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12.10.

2013 Spectral Comparisons


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CD image downloaded from
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The EAC guides are written by
xuncat, all screenshots by xuncat
(February 2008 - September 2009).

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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EAC Guides Home
Back To Index
EAC 1.0 Setup Guide
EAC 1.0 Ripping Guide
Guide Contents
1. Introduction: lossless
and lossy formats
2. Spectral view
3. FLAC
4. LAME
5. Ogg Vorbis
6. Transcodes
Other EAC Guides
EAC Installation Guide
EAC Setup Guide
EAC Lossy Setup Guide
(mp3 and Ogg Vorbis)
EAC Ripping Guide
EAC CD Burning Guide
Useful Links
EAC Homepage
FLAC Homepage
1. Introduction: lossless and lossy formats
This is not a guide. This section is here in order to visually show you the
difference between the different kinds of files treated in the EAC guides. It
ends with a brief explanation of what transcoding is and why transcoding
normally is a bad thing to do.
Our point of departure is the wave file: the .wav file that EAC produces as
you rip an audio CD track. To be sure, .wav is really a container format that
can hold different kinds of audio; in this case the content of the .wav file is
"really" PCM audio.
If you have ripped the CD properly, in accordance with the guides, the
.wav file contains exactly the same audio data as the original CD. Wave files
are rather large, though, which makes them awkward for transfer and/or
storage. This is where FLAC enters the picture. It stands for "Free Lossless
Audio Codec". It compresses the audio data without removing any of it,
just like Zip and RAR compress data without removing any of it. This is why
FLAC is properly called a lossless format. With the right kind of cue sheet,
you can re-create a copy of your CD from your archived FLAC files any time.
Lossy formats can save space by removing some audio data, for example by
cutting down on the number of kilobits used per second of audio and/or
removing "unnecessary" audio data according to some algorithm, in addition
to compressing the files. This way the files can be made much smaller, but
there is always a trade-off between audio quality and file size.
A common standard for "acceptable" audio quality for mp3s is 128 kbps. It
is a constant bitrate (CBR) setting that you see, for example, with most
iTunes downloads (though they make use of the FhG encoder, not the
superior LAME encoder for mp3). Ogg Vorbis has been developed to focus
on quality measures rather than bitrates, but a rough equivalent to mp3 at
128 kbps would be the q3 setting.
Others claim that the threshold for "transparency" (where you can't tell the
difference from the original) would be at 192 kbps for mp3s, and q6 (or
even q5) for Ogg Vorbis. For LAME mp3, there is also the variable bitrate
(VBR) preset V2 (target bitrate ~190) that would be the "transparent"
VBR setting. (Variable bitrate, used in both the Ogg Vorbis -q presets and
the LAME mp3 -V presets, means that the encoder analyses the audio data
and only uses as high bitrate as is needed, i. e. lower bitrate for less
complex (or silent) parts of the audio data.)
The pictures below are intended to show you the differences between
different formats and bitrate settings, from "best possible" to "transparent"
to "acceptable".
2. Spectral view
The pictures are screenshots taken while using the "spectral view" in
Adobe Audition (v. 1.5). The spectral view is a way of making some audio
properties visible. The screenshots show you the two stereo channels with
the left channel on top. The horisontal axis is for time, the vertical axis
shows the frequency of the audio data for each channel. The colours
indicate the amplitude: from dark blue for the lowest decibel (softest)
sounds to bright yellow for the highest decibel (loudest) sounds.
These screenshots show a maximum of 22 kHz for each channel. That is
because we are looking at CD rips with the standard frequency of 44.1 kHz
(combined for both channels). Other recordings, such as some soundboard
tapes or vinyl rips, may go much higher.
All the screenshots, except two of the FLAC ones, are for the same track:
"I Feel You" from Depeche Mode's Songs of Faith and Devotion. That is a
reasonably complex audio track that serves to illustrate the differences
between the different encodings. The LAME mp3 and Ogg Vorbis files
were created from the FLAC file using dBpoweramp.
3. FLAC
Spectral Comparisons
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AccurateRip Homepage
DAE Drive Features
Database
The Hydrogenaudio
Knowledgebase
EAC Helper
First out is the original FLAC file - if it were decompressed to WAV (PCM) it
would still look exactly the same. (In fact, any file you open in Audition is
"converted" to WAV in order to show the waveform.) As you can see, it
goes all the way up to 22 kHz. The file size is 31.2 MB; the decompressed
.wav file would be 46.3 MB.
FLAC (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 31.2 MB
The following two pictures are here in order to illustrate that CD rips will
look different depending on the source and the kind of music. The first one
is a recording originally made in 1937, digitally remastered from the analogue
master in 2000. It's the small jazz group Benny Goodman Quartet (clarinet,
piano, vibraphone and drums) playing "Tea For Two". This is what old and
most new acoustic recordings will look like. In other words, there is not
necessarily anything wrong with a CD rip that does not show audio data all
the way up to 22 kHz per channel. The second picture drives this fact
home: it is Mitsuko Uchida playing the rondo from Mozart's KV. 545,
recorded digitally in 1984 by Philips' finest.
FLAC (small group jazz, 12.9 MB)
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FLAC (classical solo piano, 6.6 MB)
4. LAME mp3
LAME mp3, starting with the highest CBR setting, 320 kbps. The frequency
has been cut off at 20.5 kHz - that is one reason for the comparatively small
size. Another reason is the removal of some "unnecessary" audio data, that
you can see in the stripey character of these pictures as compared to the
original FLAC. The V0 that follows should be equal in sound quality to the
320 kbps CBR, but it is smaller in size because lower bitrates have been
used for less complex parts of the audio, and the frequency maximum is at
19.5 kHz. Also, in the V0 you can see a "shelf" cut-off at 16 kHz, that is
more pronounced in the "transparent" V2 (max frequency at 18.5 kHz),
and prominent as a clear cut-off for the "acceptable" 128 kbps CBR.
LAME mp3 320 kbps (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 10.8 MB
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LAME mp3 V0 (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 8.8 MB
LAME mp3 V2 (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 6.6 MB
LAME mp3 128 kbps (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 4.3 MB
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5. Ogg Vorbis
Ogg Vorbis can go up to 500 kbps, and it thus has a higher "best possible"
quality than mp3, illustrated here by the q10 setting. Ogg Vorbis uses a
different algorithm from mp3, and doesn't cut off the frequency for the
higher quality settings: both the q10 and the "transparent" q6 shown here
have more or less audio data preserved at 22 kHz, though much less for the
q6. The "acceptable" quality q4, still reaches roughly 19 kHz, but you can
clearly see that some audio data is missing, compared to the original FLAC.
Ogg Vorbis q10 (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 15.4 MB
Ogg Vorbis q6 (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 5.8 MB
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Ogg Vorbis q4 (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 3.9 MB
6. Transcodes
So, encoding to lossy formats gives you the advantage of small file size at
the price of losing some audio data. This simple fact should be enough to
explain why you can not encode such files again, and get higher quality
audio files. You simply can not regain lost audio data, not by increasing the
bitrate, and not by converting to another format.
The quality will actually decline in lossy to lossy encoding, even if you try to
"increase" the quality by encoding to a higher bitrate, since the algorithm
for removing "unnecessary" audio data is applied once again. If you encode
from lossy to lossless, the quality will stay exactly the same, only the file size
gets bigger. See the screenshots below. Yes, they look very much like the
mp3 128 and the V0 above, respectively, but these really are screenshots
of transcodes.
Do not ever do it.
128 kbps LAME mp3 transcoded to 320 kbps LAME mp3 (I Feel You,
Depeche Mode) 10.8 MB
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V0 LAME mp3 transcoded to FLAC (I Feel You, Depeche Mode) 30.4 MB

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