I understand that sound quality is subjective, and that one might argue "-apx is overkill; it doesn't really matter which version you use, they will all sound the same", but I have reason to believe that there are members out there who have ABX'd different LAME versions using this preset, and can clearly discern between the two.

Oh, and to justify my usage of -apx, I have enough hard disk space on both my DAP and computer to not be worried about space. That being said, --insane is probably too insane for my taste.

This isn't limited to just LAME 3.90.3 vs 3.96.1 but it should be within the limits of what is NOT superannuated and is irrelevant (i.e a LAME compile from the paleolithic era that has NO vbr presets; that was sarcasm).

Thanks

I believe the tunings on LAME keep getting better, thus, your best bet would be to try to abx yourself with 3.96.1 vs 3.90.3 vs 3.97a11, the latter which quite a few users have chosen to use.

I've just been toying around with encoding The Killers - Mr Brightside with the three different build versions. with just -apx commandline, avg bitrate and filesize goes (least to greatest)

3.90.3 < 3.96.1 < 3.97a11

And then I tried doing "-V1 --vbr-new" with 3.97a11 and compared it to 3.90.3 -apx, and the filesize and avg bitrates (and even bitrate distributions) were almost bit-for-bit identical. That's pretty amazing, considering it only took almost 1/4th of the time to encode (14 seconds versus like 52 seconds).

3.97 might be the way to go, even if it still is in alpha stage. Oh, and I ABX'd them all, my ears can't discern the difference between any of them... my ears are tuned, just not as fine as sand particles

This was discussed thoroughly here:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ST&f=15&t=35866

I ended up with 3.97a11 and -V0 --vbr-new