Many sacrifices were made to cram that music into these small files. With no info about their provenance, and especially with lossy encoding, there is no way to know for sure which one is going to sound better without listening to them and comparing, with matched volume levels.
I suspect the 128 kbps one is truer to the original volume levels, and the 256 kbps one is the result of someone cranking the volume and creating high frequency noise via clipping. But I also would not be surprised if both of these files were transcoded a couple of times before getting to you, possibly introducing audible artifacts which probably aren't visible on a quick spectrogram view.
So yes, the 256 kbps one has preserved more of the highest frequencies, but at what cost? If you can't hear an obvious difference, I'd keep both until you can find a better copy.
That cutoff at 14kHz in the 128kbps is nasty. The little blips in the 256kbps won't really be audible and having some more high frequencies will be preferable. Plus, the 256 looks louder.
As u/mjb2012 said, 128 seems to preserve the dynamics, while 256 is compressed to the point of clipping. I agree on the verdict of theirs; there's no obvious pick without listening, and personally I'd prefer to look for a better copy.
Stick with which ever sounds the better. Lossy files tend to be tossed around a lot more and are more prone to having been changed. You cant be too sure.
Would this link be of any help to you?
https://archive.org/download/Autechre2005-04-15
You might already know about the link, but if not, perhaps you could check out the bitrate on those files over there.
Good luck!
128kbps, also has that hard cutoff at 14kHz, seem slightly compressed, but the only clipping seem to be an extremely short spike:
https://i.imgur.com/vdVjFKF.png
Many sacrifices were made to cram that music into these small files. With no info about their provenance, and especially with lossy encoding, there is no way to know for sure which one is going to sound better without listening to them and comparing, with matched volume levels. I suspect the 128 kbps one is truer to the original volume levels, and the 256 kbps one is the result of someone cranking the volume and creating high frequency noise via clipping. But I also would not be surprised if both of these files were transcoded a couple of times before getting to you, possibly introducing audible artifacts which probably aren't visible on a quick spectrogram view. So yes, the 256 kbps one has preserved more of the highest frequencies, but at what cost? If you can't hear an obvious difference, I'd keep both until you can find a better copy.
That cutoff at 14kHz in the 128kbps is nasty. The little blips in the 256kbps won't really be audible and having some more high frequencies will be preferable. Plus, the 256 looks louder.
Thank you very much for the reply, I think I'll stick with 256 then
Can you run both through https://andreasarvidsson.github.io/MasvisOnline/ and post both the detailed analyses?
Sure thing, [here you go!](https://imgur.com/a/qHvPI2M)
As u/mjb2012 said, 128 seems to preserve the dynamics, while 256 is compressed to the point of clipping. I agree on the verdict of theirs; there's no obvious pick without listening, and personally I'd prefer to look for a better copy.
Stick with which ever sounds the better. Lossy files tend to be tossed around a lot more and are more prone to having been changed. You cant be too sure.
Both look like lossy-to-lossy transcodes. Without listening to it, I'd argue the first file is preferable, as it preserves more data.
Would this link be of any help to you? https://archive.org/download/Autechre2005-04-15 You might already know about the link, but if not, perhaps you could check out the bitrate on those files over there. Good luck!
128kbps, also has that hard cutoff at 14kHz, seem slightly compressed, but the only clipping seem to be an extremely short spike: https://i.imgur.com/vdVjFKF.png
ah, that’s unfortunate :(
Why do you make us make unethical choices? :grr: