It is difficult to compare them because SBR adds a second dimension to the comparison. With MP3, smeared, watery, tinkly HF slush is the downside of low bitrates, while with HE-AAC, one-dimensional, gritty HF audioturf is the downside. Some hear neither of those effects, others hear only one, and still others hear both and can't stand either.
The only way to truly please everyone (save the most golden-eared, lossless-only-please audiophiles) is upgrading to 256-320 kbit/s AAC-LC or MP3. But, of course, as my original lament went, most stations seem largely inert on performing that upgrade even now that modern internet mechanics and costs have cleared the path.
This situation actually reminds me of the dilemma distortion-canceled clipping once presented radio stations with -- where heavy clipper action wasn't as fully canceled (masked) for females as it was for males, forcing female-oriented formats to lean light on their clippers and heavier on their less punchy HF limiting instead. Psychoacoustic coding artifacts, by comparison, may not be more or less audible by gender, but there is still a "two listener buckets" situation where you have those who don't hear them, and those who do. And for me, not exploiting modern internet speeds to maximally mask codec artifacting strikes me as the 1990s equivalent of flooring the pedal on an Optimod's psychoacoustic clippers while disabling its HF limiting functionality entirely.
Sure, although nobody yet had any superior alternatives to find them lacking in comparison to. I'm sure had 33 RPM vinyl appeared half a century earlier, the era's comparatively inferior-sounding 78 RPMs would have gone out of fashion all the sooner.
Our great grandparents were undoubtedly as keen on good sound as we are now; we just don't think of them that way because they were all wearing hearing aids by the time we came along. Consider, for instance, the history of early 20th century sound technologies Hollywood cycled through in search of ever-cleaner audio following the invention of talkies. Remember all the fancy logos in the opening credits of that period's films, bragging about marvels like the "Western Electric's
Noiseless Recording System"? And then there was Armstrong's FM research in the 1920s. I think gramps would have been quite happy having a Bose CD sound system in his 1907 White steamer car, had that been possible. He certainly wouldn't have had any engine noise to mask the quieter parts of his minstrel songs, anyway.
In deed. Noise that is "high entropy," with a gaussian distribution, is much easier for the mind to ignore than patternistic things. Surface noise is like the video grain in fringe analog television reception. Patternistic MP3 artifacts are like the flickering VBI closed captioning bits that get shifted into view by a mistimed genlock. You know, like the ones visible here (if you watch full screen):
Unlike the lossy compression Huell is admiring, that spastic morse code is
not amaaaAAAAaazing.
I third this. There are amazing examples on Youtube demonstrating the frequency response and low noise floors of "new old stock" vintage 78s, when properly played back.
This one comes to mind, but I have heard way better.
WOW. Thank you for that! It went straight to my Winamp bookmarks.
