Topic of the new digest "Β» - audio formats. The articles of the collection will tell you about codecs for audio compression and various analog media. So, weekend reading time.
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- . Some music lovers insist on the superiority of vinyl records over CDs, but the situation is not as simple as it seems. Music journalist Chris Cornelis argues that it is impossible to unequivocally determine the winner. Moreover, in his opinion, vinyl gained popularity not because of the sound quality, but because of the collector's value and the nostalgic factor.
- . Another attempt to prove that no format is created without flaws. First, let's talk about the limitations of vinyl - problems in reproducing hissing sounds and frequencies at the edges of the spectrum. Further, the author talks about the peculiarities of the perception of CDs and refutes the myth that digital recording is inferior to vinyl by default. Also from the material you will learn how the characteristic sound of the records is formed and why some listeners still prefer it.
- . Vinyl is already back on store shelves - is it the turn of cassettes? Yes and no. The author will tell about the history of the format, its technical features, and the current state of the cassette industry. For those who want to start or add to their collection of compact cassettes, the article will provide buying advice.
- . A blind comparison of the most significant formats in the history of recording. The analog master was copied onto five media, from classic tape to high-resolution audio flash drives, and played on high-end hardware to a group of skeptical audiophiles. The listeners tried to blindly distinguish the formats. According to the author of the article, this was done, and the test showed noticeable differences in the sound of different media. In the material you will find the listeners' impressions of the experiment, as well as photographs and a description of the reference equipment used.
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- This article is about DSD, a low-resolution, high-sampling audio format. Its adherents claim that the quality of such a recording is so superior to any other analogues that any master should be converted to DSD as an intermediate step. In the material you will find an experiment in which an attempt was made to figure out what effect DSD conversion actually has.
- To what extent does the program through which an audio file is played affect its sound? Do premium software players have a right to exist, and if so, why? The author of the article tried to find out whether the content of the audio stream changes when "passing" through three different players - Jriver ($60), Audiorvana ($74) and Foobar2000 ($0).
- The same music recording was compressed with three different codecs, then converted back to WAV and compared with the original. For clarity, the same operations were performed on a simple audio file with a square signal with a frequency of 100 Hz. In the article you will find a more detailed description of the experiment and find out which of the formats did the best job. At the end of the material, the author provides links to download test phonograms, which you can compare by ear yourself.
- . The material explains why errors can occur when reading a CD and how to find them. The first part of the article describes the process of reading information by a laser and the problems associated with it. Further, the material talks about errors that occur on the disks themselves and their impact on reading the media. As it turned out, high-quality licensed discs are far from immune from such problems, and their home copies can sound better than the original.
- An educational program article about popular digital audio formats, in which special attention is paid to ways to compress music without losing quality. Among them are both open FLAC and APE, as well as "proprietary" formats: WMA Lossless from Microsoft and ALAC from Apple. The "star" of the material is a modern WavPack format that supports 256-channel audio files. In comparison, FLAC files can store only eight tracks. For more information about the format, follow the link.
- . A series of articles by Chris Montgomery, creator of the Ogg format and the Vorbis codec. In his lyrics, Chris criticizes the popular practice among music lovers of listening to 24-bit audio with a sampling rate of 192 kHz. Montgomery explains why these impressive figures, at best, do not affect the perception of the soundtrack, and in some situations even harm it. To do this, he cites scientific research data and analyzes in detail the technical aspects of digital audio recording.
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Source: habr.com