The results of 128kbps extension public listening test

Just for your information: I plan to start a 64kbps test in about a month, comparing Vorbis, HE AAC, WMA pro, MP3pro and Real Audio Cook. Best regards; Roberto.

Even though I am aware of the difficulties in executing a high bitrate test, I would love to see a ~192 kbps range test. It would be interesting to see the difference between LAME and newer formats. On the other hand, people would need yet another reminder of the defects of 192kbps CBR encoding.

Indeed. But the problem of high bitrates is that all formats (even Lame MP3) easily reach transparency on most samples. Therefore, this test could only be taken by real golden ears (the likes of Guruboolez) and only using problem samples. That raises another issue: problem samples are representative of a very small percentage of the various musical styles. Therefore, the test wouldn't be representative - I.E, wouldn't be useful to anyone but people that like to listen to those kinds of samples. If I conduced such test, I would expect results with all codecs ranking 5 most of the time pouring in my mailbox. :-/ Regards; Roberto.

yeah

I prefer a codec that keeps good average quality for a typical bitrate, e.g. the MPC codec here looks interesting. WMA9 Pro VBR is definitely an improvement over the previous version (from Windows Media Encoder 9, not the one in Windows Media Player 9), but seems to be a disaster for me for music with stereo voices, e.g. M People & Billy Joel.

Well, keep in mind that WMApro is still in version 1. We can expect it to be improved on upcoming versions.