Lossy or not?

[chilton]

Hi all -
I just got a cd-r with a 1977 show by a band I've been looking for forever.
It sounds like a rather muddy sbd, I'm guessing there are a few cassette generations. But hopefully no mp3, since I want to share it.

I ran a track through Traders Little Helper, with the result that it's CDDA with 53 percent probability.

I also opened the WAV in Adobe Audition and took this screenshot. What do you think?

[corsair]

Looks lossy to me...

Can u shorten the spectral view to about 2-3 seconds?

[chilton]

Looks lossy to me...
Can u shorten the spectral view to about 2-3 seconds?

Sigh...
Well, it's better to get the bad news now than to have a torrent banned.
I'll post a more detailed spectral jpeg later- Then there's another show by the same band I'll have to take a closer look at....

Thanks!

[chilton]

OK, here's a more detailed (hopefully) spectral of another track on the same disc.
Trader's Little Helper says there's a 43 % probability of this one being CDDA.

[Five]

these are both MD recordings, which are lossy (ATRAC) but considered tradeable when its an AUD master. Sometimes 60s and 70s stuff turns up thats been transferred to MD, this is not considered tradeable.

some examples of MD SA over here (http://www.thetradersden.org/forums/showthread.php?t=8003).

what are the dates of these shows, and what lineage information (if any) did you recieve?

[chilton]

what are the dates of these shows, and what lineage information (if any) did you recieve?

1977 and 1978 - but the tracks form the 1978 show got a 99 percent CDDA probability rating by Traders' Little Helper, so I guess that's OK, right?

Both shows sound like they've been taped straight from the sbd, the vocals and keyboards are in your face and you can hear the audience somewhere far away.
I'll try to check the lineage with the trader, but I'm not sure he'll know or care.
At the moment, I can only guess it's been transferred from an unknown gen cassette to MD and then CDR.
Thanks for taking the time to help.

[corsair]

Little helper is not really a good tool imo...

Looking at the spectrals already speaks volumes about it...Like Five said,
somebody prob transfer them from cassette to MD first.... like some stuff I used to get 5-6 yrs ago.

[Five]

TLH's lossy detection feature is not reliable enough, it can spot really obvious mp3 sources but also gives a pass to many lossy shows. Don't even bother with that, use your ears and SA/FA only.

there's some ppl who have really nice expensive home MD decks that they figure are as good as DAT, and mistakenly use them for archiving shows which were lossless up until then. good news is, it is most likely that you will be able to find the pure sources out there somewhere. In the meantime I would not trade the versions used for the screenshots above.

[chilton]

OK, just to be on the safe side then, here's a spectral shot of a wave file from the other sbd show I got in the same trade. As I said, this one passed the TLH test, but now I know better than to trust that.
So what's the verdict?

[Five]

that one is lossless for sure. if the color goes all the way to the top & no blocks visible when zoomed to 2seconds like this one, 99.9% it is lossless. AC3 is the hardest to spot, but that's another story...

[chilton]

that one is lossless for sure. .


Great!
These recordings are so rare that I'm satisfied with one out of two.

[the Flea]

Any clues as to what's the band ?

[chilton]

Any clues as to what's the band ?

OK, here's a clue - the guitarist co-wrote the greatest pop single of the new millennium.

But his own band doesn't mean anything to anybody on TTD, I'm afraid.
It's just the UK second division glam pop band Mud, going through the motions a couple of years after their run of bubblegum hits ended. At least it's a real kick for me and about three other sad collectors, the ones who can't get over the fact that Bowie killed off Ziggy.
I'll probably seed the lossless one on Dime, along with a request for more glam rock. It was never big in the States so I've never seen bands like Mud, Hello or Bay City Rollers on the trader sites.
When I finally found a trader with a huge list of glam and extra cheesy 70s pop, he only wanted 4 items from my 3000+ list. I thought long and hard before choosing these two shows, plus a so-bad-it's-good 1975 UK movie featuring Mud, and a dvd with home movie footage from the funeral for Sweet vocalist Brian Connolly.

[the Flea]

Ah yes Kylie Minogue and I can't get you out of my noggin I believe.

[chilton]

Here's another tricky one, for me anyway.
This Adobe Audition screenshot contains 2 seconds from an extremely poor audience recording of a 1978 show.
Lossless or not?

Perhaps I edited out too much from the shot: The red/yellow line at the bottom peaks around the 5000 Hz mark

[slewofboots]

Please include screenshots of the frequency analyses as well. Together, these two are a good judge of lossless or not. You can use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to do both, just click on Tools, Process Wave and you'll figure it out.

-Slew

[chilton]

Here's an EAC frequency analysis of the same track.

[slewofboots]

This second sample's freq. analysis looks lossless to me, there is no abrupt dropoff of frequencies anywhere near the high end (i.e. above 10kHz there's no dropoff noticeable).
And FYI - what I would do is use EAC for the spectral and freq. analyses, cause then you can combine both graphs in one screen shot.

[Five]

EAC is not reliable for FA/SA. It can spot some lossy sources, but not others.

CEP/Audition is best for SA, Analfreq is still best for FA fwiw. I'm always looking for something better if anybody knows.

from what I can see this one is seriously strange, can't recall ever seeing anything quite like it.

can you upload a sample of this track to rapidshare.com or similar so I can take a look and also hear it?

[chilton]

can you upload a sample of this track to rapidshare.com or similar so I can take a look and also hear it?

Here it is (but please don't judge me on the musical content)

http://rapidshare.com/files/12212117/Melton_3_sample.wav.html

While looking at the Audition meters while getting the sample ready, I saw the decibel meter going into the red zone and hitting the top repeatedly.
Could this be a case of a very poor audio recording sounding even worse after a digital transfer with the recording level set too high?

[slewofboots]

EAC is not reliable for FA/SA. It can spot some lossy sources, but not others.

CEP/Audition is best for SA, Analfreq is still best for FA fwiw. I'm always looking for something better if anybody knows.

from what I can see this one is seriously strange, can't recall ever seeing anything quite like it.

can you upload a sample of this track to rapidshare.com or similar so I can take a look and also hear it?

Five, explain how you can say that one spectral or frequency analysis is "better" than another? Only thing I can think of might be that you think the color scheme is easier to read on one graph compared to the next. I mean, come on we're talking about data points on a graph here. Plus, EAC doesn't "spot" a lossy source, instead it's the person reading the graph and looking for telltale signs. The x-axis and y-axis are the same for each program's graph, so what's the difference? Or are you claiming that EAC doesn't properly analyze the audio data?

[Five]

EAC shows a bunch of mirroring in the highs that isn't actually there.

check out this thread, keep reading to pg2 to see where I'm coming from
http://www.thetradersden.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1331

[Five]

ps ssamadhi97 really sums it up in the last post on pg3

[slewofboots]

thanks for the link.
After reading I still am not convinced that there is anything wrong with EAC - it would appear that one just needs to know how to use it (i.e. zoom in on 2-sec chunk, and also compare different chunks from different tracks throughout the recording).
However, the Anal Freq program appears to give a cleaner-looking graph based on the samples included in that link you posted above, but EAC gives you some extra flexibility what with the different types of FA graphs you can get.
Plus it has a nice dirty sounding name.

[Five]

Plus it has a nice dirty sounding name.
indeed! :lmao: :lmao:

the main thing I don't like about EAC is the false readings in the highs. I want to know if there is any noise up there or not. CEP/Audition is my favorite, but I believe that Audacity's SA is about equal once you set it to max out at 22050Hz in preferences. But I find Audacity's colour less intuitive since I use Audition seven days a week.

edit: meant audition seven days

[slewofboots]

Five, is there any reason my version of Cool Edit Pro (old school version 1.0) would have any problem doing nice SA and FA graphs? If not would you tell me how, please?

Thanks!

[Five]

so far as I know it works just as well as the more recent versions, altho I have only used as far back as v1.2a. There is one small bug in the FA that you have to watch out for, after opening the FA window it is sometimes necessary to move the cursor to another position to get an accurate reading. I'm not sure if the FA bug has been fixed, I've seen it as happen on versions as recent as CEP2.1

AnalFreq I still like better but it takes forever to render and only one channel at a time. And it usually crashes on my machine right at the end, but not before giving a really good graph.

you're welcome, hope this helps