Hmm ... potential audio war laugh

FWIW, here are my thoughts; I'm sure others will differ.

Background: I'm not absolutely certain when I did this, but 2009 looks likely when I was mid-fifties so my hearing would already have been fading. I compared MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, the first two at several bit rates, looking for the "indistinguishable from the CD". 128kbps didn't do it. 160kbps on MP3 seemed marginal ... mostly OK with a few "Oh" moments. 160kbps on Ogg was better. Faster bit rates were fine for me. With my codec, decompressed FLAC was binary identical to the source. If I did that again, I'd now use FLAC or similar, but I'm not sure how that would fit with PGM's marketing.
Back then I settled on Ogg Vorbis 44.1k and 160kbps.

I think there are good arguments for going to 48k sampling as I think resampling down should be better then resampling up.

Once inside the software itself, there's then the tradeoff between sample-rate plus sample depth and the amount of CPU time needed to process the data. My temptation in that case is to say stick with 48k sampling and 32-bit floating point and don't get carried away with more, because that will just hit the number of tracks and number of plug-ins.

Using graphics cards as the engine might recalibrate that.

All caveats apply, YMMV.


Edit .. Just an FYI aside: The reason I compared only MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, not WMA, is that as a Linux user there was no WMA. There are also, of course, more formats available today than there were 15 years ago.

Last edited by Gordon Scott; 03/23/24 03:34 PM. Reason: FYI addendum.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11
BIAB2025 Audiophile, a bunch of other software.
Kawai MP6, Ui24R, Focusrite Saffire Pro40 and Scarletts
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