Lame 3.99.5 outputs smaller files than 3.97 ? Options

[gourdo]

I ripped most of my CD collection about six years ago with LAME 3.97b with the V2 preset. I recently had a hard drive crash and had to re-rip pretty much everything. Fortunately, i still had all the physical discs stored and in excellent condition, so I lucked out this time. I downloaded the latest version of LAME 3.99.5 to re-rip.

As it turns out, a few albums of the original 3.97 rips survived the crash (saved to an external SD card), so I was able to compare a number of tracks. I noticed that pretty much every newly ripped song had a lower bitrate (5-10kpbs) and file size than the ones ripped with 3.97. Is this to be expected due to the improvements in compression techniques made to LAME over the past several years? I suppose I would have expected the V2 preset to hover around the same average bitrate as the encoder improves, and that it would use the extra headroom to improve quality in difficult passages...

[shadowking]

If one encodes aps -Y and V2 -Y you see a similar bitrate. It is a new handling of the sfb21 and it looks like a big improvement for lame. I checked the a standard V2 encode and the spectrum analysis (above 16khz) looked fine just like old versions.