YouTube Audio Quality Deep Dive: Opus vs. AAC
2025-02-01
This article delves into the audio quality of YouTube videos. The author, collaborating with the Ralph Vaughan-Williams Society, compared original audio files with various encoded versions available on YouTube, focusing on Opus and AAC codecs. The analysis revealed that YouTube's audio processing introduces some distortion, particularly at higher frequencies. While the Opus codec performed better in some aspects, overall YouTube's audio quality shows room for improvement.