making your tracks sound better for 96kbps encoding

[Guest coriolis]

i just figured out that you can improve the sound of your track when you encode it at 96kbits by doing some EQing before encoding. Let it be known that my results are from using the lame encoder and other encoders may work better with other settings:

 

before encoding your track, try applying the following generic EQ settings:

ramp up the frequencies from 6khz at 0db to 16khz at up to even 8 db!

drop the 175hz +-75hz range maybe 1 to 3db

drop the 3khz +-1khz range 1 to 3db

boost the 600khz+-3khz range 1 to 3db

 

when i say boost or cut whatever range i mean applying a mountain or valley-style peak/dip, not a flat plateau.

 

keep in mind this is very general and will depend on your track. i think the most important thing to making it sound better is boosting the highs because those are the ones that the encoding destroys the most!

 

let me know if this was helpful, or if you found other settings to work better!

[Guest monno]

why would you want to encode your material to 96khz if it isn´t recorded in 96khz?? if you don´t keep the signal 96khz all the way from recording to mastering

you wont get the advantages that the high resolution offers. eq´ing might seem to do the trick but in fact it won´t really. the thing is when you sample the signal up from whatever resolution you are working in the dither algorithm used for this adds a certain amount of noise to mask the gaps between the samples and depending on the algorithm this is more or less audible. i recommend the pow-r algorithm found in logic 5.0 or apogee uv-22 but the waves idr works fine too.