Hi there,
I guess the question is clear to everbody who is a bit into technical mp3 stuff, so I'm sorry if this is one of theese over and over again questions...
Anyway, I did some searching on the net, and of course in ha, but couldn't find any whatsoever useful describtions or hints, so please don't stone me to death...
When using lamedropxp, there are some options for vbr-methods:
1. vbr-default
2. vbr-rh(old)
3. vbr-mtrh(new)
What I got so far is, that vbr-rh is supposed to be of higher quality than vbr-mtrh, though a little bit slower (that's o.k. with me).
I didn't got any other informations than that...
would somebody point out the differneces in the methods, or point me to link?
thx

This is what I took from a recent post by LCtheDJ:

'· Old, the old and commonly used method.
· New, a new method which is still a bit experimental.
· MTRH, a mix between the old and new method.'

Can anyone give me a more complex explanation?
(without toooo much technical reference, as far as possible... )

vbr-mtrh (also called vbr-new) is faster, considered stable, and used in the "--alt-preset fast xxxx" presets. It tends to make things a bit smaller too, but there are apparently some samples it still falls flat on, which is why vbr-old is used as default when you just specify --vbr for instance. --vbr-old is used on the non-"fast" presets.

Uh... ?

From what I've read in the past:
1) VBR Old is the best method.
2) VBR New was developped to improve encoding speed, but bitrate bloating and slight disadvantage in sound quality caused it to not be well liked.
3) VBR MTRH was created most recently, to deliver the same quality as the Old method for 99% of cases (but encoding faster), with the only disadvantage being some bitrate bloat.

Allright, that cleared things out, thanks guys.
There is often the tendency to use the newest stuff (e.g. vbr-new), so I was a little confused... As vbr-old is the vbr-method of choise atm, I'm going to use that.