This reminds me of Monty's A Digital Media Primer for Geeks[0] and Digital Show & Tell[1] - the delivery, the explanations and the way the experiments are set up is superb.
The article's author, Chris "Monty" Montgomery, is one of the authors of Ogg Vorbis [1] and Opus [2].
It puzzles me that many people don't yet know about Opus. Let me quote the FAQ [3]:
"Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete?
Yes.
From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...)."
I use Opus for music playback for all my archived music. The reason it's not more widespread was opposition of the likes of Apple to free codecs. Today they are losing this, and Opus is making its way even to Apple's systems.
I love opus just as much as I loved musepack and vorbis, the one thing all of them lack to one degree or another is support and hardware acceleration. If I throw an opus file on my Android 8.1 phone, it has no idea what to do with it unless I manually open it with vlc or foobar. For the regular user the support needs to be seamless, otherwise they are not going to bother.
The use of analogue gear in #2 is one of those things that as someone who _already believed what Monty is showing here_ I wouldn't have thought to do. But it really heads off a bunch of arguments.
And twenty years from now it's going to be hard because you'll have to scrounge the gear from a museum instead of it being available for a reasonable price from eBay or borrowing it off somebody who kept it in the cupboard after upgrading to modern digital gear. So I'm glad Monty did it in that era where the gear was still available.
Honestly it is remarkable how many engineers (self-proclaimed or otherwise) in audio don't understand the basics of sampled systems and quantization. You'd think that anyone making broad claims about these kinds of systems would have at least a rough understanding of the foundational principles, but no.
teknico|7 years ago
It puzzles me that many people don't yet know about Opus. Let me quote the FAQ [3]:
"Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete?
Yes.
From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...)."
[1] https://xiph.org/vorbis/
[2] http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/
[3] https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other...
shmerl|7 years ago
deevious|7 years ago
ValentineC|7 years ago
tialaramex|7 years ago
And twenty years from now it's going to be hard because you'll have to scrounge the gear from a museum instead of it being available for a reasonable price from eBay or borrowing it off somebody who kept it in the cupboard after upgrading to modern digital gear. So I'm glad Monty did it in that era where the gear was still available.
blattimwind|7 years ago