128kbps Extension public listening test

Lasse Penttinen
23 Jul 2003 15:37

The RareWares are continuing their series of extensive listening comparison of lossy audio codecs.

Building on the AAC at 128kbps test results, this test is meant to compare the AAC winner (QuickTime) against other popular compression formats: Musepack, Vorbis, WMA Pro and MP3
It's purpose is to find what encoder outputs the best quality on bitrates around 128kbps
The encoders and parameters tested are:

Apple QuickTime 6.3 MP4 encoder 128kbps high quality

LAME MP3 Encoder 3.90.3 --alt-preset 128

Musepack 1.14 --quality 4 --xlevel

Ogg Vorbis 1.0 post-CVS -q 4.25

Windows Media Audio v9 PRO bitrate-managed 2-pass VBR 128kbps