If any of you do a lot of listening at your PC, I ran into something today that may be of interest.
I've been listening to MP3s on the command line using madplay.exe, cuz winamp sounded like ass, even with the MAD plugin. It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream, and I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
John van Ommen
It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream,
and
I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Could you please give more details: wich winamp version was shipped with a restricted wav-out and wich version of the plugin did you used instead?
Regards,
---- Gabriel Bouvigne www.mp3-tech.org personal page: http://gabriel.mp3-tech.org
mmm,
although it sounds silly that compressing and upsampling would better the soundquality, I remember a review of the 18-bits DCC player (sadly lost the war with minidisc) where a few panel meber actually thought that the dcc (blind test) sounded more analogue / less grainy / clearer than the original cd that was included in the blindtest aswell. Can't remember the cd-player in question, but they did use a very high quality one.
Regards,
Hans.
----- Original Message ----- From: "John van Ommen" jvanommen@verio.net To: bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu Cc: mad-user@lists.mars.org Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 9:40 AM Subject: Huuuuuuuge Improvement to My Stereo
If any of you do a lot of listening at your PC, I ran into something today that may be of interest.
I've been listening to MP3s on the command line using madplay.exe, cuz winamp sounded like ass, even with the MAD plugin. It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream,
and
I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
John van Ommen
At 09:55 AM 21/02/2002 +0100, Hans Laros wrote:
mmm,
although it sounds silly that compressing and upsampling would better the soundquality, I remember a review of the 18-bits DCC player (sadly lost the war with minidisc) where a few panel meber actually thought that the dcc (blind test) sounded more analogue / less grainy / clearer than the original cd that was included in the blindtest aswell. Can't remember the cd-player in question, but they did use a very high quality one.
I borrowed a high quality cd player to make copies of cd's onto minidisc and blow me over but the copy seemed to be more dynamic and spritely then the original, the minidisc is 20-bit. And while I was expecting it not to sound much diffrent it was better. the diffrence was not a subtle one.
Horst
It's really hard to explain why upsampling works without resorting to graphs. Basically, audio theory says that 40,000khz is adequate to play back a 20khz sinewave. But if you think about it, a sampling rate of only 44,000 hz gives a VERY crude approximation of a sine wave. Sure, the peaks and the valleys are there, but the sine wave now looks more like a square wave than a sine wave.
With upsampling, you can interpolate that waveform to *approximate* a sine wave. Obviously, the best solution would be to do the original recording at a extremely high sampling rate.
John
P.S.
Here's my graph:
Analog 20khz sine wave : ** ** * * * * * * * * * * * * ** and here's what a 44khz DAC does to a 20khz signal:
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
As you can see, there's little more than a passing resemblance to a sine wave at that sampling rate, the interval is too coarse.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu [mailto:owner-bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu]On Behalf Of Hans Laros Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 12:55 AM To: bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu Cc: mad-user@lists.mars.org Subject: Re: Huuuuuuuge Improvement to My Stereo
mmm,
although it sounds silly that compressing and upsampling would better the soundquality, I remember a review of the 18-bits DCC player (sadly lost the war with minidisc) where a few panel meber actually thought that the dcc (blind test) sounded more analogue / less grainy / clearer than the original cd that was included in the blindtest aswell. Can't remember the cd-player in question, but they did use a very high quality one.
Regards,
Hans.
----- Original Message ----- From: "John van Ommen" jvanommen@verio.net To: bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu Cc: mad-user@lists.mars.org Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 9:40 AM Subject: Huuuuuuuge Improvement to My Stereo
If any of you do a lot of listening at your PC, I ran into something today that may be of interest.
I've been listening to MP3s on the command line using madplay.exe, cuz winamp sounded like ass, even with the MAD plugin. It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream,
and
I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
John van Ommen
Don't forget John, that the 44kHz lobes on the crummy looking 20kHz square wave of yours are going to be filtered out before it gets to the output. Then you will have a nice clean 20kHz sine wave again.
Steve
----- Original Message ----- From: John van Ommen jvanommen@verio.net To: hanslaros@hotmail.com Cc: bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu; mad-user@lists.mars.org Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 2:22 AM Subject: RE: Huuuuuuuge Improvement to My Stereo
It's really hard to explain why upsampling works without resorting to graphs. Basically, audio theory says that 40,000khz is adequate to play back a 20khz sinewave. But if you think about it, a sampling rate of only 44,000 hz gives a VERY crude approximation of a sine wave. Sure, the peaks and the valleys are there, but the sine wave now looks more like a square wave than a sine wave.
With upsampling, you can interpolate that waveform to *approximate* a sine wave. Obviously, the best solution would be to do the original recording at a extremely high sampling rate.
John
P.S.
Here's my graph:
Analog 20khz sine wave : ** ** * * * * * * * * * * * * ** and here's what a 44khz DAC does to a 20khz signal:
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
As you can see, there's little more than a passing resemblance to a sine wave at that sampling rate, the interval is too coarse.
this is what that '1bit' CD standard is supposed to solve.
i am starting to think that it's actually a pretty good id, tho 1500 bux for a CD player/recorder is awfully challenging...
On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, John van Ommen wrote:
It's really hard to explain why upsampling works without resorting to graphs. Basically, audio theory says that 40,000khz is adequate to play back a 20khz sinewave. But if you think about it, a sampling rate of only 44,000 hz gives a VERY crude approximation of a sine wave. Sure, the peaks and the valleys are there, but the sine wave now looks more like a square wave than a sine wave.
With upsampling, you can interpolate that waveform to *approximate* a sine wave. Obviously, the best solution would be to do the original recording at a extremely high sampling rate.
John
P.S.
Here's my graph:
Analog 20khz sine wave : ** ** * * * * * * * * * * * * ** and here's what a 44khz DAC does to a 20khz signal:
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****As you can see, there's little more than a passing resemblance to a sine wave at that sampling rate, the interval is too coarse.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu [mailto:owner-bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu]On Behalf Of Hans Laros Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 12:55 AM To: bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu Cc: mad-user@lists.mars.org Subject: Re: Huuuuuuuge Improvement to My Stereo
mmm,
although it sounds silly that compressing and upsampling would better the soundquality, I remember a review of the 18-bits DCC player (sadly lost the war with minidisc) where a few panel meber actually thought that the dcc (blind test) sounded more analogue / less grainy / clearer than the original cd that was included in the blindtest aswell. Can't remember the cd-player in question, but they did use a very high quality one.
Regards,
Hans.
----- Original Message ----- From: "John van Ommen" jvanommen@verio.net To: bass@lists.cc.utexas.edu Cc: mad-user@lists.mars.org Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 9:40 AM Subject: Huuuuuuuge Improvement to My Stereo
If any of you do a lot of listening at your PC, I ran into something today that may be of interest.
I've been listening to MP3s on the command line using madplay.exe, cuz winamp sounded like ass, even with the MAD plugin. It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream,
and
I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
John van Ommen
John,
To challenge this statement of yours : I once tested my then new Marantz CD-63 MkII KI Signature CD-player (a respectable one in my opinion) and played a CD where I had put a 20 kHz sinus testsignal on (made with CoolEdit, so with mathematical precision). The output signal was a perfect distortion free sinus of the exact amplitude which proved the validity of the Nyquist sampling theorem to me. Don't let your mind fool you (it indeed sounds strange that 2 samples per period suffice to reproduce a periodical sinewave, but I assure you : it is) !
Kind regards,
Luc Henderieckx luc.henderieckx@pandora.be http://users.pandora.be/airborne
It's really hard to explain why upsampling works without resorting to graphs. Basically, audio theory says that 40,000khz is adequate to play back a 20khz sinewave. But if you think about it, a sampling rate of only 44,000 hz gives a VERY crude approximation of a sine wave. Sure, the
peaks
and the valleys are there, but the sine wave now looks more like a square wave than a sine wave.
With upsampling, you can interpolate that waveform to *approximate* a sine wave. Obviously, the best solution would be to do the original recording
at
a extremely high sampling rate.
I had something similar. I used to play mp3s from my laptop PC. When the laptop crashed recently, I re-installed the OS. To my surprise, the audio came out dull and flat. I noticed that there were two different sets of drivers for the soundmodule. After installing the other drivers, the old great sound was back (to my relief).
Apparently the drivers can have a substantial impact on the way the sound is output on the line-out. Whether that is a result of better software or software that activates better hardware (i.e. a generic set of drivers vs. a h/w specific set) I don't have a clue.
Stefan
On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 12:40:55AM -0800, John van Ommen wrote:
If any of you do a lot of listening at your PC, I ran into something today that may be of interest.
I've been listening to MP3s on the command line using madplay.exe, cuz winamp sounded like ass, even with the MAD plugin. It turns out that a upgrade of wimamp had replaced my "wave out" output plugin in Winamp. As far as I can tell, the MAD input pluging was outputting a 24bit stream, and I think the wave out plugin was truncating it down to 16bit.
Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
John van Ommen
On Thursday, February 21, 2002, 7:40:55 PM, you wrote:
JvO> Nonetheless, I fixed the output plugin, and the difference is h-u-g-e. JvO> 24/96 soundcards playing MP3s upsampled to 24/48 really give CDs a run for JvO> their money. Especially at high volumes, the extra dynamics of 24bit are JvO> clear, and it seems like you can see 'deeper' into the recording as well.
Off-topic: I think you should try MPEGplus when you get a chance. www.mpegplus.de.
Rgds Dean-Ryan Stone www.dhryland.com
-
Dean-Ryan Stone -
Gabriel Bouvigne -
Hans Laros -
horst -
John Utz -
John van Ommen -
Luc Henderieckx -
Stefan Baltus -
Steve Hanna