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).

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.

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 =)