It's just me, or did MP3enc 3.1 sound better than LAME 3.97?

2024-05-22 03:30:09

It's just me, or did MP3enc 3.1 (by Fraunhofer) sound better than LAME 3.97?
For this, I made a 15-second snippet of "Afrowell" by StephanAXX, encoded to MP3 using MP3enc and LAME and listened.
MP3enc beats LAME (at quality) at encoding to narrowband (8 kbps, 8 kHz, mono) while still keeping the bandwidth at maximum setting.
About the same at encoding to wideband (16 kbps, 16 kHz, mono).
Commands:

Code: [Select]

mp3enc -if C:\Users\Stefan\Desktop\AfroWell_15sec.wav -br 16000-esr 16000 -dm -bw 16000 -qual 9 -of "C:\Users\Stefan\Desktop\afrowell.mp3"
mp3enc -if C:\Users\Stefan\Desktop\AfroWell_15sec.wav -br 8000 -esr 8000 -dm -bw 8000 -qual 9 -of "C:\Users\Stefan\Desktop\afrowell_8k.mp3"
lame -q 0 -k -b 16k -mm --resample 16k C:\Users\Stefan\Desktop\AfroWell_15sec.wav C:\Users\Stefan\afrowell_lame.mp3
lame -q 0 -k -b 8k -mm --resample 8k C:\Users\Stefan\Desktop\AfroWell_15sec.wav C:\Users\Stefan\afrowell_lame_8k.mp3

File sizes:

Code: [Select]

14.976 afrowell_lame_8k.mp3
15.336 afrowell_8k.mp3
30.024 afrowell_lame.mp3
30.240 afrowell.mp3
2.880.122 afrowell.wav

All files attached. Tell you your results (with these attached files or different files, by ABXing, listening and other tests)! Thanks for reading this topic!

Re: It's just me, or did MP3enc 3.1 sound better than LAME 3.97?

Reply #1 – 2024-05-22 21:11:15

I don't think LAME was really tuned for ultra-low bitrate.
The 8 KHz/8 kbit files: muffled as expected but LAME also has artifacts. MP3enc sounds ~~clearly better~~ cleaner to my ears.
16 KHz/ 16 kbit: very metallic for both encoders. Similar but I'd say that LAME is a worse.

It's funny to compare them with OPUS or xHE-AAC at similar bitrate

Notice