Lame or Radium : What's best ?

[LaFouine]

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 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) is not good quality anymore.

So, does anyone know if Lame codec is better ?

Thank you

[Batman]

It may depend on the bitrate you've set? I'm just speculating. Radium is quite popular with members on this board.

[LaFouine]

I'm always working at 128kbit/s, 48000Hz

[Batman]

The audio problems appear to culminate from the original rip. You may want to try another procedure/program to rip with.

[LaFouine]

You mean the problem comes from AC3Tool (based on Azid) I'm using to extract AC3 from VOBs ?

[Batman]

You may want to search the forum on Setarip's ripping methods---he knows a lot about digital media---try his way?BTW Lawrence of Arabia is a cool movie

[Mpegger]

LAME will give a better quality then Radium, but at 128kbps, its not going to be much. You may want to go abit higher, say 160 or even better 192. Use RazorLame in Windows, use Joint Stereo (NOT Forced JS), a q level of 0, and a lowpass of about 19.5. Yes the audio track may go up to 22khz, but the average adult human can't hear past 19khz (I can only hear up to about 18.5), so allowing LAME to allocate more bits to the range that is audiable will help. And unless you have a really high end audio system (no, BOSE is not high end ), its probably not even capable of producing frequencies that high either.

[Batman]

Wow

The sound of music can be so complex

[Enchanter]

As long as I don't hear anything annoying, it's fine with me. I use LAME though.