"palppp" from the r3mix forum provided a sample of harpsichord music, which gives --r3mix and --alt-preset fast standard a lot of trouble. The sample can be found here: http://gregor.ath.cx/~Dr%5enO/original.flac, and the original thread is here: Harpsichord and lame - a bad combination?.

Confirmed for r3mix (abx 11/12). The rest I did not bother to check at this late hour. Aps fast sounds similar. I will try again tomorrow. It is hard though since the original recording already has some garbly sound around the attacks.

Well, --r3mix sounds pretty bad, ABX 9/9. --r3mix intoduces quantization noise after the harps "attack", making the harps aftersound (immediately after the attack) sounding less defined. Could be because of pre-echo, could be because of vbr-mtrh or something other.

APS sounds much more defined, much better. Hmm, though in the beginning there's a small "glitch"-thing which is a bit more audible with APS, I need to cut that away before doing comparison. However, it's clear that APS sounds very much better here.

I would try -h -b192. To me, although there is a bit of a "double hit" at the beginning of the sample, it is slightly better to me than alt-preset standard.

I agree that r3mix sounds clearly worse.

ff123

Well,

I've been trying to obtain a copy of what should be a fantastic pre-echo sample track. I recently downloaded a track from the Bladerunner Soundtrack. Now, the problem is that there are several different Bladerunner Soundtrack versions, most of them are not approved by the copyright holders. They are 'hack' releases by people who managed to get their hands on the studio soundtrack material and dub it.

The "offworld" releases are not approved by the copyright holders, but contain many tracks of music found in the movie itself. One such track is the "Japanese Blimp woman" music which has terrible pre-echo problems that are downright obvious in an extreme way. Try to download an mp3 of that track.

Within the track is some kind of oriental harp that is played with fury and causes a slap-like pre-echo and garbled artifacts which are terribly obvious within the natural ambience of the recording.

I'm currently trying to obtain one of the unapproved Bladerunner Soundtracks with the Japanese Blimp woman track. It's a codec killer.

mp3