Heterogeneous listening test. Pretest thread.
Reply #7 – 2006-02-03 18:23:00
BTW, are there many people still use “- preset insane” in practice or it’s just an academic interest? I don't think a lot of people are using 320 kbps or similar bitrate at all because most of the time the bitrate range around say 150 kbps yields practically perfect results with current lame. Nonetheless from time to time you find posts here from people who want to use mp3 at highest quality possible, for instance on their home stereo equipment. File size ususally doesn't matter to these people, it's mp3 that matters because of usability on their equipment. Despite Lame's success at moderate bitrate there is room for improvement using high bitrate. Current Lame has a weakness with certain kinds of trumpet or saxophone-like sounds even at high bitrate (see the trumpet sample I gave), and I found with these samples 3.90.3 (or 3.91) high bitrate --abr x or -b x is better than the corresponding 3.90.3 alt-presets (I admit at 320 kbps I cannot hear a difference). While difference between 3.90.3 abr x and --alt-preset x is audible to me at around 224 kbps but not at bitrates beyond 256 kbps I can clearly distinguish current Lame 320 kbps which is not transparent with the trumpet sample. Of course this is not the entire story cause it applies only to these trumpet-like sounds. It might happen that current Lame is to be preferred so much on other kind of music that these things don't count very much. I do not expect it but who knows. That's why it is of vital interest for those who want to use high bitrate for the sake of utmost quality to learn about real performance, and your kind of tests are great at finding out differences that are unheard otherwise. Apart from showing up real problematic behavior it gives a feeling of a safety margin.