After 4 Years, HydrogenAudio Opens New 128kbps Listening Test

kwanbis writes "After more than four years, a new MP3@128kbps listening test is finally open at HydrogenAudio.org! The featured encoders are: LAME 3.97, LAME 3.98.2, iTunes 8.0.1.11, Fraunhofer IIS mp3surround CL v1.5, and Helix v5.1 2005.08.09. The low anchor is l3enc 0.99a. The purpose of this test is to find out which popular MP3 VBR encoder outputs the best quality on bitrates around 128 kbps. All encoders experienced major or minor updates that should improve audio quality or encoding speed, and we have a totally new encoder on board. Note that you do not have to test all samples — it is a great help even if you test one or two. The test is scheduled to end on November 22nd, 2008."

Comments

Re:What kind of music is involved

[maeka]

You are asserting MP3 has faults it does not have.
"Overtones" are not an issue, nor do I think you could point out a 'problem sample' which fails due to the presence (or lack) of "overtones."
Popular music, in fact, is often harder to encode efficiently as it tends to have the dynamics compressed out of it (see loudness war), full of distortion, and therefore be closer to random data.
Temporal smearing is clearly a problem with MP3, and is evident in music such as harpsichord, but that is not the claim you make.
Do you have any ABX tests to back your claim?

Re:ugh

[Petrushka]

Fortunately someone on the HydrogenAudio forum was equally annoyed and has posted all the samples in a single zip file (54 MB file).

Direct link

[Snowblindeye]

Only up half an hour and already slashdotted.

Here is a direct link to the download site: http://www.listening-tests.info/mp3-128-1/

Re:Outdated?

[Canar]

Other codecs have been tested previously. Blind testing codecs is very labour-intensive and these events do not happen frequently. This test is expressly centred around MP3. If you'd like, drop by Hydrogenaudio and come take a look at the other listening tests that have been co-ordinated. There have been many through the years.

Re:Outdated?

[Petrushka]

Such tests have been available for a long time (though I think that can't possibly be a complete list: I thought there had been loads more tests than that). This item happens to focus on a single-format MP3 128 kb/s test; why this is newsworthy when all the other tests aren't, I'm not sure.

Re:Outdated?

[Snowblindeye]

Also, this should really be set up as a blind test, you get to listen to two clips, and have to choose which is better. The clips are randomized, of course...

Glad you took the time and checked how they do it.

The test is done using the ABC/HR blind listening utility, which does pretty much what you suggest.

Re:What's the point?

[corychristison]

I've got my entire music collection stored as FLAC right now on a single half-gig hard drive.

Must be a really small 'entire music collection'. 1/2 of a gig is 512MiB. Average FLAC encoded song I have are anywhere from 8MiB to 25MiB per song.

I hope you meant a half TB. That would make it much bigger... but again, you could still probably have your entire collection stored in WAV. I have about 1,300 songs.. all stored in various formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC) and it's under 10GiB.

Out of phase

[tepples]

is there anything else I should be aware of as someone who transcodes everything to mono before I copy it to my mp3 player ?

Some songs are recorded with parts out of phase between the stereo channels. This means that the left and right channels, instead of being up/up and down/down, are up/down and down/up, which creates directional effects in stereo (especially on a surround receiver) but cancels itself out in the conversion to mono. For instance, "Happiness in Slavery" on Broken by Nine Inch Nails loses the snare in mono, and the quality of the snare drum in the remix of Coburn's "We Interrupt This Program" used with the NEDM meme drifts back and forth between clap-like and snare-like.

It is a blind test; they've tested aac, ogg, etc

[jensend]

HydrogenAudio has done all kinds of listening tests over the years with various different codecs, including multiple encoders and rates for all of the major lossy formats. Their public tests are well designed blind tests-they give you the various samples but don't tell you which is from which encoder, and you're asked to use ABC/HR which is a program designed specifically for blind testing of audio.This one just happens to be 128 kbps MP3.

This is particularly of interest to a lot of people because

• MP3 is still the most popular and most compatible lossy format out there
• with the best encoders, 128kbps should be very close to perceptual transparency for most listeners on most samples while still being very usable for portable devices
• MP3 encoder comparisons based on valid scientific and statistical principles (blind tests, ANOVA, etc) aren't too common; as the title says, it's been 4 1/2 years since Roberto Amorin's test.

Re:use the cans, luke

[afidel]

Uh, PNG DOES look better for certain content, namely screenshots. Due to the way JPEG works it will always blur fonts more than PNG. For pbotographs you will get a better looking shot out of JPEG than PNG for the same files size ~90% of the time, so use the right tool for the job =)