Lasse Penttinen
22 Sep 2003 12:38
Marketing slogans of WMA and MP3Pro appear to be nothing but marketing hype. RareWares has published the results of their recent public 64kbps compressed audio listening test and once again interesting conclusions can be drawn.
The modern low bitrate audio compressors were challenged by LAME MP3 Encoder with optimal 128kbps settings. The motivation of this was to show how well do the modern compressors live up to their marketing slogans. Most notably MP3Pro and WMA have been advertised to be able to deliver the ‘same audio quality with half the file size’. These test results indicate that this is not the case, as LAME MP3 is the clear winner of this test.
Also this test seems to prove the high quality of the Nero HE AAC profile (High Efficiency AAC, a.k.a. AAC+), being the highest rated of the 64kbps codecs tested. OGG Vorbis and MP3Pro are competitive, but the big boys Microsoft WMA, Apple QuickTime AAC and Real Audio still have some work to do.