Artifact

From Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

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.


Different kind of 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