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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, listening the the samples [0], the OPUS one is almost unbearably noisy, whereas the MP3 while, while clearly low quality, is still listenable. Am I missing something, why is OPUS doing so poorly?

[0] http://ajroach42.com/floppycast-examples/

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As sad as this sounds, I think based upon the slurring of "s" sounds, that I recognize those source HHGTTG encodings, having listened to them on loop for hours at a time whilst coding. I think they're the 56kb/s MP3 ones that were floating around a couple of decades ago. There are some 128kb/s ones that might be a bit fairer.

It's interesting. The OPUS one is noisy, but pretty crisp. MP3 is smooth but more muffled. (like it lacks dynamic range) Honestly, I'd rather listen to the OPUS version if these were the only choices.

That's odd. My experience was the opposite. Although the Opus one was a bit muffled and some of the low end was missing so I had to strain a little to hear, the MP3 was a cacophony of pops and whistles all the way through. It was annoying and hard to concentrate on. I'd take the Opus one every time.

I will say the music part was interesting. I could mostly make out the song on the MP3. On Opus, I could barely tell there was music there. A lot of it was just missing.

he used the opusenc setting "tuned for speech" and music sections (like :22) sound awful. would like to know what it would sound like without that mode turned on, as it also surprises me how bad opus sounds vs mp3.

The opus file is at 6kbps, the mp3 at 8.

Opus file is tuned for speech, mp3 isn't.

The opus file sounds unbearable when the music is playing, but is clearer otherwise.

Double the bitrate and opus is way ahead.

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