LAME 3.98 Final
Reply #91 – 2008-07-10 09:12:26
Last night I did a very high bitrate listening test with my usual problem samples. I used -V0 as it's the best VBR quality setting, as well as ABR 270 and CBR 320. I don't care about the bitrate differences: if the philosophy behind VBR and ABR works well, the quality of these settings should be identical. I wanted to find out if the philosophies are right, or whether it makes sense qualitywise to pay some bitrate and go the brute force way using CBR 320 in the extreme case. I started with my moderate problems herding_calls, Birds, trumpet, trumpet_myPrince. With these very high quality settings these problems were expected to be transparent to me. Well, they are to me with last night's ABXing, with all the settings, though there is sime suspicion that herding_calls and trumpet_myPrince aren't perfect. With herding_calls I started quite well and arrived at 5/6 resp. 4/5 (depending on encoding setting) before I failed and ended up 6/10 resp. 7/10. With trumpet_myPrince I arrived at 8/10 (-V0) to 5/10 (--abr 270). If at all the isssues are very subtle though, and I can't really differentiate the quality of the various settings. With the serious problems castanets, eig, and harp40_1 I can't differentiate the quality of the various settings either. This time I had no problem abxing castanets clearly, and eig of course is easy to abx. But to me quality of the encodings is very good, with any of the settings. harp40_1 was hard to abx, and it was only with ABR 270 that I got a decent result of 9/10 (7/10 with the other settings). But I don't think ABR 270 is worse - as with the other test samples with subtle issues if at all there's some randomness in my ABX results). Which shows of course that quality is very high. So in the end quality is identical to me with my samples tested, no matter whether -V0, --abr 270, or -b320 is used. Quality is very high, remarkably high with very bad problem eig. So according to this test -V0 is the most attractive way to go, and taking it together with my last -V3 test, everything is fine from -V3 to -V0 depending on personal quality demand. BTW the strong error of herding_calls at sec. ~3.8 is so strong just with --abr 170. With --abr 175 it's a lot better, and it disappears for me when using --abr 180 (though herding_calls as an entire track is not transparent using --abr 180).