Wavpack Lossy Quality, As good as OGG, MPC or AAC? Options

[Lev]

I note that a certain pet bird has the signature line

WavPack (352/448 kbps) lossy for HQ lossy encodings and transcoding
LAME 3.90.2 (by Dibrom) --alt-preset extreme -Z --lowpass 21 or --alt-preset insane --lowpass 21 for my mp3s
MP2 384 kbps stereo for the classical music on my portable
MusePack 1.15r --insane --xlevel for archiving on CDs

Is he right in using WavPack, as opposed to MPC?

Something tells me the higher the bitrate, the more he likes it - There isn't an MP2 encoder as well tuned as Lame, and cranking the bitrate up to 384 isnt going to make the encoder more 'tuned'. And MPC insane / MP3 APX are virtually unnecessary overkills too; YMMV.

[Moneo]

have you tried doing the inverse with APE+MPC to see if the result is really the same as the original wav?

Yes.

There were 72 last significant bit errors. I think that it was because of the difference between two files going over 16 bit treshold at these positions.

I also agree that the whole process is very clumsy.

rjamorim
According to den, mpc at --quality 5 sounded transparent to him, and wavpack's lossy encoding at 352 kbps didn't. That's what I mean by "decreased transparency". I didn't perform any listening tests myself.

Edit: using a simple utility that subtracts wavs and gives bit-identical results, diff.ape increases by only 24 bytes, so the results are essentially the same.

This post has been edited by Moneo: Apr 21 2003, 20:00