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Re: YouTube sound quality

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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