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
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