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Re: MD v. DAT

Subject: Re: MD v. DAT
From: "Raimund Specht" <>
Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2003 12:27:59 -0000
Dan Dugan <> wrote:

> >The differences between various A/D converters or pre-amplifiers
can
> >surely be neglected compared to the effects sometimes introduced
by
> >ATRAC. Believe me or not ;-)
>
> I agree, and I'm an enthusiastic user of ATRAC. You
said "sometimes."
> Do you agree that it's higher-level stuff that trips up ATRAC, so
> it's not likely to be responsible for the low-level stuff Vicki
> described?

I'm not sure. Theoretically, lower levels require less bits for
error-free encoding and should be easier to process by ATRAC. For
example, a level of -24 dBFS would require only 12 instead of 16
bits (each bit represents 6 dB). This would reduce the amount of
data to 75% compared to a full-scale signal. These savings are
relatively low compared to the overall reduction of 20% in ATRAC.
The ATRAC encoder may benefit more from very low levels (e.g. -48
dBFS would reduce the amount of data by 50%).

So it depends on how 'low-level' the stuff really is. By theory,
only very low levels should have a significantly positive effect on
the compression. But I still have no practical experience on this,
because I have tested only higher-level stuff.

Best regards,
Raimund Specht



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