I happen to watch my video again this morning and noticed that even at 1080p, the audio was not up to the sound quality I heard when I recorded the audio. I loaded the project up in Adobe Premiere and checked my export settings; sure enough, I used a the standard Windows Media 9 codec with compression instead of the lossless codec. This is the same mistake I made with the first upload of 'The Mooche' from the Cotton Club soundtrack. For some reason, even with the best audio quality compression settings, the audio looses some quality. Add the Youtube compression artifacts on top of that and it begins to sound even worse.

For comparison, here's the original audio file (320K mp3 for streaming purposes) for that video:

The effects of Youtube's compression tend to distort and amplify sibilance problems making them seem worse then they really are. The depth and imaging is also diminished.

What do you guys think?

I think the best thing would be using a video editor that can export the audio with the FLAC codec, which I believe to be the true lossless format. However, YouTube, during the video processing step, always decreases the audio bit rate, even in 1080p...so the best recorded audio will always suffer from compression and loss in definition.

The problem with Adobe Premiere is they link audio and video codecs together, limiting your encoding choices. I use Windows Media 9's codec for video so Premiere automatically limits the audio codecs to: Windows Media Voice 9, Windows Media 9.2 Lossless (which is what I usually use - 100% quality: 96K/24bit), Windows Media 9 and Windows Media 10 Professional. Does anyone know how to add other audio codecs when using the Windows Media video presets? I would like to try encoding the video with FLAC or the original .wav audio.

After experimenting with the various encoding preset options in Premiere, Windows Media video codecs produce the best quality video with the smallest file size, IMHO. I just wish there was an option to just include the original audio file in the output file with no compression.