Re: Just out of interest..

Roderick Stewart wrote:
In article <m8xlg.28477$lQ.24536@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, DAB sounds
worse than FM wrote:
In 25 years time when we've all got optical fibre bringing all our
information and communications in and out of our homes, and our
computer disks are 100 times as big as they are now, a discussion
about how much quality do discard deliberately from our broadcasts
will seem as silly as the notion of recording computer programmes on
compact cassettes and waiting ten minutes for them to load.

But we're talking about the present day, not 25 years into the
future. Current limitations require audio compression, and that will
be the case for many years to come.

I think it may surprise you how quickly things can change,


It wouldn't surprise me, and I don't dispute any of what you say about what
things will be like in 25 years - actually, I think you vastly
underestimated how much memory we'll have on our PCs in 25 years' time
(they're predicting we'll have 5 TB of capacity by 2010).

But you're talking about 25 years, and that is a very long time into the
future - that's my point.


and by how
much. 25 years ago the internet was unheard of and nobody had a
mobile phone, the CD had yet to be invented so we used compact
cassettes and gramophone records. Television broadcasts had mono
sound, computers used a system called MS-DOS and many of them only
had floppy disks and no hard drives. A printer would be a mechanical
dot-matrix type that made a lot of noise and could only print in one
colour. Photography meant using chemical film and waiting a week to
see the results, usually only 6" x 4" prints. There were no
electronic navigators for cars, so you'd still have to use a map. In
the supermarket, every item would have to be entered on a keyboard
instead of being flashed past a laser scanner, and you'd pay for the
items using cash for which you'd probably had to visit a bank and
write a cheque.

Those are just a few of the more significant technological changes
that have affected our everyday lives during the *last* 25 years, so
think what the *next* 25 years could bring.


See above.


As you keep reminding us, DAB is at least 10 year old technology


16 years old, actually.


and
effectively out of date before it is even fully implemented. It makes
serious use of data reduction to squeeze all the required services
through the limitations of today's transmission systems. Any
broadcasting system that aspires to be future-proof should not have
any data reduction built in as standard.


I totally disagree. AAC at 160 kbps provides a level of audio quality that
is virtually indistinguishable from the original.

I think I've asked you to perform an experiment about this before, and I'm
going to go through it step by step, so please do me a favour and carry out
the following:

Download and install iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
Download and install Exact Audio Copy (EAC):
http://www.digital-world.de/downloads/audio/software/1253089/index.html

(or if you've already got some CD ripping software, use that instead)

Put a CD in your PC's CD/DVD drive

In EAC, click on the track(s) you want to 'rip' off the CD, then click on
the WAV icon. Select where you want to store the file(s), then OK.

EAC will then 'rip' the audio off the CD leaving you with WAV file versions
of all the tracks you've selected on the CD.

Open iTunes.
Go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced tab
In the Advanced tab go to the Importing tab and select the following:

Import Using: AAC Encoder
Setting: High Quality (128 kbps) << you can select other bit rates etc from
this drop-down menu by selecting Custom

Click OK

Go to File > Add file to library
Select the WAV file(s) you've just ripped from your CD

Assuming you're looking at the Library, right-click on the track that's just
been added to the Library, and click Convert Selection to AAC

You'll then have the original uncompressed WAV file and the AAC version of
that WAV file.

Play one then the other and see how much difference there is between them.
If you don't have your PC connected to your hi-fi system, you'll need to
decode the AAC file back to WAV. So go back to Edit > Preferences > Advanced
tab and change AAC Encoder to WAV Encoder, then right-click on the AAC file
and Convert Selection to WAV. Then burn both files to a CD and play them on
your CD player, making sure you know which file is which.

When you've done that, come back and tell us whether you could tell the
difference. If you can tell the difference, repeat the above process using
higher AAC bit rates until you can't tell the difference between the
uncompressed WAV file and the AAC file and tell us at what AAC bit rate you
can't tell the difference between the two files.




--
Steve - www.digitalradiotech.co.uk - Digital Radio News & Info

Find the cheapest Freeview & DAB prices:
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/freeview/freeview_receivers.php
http://www.digitalradiotech.co.uk/dab/dab_radios.php


.

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