I have tested the psytel encoder in the past, it did a better job at 128 than lame did, but lame was still more efficient with its vbr mode. Psytel was sometimes inconsistent with its quality. It had trouble encoding live music, I could hear a lot of artifacts in a relatively easy to encode song. Ivan has had a hard time with aac since all the cool methods of compression have been covered by patent in the iso aac code. Im sure he has improved his encoder since I last tried it, i'll have to check his website and see what changed. I havent tried liquifer yet, I wouldnt even know where to get it anyway?

Sean