Multiformat listening test @ ~64kbps: Results, Results and post-test discussion Options

[IgorC]

The test is finished, results are available here:

http://listening-tests.hydrogenaudio.org/igorc/results.html

Summary: CELT/Opus won, Apple HE-AAC is better than Nero HE-AAC, and Vorbis has caught up with Nero HE-AAC.

[Garf]

Has anyone ever seriously blind-tested e.g. Dolby's and Fraunhofer's HE-AAC encoders in the last few years, especially at these bit rates? I'd be more than happy to test them here, provided I can choose their versions.

The CT/Dolby encoder was last tested here (AFAIK): http://www.mp3-tech.org/tests/aac_48/results.html
The latest version I have is 8.2.0 (found in the latest Winamp version). Igor took a look at this, and concluded it didn't seem improved much if at all since the 7.x series. I don't know if that is an accurate assessment, but it should be verifiable easily. I don't know of any newer versions, and 8.2 is from 2009.

Nobody ever tested Fraunhofer's HE-AAC encoder. Their MP3 encoder is available freely, and was tested in the past, but I couldn't find a free AAC encoder, which probably explains the complete lack of interest.

I'm not sure what you mean by "I'd be more than happy to test them here", but if you are able to provide copies of those codecs so they can be tested further including in future listening tests, that is probably a good idea. And if they do win those, your criticism is founded. Until then, I see little point.

[C.R.Helmrich]

I'm not sure what you mean by "I'd be more than happy to test them here", but if you are able to provide copies of those codecs so they can be tested further including in future listening tests, that is probably a good idea. And if they do win those, your criticism is founded. Until then, I see little point.

Yes, pointing to encoders and settings is what I mean. Sorry for not making it clear. I'll let you know once the encoders of my choice become available somewhere for all to try out.

Maybe some background information: my (and a colleague's) full-time job over the last 3 years has been to improve Fraunhofer's HE-AAC encoder. I'm quite confident that I actually made some progress at least over Fraunhofer's older encoder versions. I'm not expecting my "latest greatest" work to win over Opus in a test like this one (because the latter sounds really good), but I hope that it would be tied on average.

I'll have to disagree (of course ), Jean-Marc. The fact that Apple's HE-AAC implementation is quite new doesn't convince me it's fully mature. From Wikipedia:

As of September 2009, Apple has added support for HE-AAC (which is fully part of the MP4 standard) but iTunes still lacks support for true VBR encoding.

Chris

This post has been edited by C.R.Helmrich: Apr 14 2011, 10:50