How to detect the quality of the FLAC through SPEK?

Aquarius_Girl · 02-16-2015, 11:59 PM

I ordered an Audio CD from Amazon and am not satisfied
with the quality of the FLAC extracted.

I used SPEK software to get its spectrogram, but I don't
know what to make out of it.

Please help.

metaschima · 03-08-2015, 09:42 PM

So, what's wrong with the quality ? I don't see any obvious clipping, so that's good. Looking at a spectrogram doesn't really help you say things about the quality, that's mostly for your ear.

FLAC is lossless, so technically unless someone has done something horribly wrong it will preserve 100% quality.

Aquarius_Girl · 03-09-2015, 02:19 AM

Thanks for taking the thread off the zero reply list.

Quote:

Originally Posted by metaschima

So, what's wrong with the quality ?

Actually, this song is of the movie made in 90's.
Compared to the songs of today, this song's music does
not sound pleasant to ear. It IS beautiful but it doesn't
sound beautiful. It sounds muddy.

Later I checked the bitrate of this song. It is somewhere
near 828 kbps.

Quote:

I don't see any obvious clipping, so that's good. Looking at a spectrogram doesn't really help you say things about the quality, that's mostly for your ear.

How do you notice the clippings? How do they look like?
What is spectrogram's purpose then?

pan64 · 03-09-2015, 05:30 AM

so do you mean the CD itself is ok, but the flac generated from that CD is not so good?

Aquarius_Girl · 03-09-2015, 05:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pan64

so do you mean the CD itself is ok, but the flac generated from that CD is not so good?

I am not claiming anything. I first posted the screenshot
here and then checked the bitrate.

I have Sennheiser HD 215 ||. The sound quality of _this_ movie's
song is really pathetic unless I use an equalizer.
Is it possible that this happening because the movie is old
and music recording didn't use to be of high quality at that time?

michaelk · 03-09-2015, 08:10 AM

IMHO you really can not detect clipping in a spectrograph and agree then it can not tell anything about quality.

It is visual representation of the the audio signal.

How does the CD sound? Yes it could be due to how the audio was originally recorded.

metaschima · 03-09-2015, 10:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelk

IMHO you really can not detect clipping in a spectrograph and agree then it can not tell anything about quality.

I noticed clipping in a song using the Audacity spectrogram, I later confirmed this using sox. It's better to use sox, because it is harder to tell visually. Basically you can see a squaring off of one of the spikes, but this is only if the clipping is major.

michaelk · 03-09-2015, 03:05 PM

Amplitude yes frequency not so much.

metaschima · 03-09-2015, 03:48 PM

Ok, maybe this graph is just confusing.