Hi.

On the egroups mailinglist for EAC (http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/), Wim Speekenbrink ([email protected]) initiated a little encoder test. Though its results might be questionable because of the restricted bitrate (approx. 128kbit/s), I still would like to post it here, asking for additional comments. Here is his original post:

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To: [email protected]
Subject: encoder test
From: Wim
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 02:21:09 +0100

Hello EAC users,

As you know EAC is able to serve as a front-end for many
audio compressing programs (= encoders). On the internet
you can read many different opinions about which encoder is
best and which suck. But do you hear the difference
yourself? And beside MP3 there are many new encoders,
which use a different format and are therefore potentially
better because they aren't restricted to the tight rules of
the MPEG 1 layer III format. But are they already better,
or do they still need a lot of development?

For this reasons I've developed a little test. I used a
piece of music that is very difficult to encode because of
the instruments used and the big differences between the
right and the left channel. This was encoded with 8
different encoders, 4x MP3: BladeEnc, Xing, Lame and the
Fraunhofer encoder in Nero, and 4x non-MP3: MP+, Ogg
Vorbis, WMA and PsyTEL AAC. The purpose of this test is
that you compare each compressed file with the original
wave file and write down what differences you hear and send
these notes to me. Of course I will put the test results on
this mailinglist.

You can download the test files here (3.4 MB):
http://home.wish.net/~wimsp/download/test.zip

The package includes the original wave file, the encoded
files, the necessary Winamp plug-ins and an users manual.

Best regards,
Wim Speekenbrink

Homepage: http://home.wish.net/~wimsp (Dutch language!)

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And my own observations along with some graphics can be found at http://www.incase.de/encodertest.


cu,
sven
(MkII 12GB blue, #080000113)

Interesting read, and nice graphs, but as you point out, not only valid for people that encode at 128.

- --
Rod, UK Mk2 64gig Red S/No.341