Which one is better for your ear?

lame 3.8x (3.9alpha?) was better than fhg with nspsy, for me. fhg caused some bad flanging. Now lame 3.92 alt preset is definetly better.

I prefer FhG (Producer Pro) at any *CBR* bitrate below 192kbps (streaming, portable use, etc)... if it were just 128kbps ABR (why?) then probably Lame, but to be honest I've never tested it .

between 128 kbps and 192 kbps there is no more need for fhg encoders. lame with the alt-presets performs much better!

I'll take your word for it, honestly I've never tried "--alt-preset cbr 128" and don't think I ever will. But I've been reasonably satisfied with FhG's CBR in the (fading) past (more so than say, Xing or Blade) so that's really all I can comment on.

When doing backups of my DVDs, I've found LAME to perform better than any FhG encoders I've tested too. (FhG encoders have a bad tendency of ruining the soundtracks of movies at anything below 192 kbps.)

I heard somewhere that fhg (producer pro) has a bug and paying attention too much in high freq (above 16) so that can cause ringing.

I prefer lame than fhg after some experiments.

I've never heard any ringing with Producer Pro files (that I can remember). In fact, I remember more ringing with earlier iterations of Lame, before the --alt-preset switches.

from ff123 web site:

Fraunhofer (Opticom) Producer Pro, AudioActive, or Radium hack of this codec: Some people swear by this codec, but I think that at CBR 128 it pays too much attention to frequencies greater than 16 kHz at the expense of more critical lower frequencies. In addition, on certain musical selections which contain lots of out-of-phase information (I don't know how rare this is), this codec may produce unlistenable results (see my page "Out of Phase Quirk in FhG 1.0/1.2 build 63i Codec", http://ff123.net/outofphase.html). In addition, bAdDuDeX has heard pre-echo problems with this codec on castanets.wav (see his comment on my listening test of castanets.wav, http://ff123.net/preecho.html).

Well, it's all from memory anyway. Except for the 24kbps mono MP3's I do for my dialup modem "internet radio station" (see www button, below) I haven't used FhG for quite a while. Why use it when Lame with the --alt-presets is available?

As for MP3 at 24kbps mono (~48kbps stereo) encoded with Producer Pro, you can check out the site at my WWW link and make your own decision... IMHO it's tolerable (doesn't produce urge to bang head against wall) on *some* music, probably better than Real or WMA. On other music, it's abysmal (the artifacts overwhelm the music).