Public AAC Listening Test @ ~96 Kbps [July 2011].

The folks at the Hydrogen Audio Forums have for years been benefiting the world with their patience, technical skills, and hyper-focus on sound quality, by comparing the real-world sound of various codecs and bit-rates for audio encoding. Under the scope for the latest public listening test (slated to run until July 27) are the following AAC encoders: Nero 1.5.4; Apple QuickTime 7.6.9 true VBR; Apple QuickTime 7.6.9 constrained VBR; Fraunhofer (Winamp 5.62); Coding Technologies (Winamp 5.61); and ffmpeg's AAC (low anchor).

Comments

Lame

[DigiShaman]

What, no comparison with LAME? How lame.

Re:Lame

[martinX]

But is there anything that plays AAC besides the iPod?

Players
Creative Zen Portable
Microsoft Zune
SanDisk Sansa (some models)
Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) with firmware 2.0 or greater
Sony Walkman
Nintendo DSi
Any portable player that fully supports the Rockbox third party firmware
Mobile phones
For a number of years, many mobile phones from manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, BenQ-Siemens and Philips have supported AAC playback. The first such phone was the Nokia 5510 released in 2002 which also plays MP3s. However, this phone was a commercial failure and such phones with integrated music players did not gain mainstream popularity until 2005 when the trend of having AAC as well as MP3 support continued. Most new smartphones and music-themed phones support playback of these formats.
Sony Ericsson phones support various AAC formats in MP4 container. AAC-LC is supported in all phones beginning with K700, phones beginning with W550 have support of HE-AAC. The latest devices such as the P990, K610, W890i and later support HE-AAC v2.
Nokia XpressMusic and other new generation Nokia multimedia phones like N- and E-Series: also support AAC format in LC, HE, M4A and HEv2 profiles
BlackBerry: RIM's latest series of Smartphones such as the 8100 ("Pearl"), 9500 ("Storm") and 8800 support AAC.
Apple's iPhone supports AAC and FairPlay protected AAC files formerly used as the default encoding format in the iTunes store until the removal of DRM restrictions in March 2009.
The Motorola Droid Family supports AAC along with several other audio codecs.
The HTC Dream (Also known as the T-Mobile G1) is described as supporting certain subset of the full AAC format. As of 2009-04-13 at least several forms of AAC files played while others did not play.[citation needed]
WebOS by HP/Palm supports AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, and .m4a containers in its native music player as well as several third-party players. However, it does not support Apple's FairPlay DRM files downloaded from iTunes.[43]
Windows Phone 7: WP7's Silverlight runtime supports AAC-LC, HE-AAC and HE-AAC v2 decoding.
Other devices
Apple's iPad: Supports AAC and FairPlay protected AAC files used as the default encoding format in the iTunes store.
Palm OS PDAs: Many Palm OS based PDAs and smartphones can play AAC and HE-AAC with the 3rd party software Pocket Tunes. Version 4.0, released in December 2006, added support for native AAC and HE-AAC files. The AAC codec for TCPMP, a popular video player, was withdrawn after version 0.66 due to patent issues, but can still be downloaded from sites other than corecodec.org. CorePlayer, the commercial follow-on to TCPMP, includes AAC support. Other PalmOS programs supporting AAC include Kinoma Player and AeroPlayer.
Microsoft Windows Mobile platforms support AAC either by the native Windows Media Player or by third-party products (TCPMP, CorePlayer)[citation needed]
Epson supports AAC playback in the P-2000 and P-4000 Multimedia/Photo Storage Viewers. This support is not available with their older models, however.
The Sony Reader portable eBook plays M4A files containing AAC, and displays metadata created by iTunes. Other Sony products, including the A and E series Network Walkmans, support AAC with firmware updates (released May 2006) while the S series supports it out of the box.
Nearly every major car stereo manufacturer offers models that will play back .m4a files recorded onto CD in a data format. This includes Pioneer, Sony, Alpine, Kenwood, Clarion, Panasonic, and JVC.[citation needed]
The Sonos Digital Media Player supports playback of AAC files.
The Barnes & Noble Nook Color electronic-book reader supports playback of AAC encoded files.
The Roku SoundBridge network audio player supports playback of AAC encoded files.
The Squeezebox network audio player (made by Slim Devices, a Logitech company) supports playback of AAC files.
The

FFmpeg's AAC encoder is not finished

[Cigaes]

FFmpeg's AAC encoder is not finished (yet?), and flagged as experimental. Including it in such a test is rather a dubious idea: it is likely to give a bad impression of the whole project.

Having the new vo-aacenc as contender for the Free Software community would IMHO have been more relevant.

Re:FLAC

[maeka]

The difference between AAC/MP3 and FLAC (and CD player *) my hi-fi allows to hear quite clearly.

If you really can easily distinguish well-encoded AAC or MP3 from FLAC you should lend us at HA your golden ears!

I rather strongly suspect once subjected to rigorous double-blinding you might not come back speaking so boldly.

Many claim so and most a quite wrong.

[guidryp]

Almost no one can hear a difference between loss-less and any of the codecs at high bit rates (256K+).

Though many think they can, until actually blind tested.

If you can reliably tell the difference in proper blind testing, you are likely have better hearing/perception than 99.9999 % of the population.

I think I have great hearing, but when I did some ABX testing, my ability to distinguish drops off completely by 160 K VBR on MP3s and that is in quiet room with quality headphones straining to ID any difference.

I am skeptical of any golden eared claims these days pooh-poohing modern codecs.

Re:And the point of this is?

[martinX]

They are the reason we don't all live in caves banging rocks together.

The rock-bangers created Ogg.

Re:FLAC

[maeka]

FLAC sound clearer to me.

That is not a description of the type of artifact one is likely to find in AAC or MP3. Try again.

Yes, I have absolute pitch, if that plays any role.

Nope, that isn't where lossy codecs fail either.

I do not understand why people get up in arms when somebody says they her the difference: be glad that you do not.

Up in arms? No. It was an honest inquiry. If you are truly able to distinguish AAC/MP3 from FLAC on a general basis you would be most valuable.

Ya see, lossy codecs tend to fail in particular ways on specific types of samples. If someone was able to readily distinguish lossless from lossy across a wide (or even moderate) collection of samples they would be damn near unique and quite useful as a tester of dev changes.

Alas lots of people talk and few actually prove they're swinging the big dick they brag about once subjected to double-blind testing.

Re:And the point of this is?

[GrievousMistake]

The Hydrogen Audio Forums tests have traditionally used a sound methodology, it would probably be worth reading up on it before you comment, lest you make a fool out of yourself.

They will not be trying to measure how 'good' each codec sounds, they are trying to measure how close it is to the source material, with a 'perfect score' being statistically indistinguishable.

Re:PROBLEM IS TESTERS HAVE CRAP GEAR !!

[Skarecrow77]

in my experience, the equipment attached to your skull is more important than the equipment you purchased.

I've seen people with complete CRAP gear ABX at higher bitrates than I can, and I've got a pretty stout rig.

Re:What?

[Skarecrow77]

I too had this same question awhile back. Why doesn't HA test commonly used codecs at, say, 192kbps or 256kbps?

The answer? the tests fail because nobody can tell the difference. they make for very boring results.

they run the test at 96kbps because they get usable results. people over a wide range of sound systems and hearing conditions can provide usable responses.

What would you do with that data? hard to say. you can't really extrapolate that, say, if codec A is better than codec B at 96kbps, the same will hold true at 192kbps. In fact, I've seen the direct opposite of that in past HA tests, where various codecs trade the lead depending on bitrate.

So "who is 96kbps for?" I don't know. but "why test 96kbps?" that's easy.

Self Proclaimed Golden ears should really step up.

[guidryp]

Rather than typical net snobbery against lossy encoders, the self proclaimed golden ears should really help out, they are the ones that can spot encodes a mile away, they should be able help find really good/bad encodes here.

I found myself humbled when I attempted to help out before. I had a hard time distinguishing anything but the poor encode used as control.

Really guys this is a chance to help out, or recalibrate your preconceptions about how good/bad modern encoders are.

Or would you rather just keep up with the unjustified snobbery?

Re:FLAC

[Velimir]

I heard the difference between an iTunes-encoded 320kbps MP3 and FLAC in 2/7 samples I used. This is through ABXing and using statistics. Granted, these samples were chosen as good examples that show differences between lossy and lossless. I wrote up a series of blog posts on it here: http://www.vel.co.nz/vel.co.nz/Blog/Entries/2009/8/21_ABX_of_Lossless_versus_MP3_-_Part_3_-_Results_and_Discussion.html