Karaoke Forums

More and more kjs have switched to running there shows with a computer and have abandoned the disc format. However the quality of the sound is also sacraficed. Everything is compressed and sounds fair at best compared to the original cdg. Any hope that we may get equal quality or better someday?

Hmm, I would have to disagree. Both CD+G and computer are digital data. There is no degrading on computer just because you digitize the music. My computer, plus the equipment attached to it, can reproduce CDs at much higher quality than a typical CD player because I record most of my music at much higher sample rate than a typical CD. If you rip your CD+G at 256 kbits/sec or higher, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference since the bottleneck of the system becomes the digital data stored on CD+G. Matter of fact, I can't tell the difference when recorded at 192 kb/s

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Most of the people that went to computers did so when hard drives were smaller & more expensive. So they would rip their catalog at a lower bitrate (more compression) making a noticeable sound difference.
With the price of hard drives as low as they are now, you could get a 500gb for about $100 give or take & rip the discs at the best quality (192 for wma/320 for mp3) & still have room. Ripped at these rates, very little if any sound quality issues. I run MTU Hoster which is based on the wma, I rip all mine at 192 & have played the disc side by side with the computer running through a pro quality M-Audio 192 Audiophile sound card & there was no difference in sound quality. Although we could tell a difference going through the computer generic internal sound card. So that may play a factor as well.

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I haven't noticed a sound difference.

The big difference is, now I'm flying the Space Shuttle and discs are used by cavemen.

If you have a good soundcard for the computer, and you have your CDGs ripped at a high bitrate then there should be no difference in sound quality. With the improvements in electronics, even the default soundcards are often high quality.

I ripped all of my CDs as .wav files that suposedly contain all of the information of the origional CD track so there is no loss of sound quality from the CD even in concept (much less in perception).

As for lugging around a lot of CDs, keeping them organized, unscratched and clean in a busy bar setting, with limited light sounds like a nightmare.

Sure I could do it but why bother if there is a much better way.

Some of the Karaoke Makers insist using computers are illegal for karoake, and lets not get into that here, it has been pounded too much in the past.

It's true things have changed.. One terabyte is selling for $199.00 and yes, the 500s are as low as $79 on a good weekend..

(I have a few)

Digital files are great, but you should have a backup..

Yeah I was looking at a 750gb just 2 years ago & the price was almost $400. Amazing how much storage has dropped & gotten bigger at the same time.

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At 192kbps the bottle neck would be the speakers; not the mp3 files.

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I can neither confirm nor deny ever having or knowing anything about nothing.... mrscott

sampling rates!!

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C Mc
KJ, FL

It may well be that ripping an mp3+g file from a CDG you lose some audio quality.
But I doubt that 97.9% of the singers and listeners can tell the differance.

The other 2.1% are just CRAZY to worry about it .....

As long as it's ripped at a reasonable rate at least 192 or better, then I doubt most would be able to tell. Under that you can start to hear it in the high end.

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Actually, that number should be 100% and if someone says that they can tell the difference then they are lying. Let me try to explain.

The music on a CD is recorded at 44Kbits/sec. That doesn't change. Human ear can only hear up to 20Khz or 20,000 samples/sec. Usually sampling rate is twice to make sure that you read the each sample twice in order to distinguish the signal. That's why CDs are recorded at 44Kb/s or twice maximum theoretical human frequency.

Remember, these data written on the CD (or CD+G since CD+G is just some graphics data embedded between CD data) is digital, that is either on or off (1 or 0 in digital world). These are written to be read at 44KHz or 44,000 samples per second. If you read it 128Kbits/sec, you are reading at about 3 times the sampling rate of the what the CD was written. What does that do? Not much. Reading the same bit 3 times, whether 1 or 0, it doesn't change the bit, it is still 1 or 0. If you go 3x the sampling rate during the same time versus just once doesn't buy you much in fidelity What you do get is you get less read errors thus you get closer to the original CD music, no better.

So, the reason for the higher sampling rate is for you to get less errors not sound better. If you had perfect errorless system, 44Ksamples is all you need to get the perfect sound from CDs.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

But sometimes that 2.1% often includes your best singers, the vast majority crowd may not notice the difference in the songs but they DO notice when your best singers really get into your songs and do a great job. It is the few awesome singers that show up and sometimes make a so-so show into a great show. Many of them are music purists (and CRAZY about it).

That said it is not even going to be 2.1% at 192 or better bitrate....

But enough people (and enough of the purists) will notice at 128.

As I said before, if you have the CD and the (cheap) hard drive space, why not go with lossless .wav files that contain ALL of the digital sound info on the CD.

I am surprised to hear that since there is no way people should be able to distinguish anything agove 128kbps unless your system reads many errors. Even then, it should not be an issue since most digital data has error correction to data read from storage devices like CD players.

There can be two things that can be happening. First, if you use a bad codec, then I can see the reproduction is not as good and may need higher digitizing samples to get a better sound. Codec is used to compress the data so it takes less space on your hard drive. There was another thread about the codec and compression so I won't discuss, bottom line, do not compress if you can. If you have to compress, choose a better codec, like LAME code.

If you take the same system from the beginning to the end, that is ripping from digital data on CD to your mixer, there should be no discernible differences between any music above 128kbps. As I said before, unless you have a noisy system that has a lot of read error, you shouldn't be able to tell the differences in a blind test. It's all in your head.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

The fact that this discussion exists proves that there is a difference between the bitrates...

If 128 was good enough for the human ear, then there would be little interest in a format that used much more storage space.

Clearly going from 128 to lower rates even a partialy deaf person can tell the difference say between 56 and 128. 96 is even better, as is 128, 192 etc.

At some point the difference is noticeable.

It may not be noticeable for every song but it is there.

For a music purist, sometimes even one wrong note in a karaoke version can really annoy me and set me "off" my pace in singing the song. Sure it is a trivial difference but that is the difference between a 9 and a 10 in "quality".

The difference is mainly in the higher frequencies, and this is a good analysis of the difference.

http://www.fliptech.net/bitrate.shtml


The difference is generally confined to the high frequencies, and it is those frequencies that are rarely the "core" of the song but noticeable if they are missing.

Also the human hearing goes up to 20k htz and the 128 k seems to do a very good job up to 16 or so k htz.

Younger people's hearing is good up to the 20k range, older people generally loose much of that ablity...

This brings me back to my point, if it helps a small portion of your singers why not do it. It falls into the catagory of spending a little more on the Mic, Speakers, Karaoke song brand etc. Individually these differences are unlikely to ruin a show but they do add up a bit to the point that they are sometimes noticed....

Do we need to record at 320k and have $20,000 speakers, to get the best possible? No such an efort is often impractical. But it should be the goal to get as close to it as is practical to attract those that do care about quality. The additional effort of going 192 or higher vs 128 is very minor and it can be noticed by some people. In my view it is worth the effort even if it is one out of 100 at the show that notice the sound is "good".

I should probably just go look it up rather than taking the chance of starting an arguement but, didn't I once read that MP3 discards everything over 10,000 Hz?

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It would be for 22kHz sampling (the highest possible frequency is then 11kHz). For 44kHz you get up to 22kHz. You can create two MP3s, one at 22kHz and other at 44kHz and hear the difference.

For years and years we were all victims of the poorly recorded karaoke tracks - consider the number of times we've had to cringe our way through an imbalanced recording on a SGB copy of a song. I'm thinking that ripping at 192 and giving the singers the best we can by tweaking it further via the board makes it far more enjoyable than just playing a poorly recorded disc anyway.

When you really consider that most people (and I say most meaning people who are NOT involved in the music industry to any degree, beyond listening to a commercially recorded CD) who sing karaoke don't complain about these poorly recorded versions, it's really almost a moot point to begin a discussion about how people will hear or not hear the difference between a CD ripped at 92 or 192. Obviously if you are able to rip at 192, that is preferable. On the other hand, ask the average Joe and unless they are an audiophile, they're just happy to get up and sing....

...isn't there a saying that goes something like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear?

k

I agree. You would be better served to work more hours to buy some better tracks than you would be to spend those hours re-ripping at 192.

I am in the process of reading our singer history over the last year and figuring out what songs are most popular. I will look at those few hundred songs and try and figure out which ones are on poor versions. I then plan on buying custom CDs to upgrade those. We were just given a $100.00 per month budget for music at my service club, and so that should provide for 15 custom tracks plus the newest Chartbuster Country and Soundchoice Pop disks as they come out. (We don't get enough urban to matter here.) Then we can fill in some downloads as we do already.

We are ripping everything we can at 192, but frankly that is the least of our worries.

I can most certainly tell a major difference between 128 and 190 for example. Remember MP3 is not lossless - and the algorithms used do "throw away" what the designers decided was "not needed" (eg. outside the human audible range).

BUT - this also has an effect on some of the "within range" audio. You can hear digital manipulation of the small higher ranges for example.

HOWEVER - I can only detect this on my good headphones or in-car system. Not my karaoke setup.