 
compression method it soured my ear for the more primitive stuff.

(M4a appears to have addressed problems that were bugging the creators of 
MP3.  It's a generational improvement, and a large one.  That is, from what 
I have read, the same very talented German engineers who worked on MP3 and 
lived with it for a few years, then improved their results, radically to 
me, as any good engineer might want to do.)

Again, vis a vis the topic of the discussion, music and perception, I 
wasn't concerned with filesize footprint, just in one encoding spoiling my 
ears for an encoding I had previously liked.

> as long as your encoder is better than your ears, life is good.

A perspicacious observation.  But then one day your ears get better than 
your encoder.  I have no doubt that you know this already.

My mom's cooking tasted great to me until I tasted good cooking.  Then, not 
so much.  I don't enjoy playing my Huang Star Performers anywhere near as 
much since I've been playing Suzuki Firebreaths.

That's the perception element.  I started smoking extremely cheap cigars, 
and really enjoyed them.  I then tried something only slightly better, and 
the cheaper ones suddenly tasted awful.  Every few months I'd go up a notch 
until I couldn't afford to smoke a cigar that tasted good to me, on account 
of I played harmonica for a living.

And I have to wonder, what is our ear or our brain adding in when a poorly 
encoded music file weakens our knees one day, and does it stop adding in 
that good stuff when we hear a better encoding and the original suddenly 
sounds lousy?