Informed rebuttal of VBR disadvantages appreciated, VBR always rocks, when it comes to lossy compression, right? Options

[Moon]

As already mentinend in this thread some fanboy over at the offical Pioneer forums is making claims that VBR sucks (here and here) in that it needs more processing power compared to CBR and for various other reasons.

I would like to have a well written rebuttal of that statment based on facts so Pioneer might reconsider putting VBR support into their upcoming DJ equipment. I've ripped all my 1000+ CDs to VBR and I wouldn't want to reencode them just because Pioneer doesn't get it right. Thanks!

[Slipstreem]

As the other guys have already said, you're wasting your time with him as he already seems to have decided that he knows exactly how VBR works when it seems fairly clear that he doesn't. However, in the second thread you link to he claims that VBR suffers from latency when making decisions regarding increasing/decreasing the bitrate when necessary.

I believe this to be true of some (or maybe most) VBR encoders, but the Hydrogenaudio LAME WIKI clearly states that...

Unlike other MP3 encoders which do VBR encoding based on predictions of output quality, LAME's default VBR method tests the actual output quality to ensure the desired quality level is always achieved.

This does seem to infer that LAME VBR is intelligent enough to know what bitrate to use and when to use it rather than just guessing and using a slewed approximation with no real-time, output-related feedback which seems to be his inference for the majority of VBR encoders. I would go and point this out to Pulse, but I've wasted too much time on his type in the past to be honest.

To further back up what Raiden said earlier, there are some official MP3 compliance tests HERE (defined as "ISO/IEC international standard IS 11172, part 3 - audio"). If the Pioneer deck in question doesn't play ALL of the files in the official Layer3 compliance tarball without error (which includes a VBR test file) then it IS NOT an MP3 compliant player and, IMHO, shouldn't be marketed as such. Assuming that the player is marketed as such and fails the compliance tests (I haven't tested one, so I'm merely speculating), I'd be demanding a full refund had I bought one.

Call me paranoid, but it worries me to see the words "Pioneer National Trainer // Product Specialist" in his signature.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

This post has been edited by Slipstreem: Oct 16 2008, 15:13

[add]

Call me paranoid, but it worries me to see the words "Pioneer National Trainer // Product Specialist" in his signature.

My thoughts exactly.

[Lyx]

Call me paranoid, but it worries me to see the words "Pioneer National Trainer // Product Specialist" in his signature. :rolleyes:

My thoughts exactly.

I'm not surprised. A title in nowadays industry doesn't mean much regarding competence.