Jump to content
Sign in to follow this  
luisam

Don't get cheated with with faked quality audio files

Recommended Posts

Music lovers always try to get the best quality audio and one of the preferred format is FLAC. With greater download rates widely available, you can get more and more audio stuff in this format.

 

But, is it always really WORTH the trouble? So, you have the latest and best quality audio headphones or speakers and you want to listen the best quality music and you are bored of listening those low quality Bill Haley records from late 50s. And you see the light: a new album in FLAC format form your beloved 50s rock stars! But can you really expect to get that great audio quality from some records from the 50s or the 60s? Those years many records were made after one or two trials and frequently they were released using the first take. Many hits were released in 45 or even 78 rpm and were rather low quality. Even LPs, the latest hi-fi music of the 50s, were quite poor. Frequently a cheaper mono was released together with a quite primitive two channel stereo and "music engineering" was just incipient. Listening both of them, you may even find out the mono sounds better than stereo!

 

Then in the 90s, enter the CD. Disk industry began re-releasing digitized copies of some quiet mediocre originals. But even worse: people started to burn pirated CDs with the 128 kbps files. I have seen even CDs burned with 96 kbps files.  Now, what kind of quality do you expect from a FLAC produced form this CD? Off course, just 128 kbps or 96 kbps!

 

So, you had your MP3 oldie in your discography, saved using a modest 128 kbps format and now you replaced it with a loss-less FLAC. Actually all you've achieved was replacing a 3 Mb file with another one of 20 Mb, with zero improvement in quality.

 

The solution to this issue is very simple: you don’t need any sophisticated hardware, just run your audio file with SPEK - a free acoustic spectrum analyzer / spectrogram viewer and you don't need to be a music geek to us it. After running several files you'll learn how to interpret the graphic output. Find SPEK at spek.cc .

  • Thanks 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  

×