Sound quality

[LaFouine]

Hello, I posted a privious post in the Conversion/Encoding Forum, but on Batman's advice, I'd rather talk with Setarip...

Here is my problem :

I ripped Lawrence of Arabia a few days ago, but I'm a little bit disappointed by the sound quality.
During classique music, where sound is sharp, I can clearly ear some distortion. So I made some tries.

AC3 sound extracted from DVD (With AC3Tool and Azid) is low and good quality : Normal
WAV sound after transformation with AC3Tools is low and good quality
WAV sound after normalization with CoolEdit is not low anymore and still good quality.
MP3 sound encoded with radium (through VirtualDub 128kbits/s 48000Hz) is not good quality anymore.

So, does anyone know if Lame codec is better ?

[setarip]

"MP3 sound encoded with radium (through VirtualDub 128kbits/s 48000Hz) is not good quality anymore."

1) Was this done to the transformed and normalized .WAV file or directly from the ripped DVD?

2) Have you tried the higher sampling rates available (up to 320 Kbps) with Radium?

3) Have you tried reducing the frequency to 44,100Hz?

[LaFouine]

1) Transformation into MP3 was done from the transformed and normalized sound.

2) I've nerver tried higher sample rates in order to keep my avi file a reasonnable size (as 650Mb or 700Mb for instance).

3) I usualy keep the original DVD 48000Hz frequency. If not, I often get sync problems.

About 1), it's true that after normalization, I can get some distortion, but it that case I couldn't ear them listening to the normalized WAV. It's only after making the WAV2MP3 transformation that sound became crap.

Thank you for your advice
LaFouine