Re: BBC radio chief Jenny Abramsky urges unity on DAB

seani wrote:


This particular rant aside, this is the point with any argument that
uses quality alone as a driver - it flies in the face of evidence and
experience. Time and time again, in all sorts of scenarios, people
have demonstrated that they are generally unwilling to spend on
quality alone (at least above a certain threshold, for a certain VFM).


That may well be true, but it doesn't mean that there isn't a limit to the lowest sound quality that people will accept.

128k became the norm for mp3 encoding. This doesn't exactly provide high sound quality, but it doesn't sound too bad either. If quality were not a factor, then wouldn't people have chosen to encode their mp3 files at 80k instead, or even 64k. That way they would be able to fit more music onto what ever device they were using. That sounds more convenient to me.

Presumably 128k ended up being widely used for mp3 because was the lowest quality level that people were willing to accept. This seems to be something that the DAB industry didn't consider when they chose the same rate for use with the much less efficient mp2 codec.

Richard E.
.

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