Doctor Who MP3's (was Hawkwind MP3's)

[Paul Mather]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2003 at 11:45:23AM -0400, Duc De Montfort wrote:
=> Intereseting point. (being a big Dr. Who fan)
=>
=> But I'd say that an audio drama is much less demanding frequency wise than
=> music.

This is certainly true---especially if that voice is recorded under
studio conditions where other ambient noise is dampened out.  (I
believe ~8 KHz bandwidth is sufficient to capture most human spoken
vocal ranges, Gilli Smyth excepted, of course.;)

=> Point being there is not much loss in MP3 for voice.  Opinions vary as to
=> the same argument for music.

Especially if that music is recorded live.  Much of the "room
ambience" is contained in the higher frequency ranges, which is
exactly the range that MPEG encoding usually deems redundant when
compressing, given that most of the spectral energy is concentrated in
the mid/lower frequencies.  Incidentally, this is one of the reasons
why studio recordings tend to sound much better than audience
recordings when MPEG compressed.  In the studio, they take great pains
to eliminate ambient noise.

Cheers,

Paul.

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
 deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
        --- Frank Vincent Zappa