Opus sounds shockingly good at 16 kb/s!

2025-06-21

Here are audio samples of "CTRL" by Shadrow, licensed CC BY-NC 3.0. In both cases, the samples are at a constant bit rate of 16 kb/s. Have a listen.

MP3 audio at 16 kb/s (20 kB)

Opus audio at 16 kb/s (20 kB)

Holy crap. It's not even close! The MP3 sounds like mud. In contrast, not only is the Opus actually intelligible, the overall sound quality isn't even too terrible!

I knew from reading about it that Opus was a better codec, but this is a really tangible demonstration of Opus's power. And it's great that it is, since it's more or less the "sequel" to Vorbis. You know, the audio codec for ogg files.

Thank you, Xiph.Org, for this wonderful, lossy gift.

Tags for this page

encoding

Home

All posts

All content for this site is licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0 unless stated otherwise.

Contact