Artifact

An artifact is a noticeable difference between an uncompressed signal and a lossily-compressed copy. Lossy encoding can result in very different kind of artifacts/distortions. Sometimes it's not easy to define why the encoding is non-transparent. There are however many typical encoding artifacts.

Common artifacts

• pre echo: pre-echo consists in a small amount of noise used to appear just before a contrasted sound events (like percussive instruments). The original transients are therefore smeared: "___shhhTak" instead of "____Tak".

Illustrative samples: castanets.wav, castanets2.wav

The phenomenon could sometimes be visualised on a frequency editor:

To listen to the corresponding artifact, click here

• ringing:

• warbling:

• coarseness:

• stereo collapse:

External links

• ff123's Audio Artifact Training Page

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