The British Federation of Audio (BFA) condemns low bit-rate audio files
Posted by Sachin Garg on 13th February 2006 | Permanent Link
The British Federation of Audio (BFA) – the UK’s specialist AV consumer electronics trade body - has come out saying it’s concerned that consumers are not getting the enjoyment they could from their portable music devices or Hi-Fis, with today’s music fans happy to download and listen to low bit-rate music files – which often don’t come even close to CD quality.
As storage becomes more cheaper, lossless audio is without doubt the future.
What do you think is an acceptable bit-rate for compressed audio? Does digital compression bother you or at the end of the day is it the quality of the songs themselves that’s most important?
February 15th, 2006 at 3:50 pm
The lowest acceptable bitrate is the bitrate that will pass an A/B blind test. It completely depends on the source material, the compression method, the encoder, and the reproduction system the user has access to (include his ears).
That being said, I encode my MP3s with LAME using “–preset standard”, which averages around ~215kbps for my entire collection. On my playback equipment with my ears, I cannot tell the difference.
February 16th, 2006 at 1:26 am
Most of my 60 GB collection is 128 kbs mp3s, I haven’t noticed them to be very different from 256 kbs. But 64 kbs mp3s are annoying to listen to.
Almost all of what I have was downloaded so I don’t know how it would compare to lossless, and I was smart enough not to re-encode 128 Kbs mp3s to 256 kbs for improving quality ;-)