This seems to be one of the few coders which I've never tried before. So I decided to give it an eval before it became too outdated to be played.

Anyway, just from informal listening, it seems to sound quite nice at 80 kbps. So I was wondering how VQF compares with coders like Ogg Vorbis, AAC, MP3Pro, etc. I mean, neglecting its lack of success, how does it compare with the other coders at this bitrate?

Pretty badly, as far as I have know. In my personal experience I have found it to be quite worse than Ogg and so far HE-AAC, even at higher bitrates than both of them. However, I don´t find the sound of it too unpleasant, at least not on the type of music I tested encoding with it (New Age, soft pop/rock) a couple years ago. It even sounded subjectively better than some MP3@128 I have heard.

It has a large tendency to muffle sharp attacks, even more than MP3.
Try it with any metal sample and you'll see.

AFAIR there were some rumours about something like VQF revisited, announced for this or the upcoming year with a whole bunch of improvements which would make it at least competititve to present audio codecs ... anybody got information about that?

Well, I doubt NTT is planning to "revisit" VQF, and much less Yamaha.

That leaves us with Ahead, that is the third company that owns the VQF sources.

Hey, Menno, do you know if Ahead plans to revamp VQF?

Anyway, Ahead already "improved" VQF by allowing bitrates up to 192kbps (the former limit was 96kbps). But I hadly consider that revisiting.

IMO, it's not wise to revisit VQF. The format is mostly forgotten now. The time that would be wasted trying to improve it would be better spent tuning a modern encoder, like AAC or Vorbis. Besides, in order to make it competitive, nearly everything would need to be redeveloped, then it wouldn't even make sense calling it VQF anymore.

The idea behind vqf sound interesting though...

http://www.mp3-tech.org/vqf.html

MPEG4 allows modified TwinVQ I think.