MP3 Listening Test at 128 kbps
Reply #43 – 2007-09-07 11:14:46
ff123 and other pros, what do you think about dropping the high anchor and using the five contenders LAME, FhG, iTunes, Helix and Gogo at 128 kbps? Previous listening tests at 128 kbps clearely teached us that transparency is almost reached for several people. Including an high anchor is very important but in this situation it may be pointless. I would go for the one of the following configurations: • 3 competitors + 2 anchors (low & high) • 4 competitors + 1 anchor (low) => 5 encodings to focuse on (and for most people, 4 only - assuming that low anchor is immediatelly detected)VBR vs ABR/CBR : I wouldn't drop VBR. From my bitrate table (based on classical music only - thus with limited validity) we should get three competitors with comparable bitrate : LAME -V5 (~130 kbps); Fraunhofer 4.xx CLI (~130 kbps) and of course Helix which is by far the most flexible tool. I don't know anything about iTunes & gogo. The remaining question is: is VBR the best choice for HELIX and Fraunhofer (and other encoders). There's only one way to get a valid answer: pre-listening tests. I seriously doubt that people would spend their free time to get a solid experience with these rather unused (here on HA) encoders. I tried once and quickly gave up: I don't see the point of spending hours and hours to analyse encoders that are immediately unusable (for my taste). Using CBR/ABR for each competitors is another possibility but such configuration won't learn anything to the community (assuming that most HA members are following the recommendations/experience of other members and are using LAME -V5 to get small and HQ MP3 encodings). So I would definitely discard this option. If I had to make this test alone I would go for: - VBR only encoders - it implies to discard all encoders that doesn't allow ~130 kbps VBR encodings and keep the other ones - unless switches are specifically labelled as 'improve quality' I wouldn't tweak the commandline (there are some dubious ones for HELIX) unless some people could provide valid proof of their positive effects on most situations.