Another Take on the Great Bitrate Debate

[Timothy Huber]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://gizmodo.com/5251247/the-great-mp3-bitrate-test-my-ears-versus-yours?skyline=true&s=x' target='_blank'>http://gizmodo.com/5251247/the-grea...kyline=true&s=x</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"There will be no judgment in this post. No sound snobbery. I'm simply asking the age-old question: At what bitrate should we encode MP3s? And I need your help. This test is occurring in two parts. In part one, I'm sampling three songs chosen from vastly different genres, encoded from CD and transcoded into the various popular bitrates available for MP3s (64k, 96, 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320kbps with VBR off). I tell you what I hear, then you sample the files yourself, and tell me what you hear."</em></p><p>There's an interesting test going on over at Gizmodo.&nbsp; Mark Wilson tried to determine the "sweet spot" for encoding MP3s in terms of bitrate.&nbsp; He performed the tests on three different genres of music and shared his conclusions.&nbsp; But more interesting, he's made the sound clips available for download and asked his readers to perform their own tests and share the results.&nbsp; Head over a give is a try!</p><p>I've played around with different bit rates and codecs over the years.&nbsp; I gave up on lower bit rates a couple years ago when hard drive storage really stopped being an issue and just decided to re-rip my CD collection in 320kbps MP3.&nbsp; And if I'm reading Mark Wilson's conclusions correctly, I should be safe, at least for a few more years.&nbsp; What bitrate and codec do you use?</p>

[ptyork]

I originally (sheesh, 8 years ago) ripped all of my CD's at 160 Kbps (constant) MP3. Since I listen only to a small subset of my library, this is probably fine for most stuff. However, I've been ripping (and in some cases re-ripping) at 256 Kbps (variable) for the past couple of years, and the quality is noticeably better, especially on live recordings with applause and the like. However, it is still noticeably worse than uncompressed. I've been wanting to do lossless for a couple years, but I can't bring myself to do it since there's no standard supported by all of my players. FLAC, ALAC, WMA Lossless, and MP3HD--come on folks, be nice and decide on a good, single standard and support it universally. I want my Jazz, Classical, and other favorites in lossless, and it bugs me that I can't reasonably achieve this. However, I'm probably going to just cave and do it all in ALAC (M4a) since I think this is probably the least of the evils in terms of player support.

[Jason Dunn]

I've standardized on 256 kbps MP3s in VBR format ripped using EAC. I did some listening tests a couple of years ago, with headphones, up and down in bit rate, and found that 256 kbps was basically the bit rate where it sounded the best...and above 256kbps VBR I couldn't tell a difference. I think lossless would be a nice option, but there's nothing like MP3 in the lossless world in terms of a truly universal standard. Plus re-ripping over 1200 albums would be pretty painful. :D