 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: DougR
Date: 2016-09-04 10:26
I am by no means an audiophile, but I was just looking thru YouTube for a friend who's doing the Premiere Rhapsodie in a while. The sound quality of most of the clips ranged from middling to awful, even when the "HD"/720 option is selected. The Rhapsodie version by George Pieterson and the Royal Concertgebouw sounded so bad (but the performance was so good) that I had to buy it off Amazon as a 256kbps MP3, and it sounds SO much better.
So asking those who know more than I, is there such a thing as good YouTube sound? Most of it, when I'm able to a/b it with a cd or a higher bit rate sound file I have, sounds pretty bad in comparison (even when the blurb on it has a phrase like "Enhanced HD Sound".
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Author: Michael E. Shultz
Date: 2016-09-04 15:18
My computer setup uses a Creative SB X-Fi DSP sound card with 2 Sony SS-B3000 speakers. My audio system has 2 Realistic Nova-16 speakers with a Realistic subwoofer. I could add a subwoofer to the computer, but I am pretty sure the audio system would still sound better.
You want videos with HD Sound. Videos with HQ quality may not have any better sound, and the HQ quality video consumes bandwidth.
My experience has been that CDs sound better than anything on YouTube.
I downloaded the Somali Refugee Appeal Single by Poly Styrene from Amazon. I prefer to buy CDs, but this is only available as a download. It has decent sound quality.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Groucho Marx
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-09-04 17:16
One could argue that in some cases you get what you pay for.
Karl
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Author: bmcgar ★2017
Date: 2016-09-04 17:34
The quality of YouTube audio is mostly based on the recording itself, not YouTube or your hardware (as long as it's decently up to date).
"Silk purse" stuff.
B.
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Author: johng ★2017
Date: 2016-09-04 22:26
In some sense I agree with bmcgar that the best You Tube sound starts with the best quality original recording you can get. On the other hand, You Tube does some filtering of their own, I believe, that can take an otherwise good sounding audio and ruin it. I have many of my own recordings on You Tube for my sheet music and when I am not careful to render the recording at the very highest level possible some of those recordings are a bit disappointing when heard on You Tube. It all has to do with trimming the file sizes, probably.
John Gibson, Founder of JB Linear Music, www.music4woodwinds.com
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Author: Wes
Date: 2016-09-04 22:52
Sound quality is not good on most of today's media compared to that of years ago, including telephone, smart phone, TV, etc.
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Author: Michael E. Shultz
Date: 2016-09-05 03:04
What I am reading on the web is that while YouTube audio quality in the past went up to 192 kbps, it is now capped at 126-128 kbps.
According to my computer, 2 of the songs on the Poly Styrene download are at 320 kbps, while the 3rd is at 192 kbps.
If you can hear the difference between 128 kbps and 256 kbps, then the answer to "Is there such a thing as good YouTube sound?" has to be No.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Groucho Marx
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Author: SonicManEXE
Date: 2016-09-05 04:42
YouTube is good for looking up music just to know what it sounds like, but even if it's true that they now cap the quality (and there's no reason to not believe that), there has to be some sort of compression of both video and audio anyway so people with weak or mobile connections can load videos without having to wait an eternity (also even with the best connections it could take a while to load an uncompressed video). Assuming it sounds good in the first place, CDs and high-quality downloads (usually M4A, FLAC, etc.) will sound the best.
FLAC is a somewhat more recent codec that is lossless and is generally considered to be the current king of audio. M4A can be encoded with Apple Lossless and will still get you amazing quality. However, for many people (especially considering their setups, which is usually Apple earbuds or some other common shelftop product plugged into a phone or a computer with no discrete sound card), an MP3 ripped from a CD @256kbps will sound pretty much the same as a 360kbps MP3 or even a FLAC file one can find floating around the internet. That's again assuming the source sounds good. If you're listening to MP3s that have been ripped from CDs and burned back onto CDs and re-ripped time and time again you may as well be listening to a cassette that's been playing every day for the past 20 years.
But to get off of my tangent and answer the question, it mostly depends on the source, but usually there is no "good YouTube sound."
Jared
Ft. Lauderdale & Tampa, FL
Post Edited (2016-09-05 04:43)
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Author: DougR
Date: 2016-09-05 22:59
Thanks everyone!
I did a little looking around on my own as well and found some 'interesting' things.
I ought to make one thing clear, which is that for my purposes "good YouTube sound" is sound that's free of distortion, audible audio artifacts like crunching paper sounds, or graininess--real obvious stuff, in other words. I'm not capable of discriminating between 256kbps versus 320kbps, or probably even lower bit rates--I'd need someone to school me on that.
My initial default position has always been 'YouTube sound sucks". After reading the above comments and doing some prospecting on the internet my revised conclusion is "not necessarily."
First of all, evidently the video quality setting DOES affect sound quality. It always did, just that prior to 2011 the bit rates were much lower.
Second, I agree with Jared that YouTube is a decent place to hear what music sounds like; but my conclusion is, if I'm looking for an archival high-quality version I'll have to buy it.
(Case in point, the George Pieterson Premiere Rhapsodie YT clip I mentioned above has the same audible distortions of Pieterson's sound at 1080p that it does at 480p, but the 99-cent mp3 download from Amazon (256kbps) sounds fine.) This suggests the problem with the YouTube Pieterson clip might be source material or the upload process, rather than YouTube sound quality per se.
I'm already so much farther into the weeds with this than I ever intended to be that I'll stop shortly. However, here's an interesting article on YouTube sound:
https://www.h3xed.com/web-and-internet/youtube-audio-quality-bitrate-240p-360p-480p-720p-1080p
The article also has a spiffy little tool you can use to analyze YouTube sound and audio quality of specific YouTube clips. Unfortunately to read the results you need a program from "ffprobe" and for me, on this Labor Day, that's a bridge too far.
Happy Labor Day everybody, and thanks for contributing.
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Author: Wes
Date: 2016-09-06 01:23
In May of 2015, I played the oboe in a live orchestra concert in the large lobby of the headquarters of You Tube, in Culver City, CA. It was high fidelity, you can be sure! It was exactly on the site of the employee relations wood building of the Hughes Aircraft Company where I signed in as a new engineering employee in July 1951!
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Author: clarnibass
Date: 2016-09-06 09:17
I think YouTube uses about 128 mp3 quality which isn't great but not bad. Listen to some of the officially released videos (e.g. pop music), it sounds ok. If a YouTube sounds terrible it's likely a bad recording or some kind of problem when it was transferred that ruined the sound.
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