While layer 2 supports bitrates down to 32kbit, layer 3 sounds better at low bitrates. Layer 2 sounds fine at 128kbit so long as you don't give it anything musical to deal with.

It's been a long time since I tried layer 2 compression (years), I should try again with the latest codecs to see if anything's improved. At high bitrates layer 2 should be better than layer 3 simply because less is being done to the audio. Layer 3 supposedly only removes audio "you can't hear", but frankly that isn't quite true. I may be wrong, but I think video cd actually uses layer 2 - and I can't hear anything wrong with the audio on video cd.


- John.

(The above may not represent the views of Empeg :)