Author Topic: Audio quality isn't that good  (Read 37962 times)

dusty-2011

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After the fix, you still need a bit more negative pre-amp than the max positive boost you apply. You can easily verify this by putting the pre-amp at -15dB and all bars at +15dB, it still distorts quite a bit, but much less than before. Is this expected behavior?

hiccup

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After the fix, you still need a bit more negative pre-amp than the max positive boost you apply. You can easily verify this by putting the pre-amp at -15dB and all bars at +15dB, it still distorts quite a bit, but much less than before. Is this expected behavior?

That will be because of the overlap between adjusted frequencies.
This screenshot (a parametric EQ) shows it well. I boosted 2kHz and 3kHz with 3dB:
 


Hifihedgehog

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Hopefully, I am not necroing this too badly. However, I wanted pipe up and praise how much clean sounding mp3 decoding sounds on MusicBee compared to Foobar2000. I stop and wonder what all the big deal is about Foobar2000 in the audiophile community. In my mind's eye, it looks like something stolen from the 90s that lacks features even with its vast extension library. MusicBee actually looks and feels like something premium, but most especially sounds premium. I cannot get over how much better at neutral, stock settings how much better MusicBee sounds, verified extensively on my HD 800 + Objective2 with Booster Board (which, thanks to this uber-rare upgrade, features less than .001% THD+noise!), than Foobar2000 ever did. Then again, even MPC-HC and Kodi have always sounded better than Foobar2000. There is something seriously wrong in Foobar2000's coding, perhaps the way timing is handled or the way it passes sound data to the system, that sounds slightly hazy in a way. Thank you for MusicBee, especially the UWP version that I use regularly.

Alumni

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Hopefully, I am not necroing this too badly. However, I wanted pipe up and praise how much clean sounding mp3 decoding sounds on MusicBee compared to Foobar2000. I stop and wonder what all the big deal is about Foobar2000 in the audiophile community. In my mind's eye, it looks like something stolen from the 90s that lacks features even with its vast extension library. MusicBee actually looks and feels like something premium, but most especially sounds premium. I cannot get over how much better at neutral, stock settings how much better MusicBee sounds, verified extensively on my HD 800 + Objective2 with Booster Board (which, thanks to this uber-rare upgrade, features less than .001% THD+noise!), than Foobar2000 ever did. Then again, even MPC-HC and Kodi have always sounded better than Foobar2000. There is something seriously wrong in Foobar2000's coding, perhaps the way timing is handled or the way it passes sound data to the system, that sounds slightly hazy in a way. Thank you for MusicBee, especially the UWP version that I use regularly.

All things being equal (bit-perfect playback, replaygain off, flat EQ, etc.) I seriously doubt anyone would be able to reliably distinguish a difference in sound quality between foobar2000 and MusicBee. I say this with plenty of experience using both programs.

Hifihedgehog

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And I reiterate that my findings having listened to both extensively as well as to countless paid and free players on various platforms over the last decade. Foobar2000 may very well be, for all intents and purposes, audibly transparent to untrained or non-golden ears on lesser hardware, such a treble-challenged Sennheiser HD 650 or a distortion-prone Grado through a tube amplifier or a distortion-prone solid state amplifier. I will clarify and qualify this in stating that it is not that MusicBee is the only transparent player but, rather, that Foobar2000 is one of a few which are somewhat audibly flawed. In my experience, MusicBee and even something mainstream and non-audiophile of the likes of Groove Music are audibly transparent, whereas Foobar2000 is not. I can reliably and blindly tell whenever Foobar2000 is playing and is not as transients and dynamic range is highly muted when decoding high-bitrate MP3s. This is while ensuring that playback is bit-matched, ReplayGain is turned off, and no extensions or plug-ins are enabled. I say this as an objective audiophile, being a voracious reader of NwAvGuy, Archimago, and many other objective type audiophile bloggers. Somewhere in Foobar2000's codebase is something not quite right, and that is why I do not recommend it or use it except in duress or with lesser, unrevealing equipment where its MP3 audio flaw is effectively transparent.
Last Edit: May 19, 2018, 06:23:48 AM by Hifihedgehog

frankz

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...untrained or non-golden ears...
...high-bitrate MP3s....
...I say this as an objective audiophile...
Dude.