Encoded with 3.90.3 -b128 female voice is slightly distorted. Gone with cbr160.

hm, iirc, 3.90.x doesn't have tuned -b modes.

To get the best quality out of 3.90.x, you have to use (alt-)presets, ie., you get best quality at 128k:

--alt-preset 128 (abr)
--alt-preset cbr 128 (cbr)

These presets are very different from -b 128 at 3.90.x, (which is different for 3.97).

Just a side note (as I don't know at the moment what the point of this upload is): 3.90.3 --preset 128 wasn't supposed to be transparent. It was tested once during a multiformat test and "slight" and even "more than slight" distortions were noticed on all 12 tested samples.

Sure.
This wasn't meant for production purposes. I just used this setting for finding female voice samples difficult to encode. And it's more or less a personal sample for guruboolez. See Insane setting thread.

Halb27, can you try my test sample below:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=39929

With pleasure. But what exactly do you want me to do?

Added later:
Guess you want me to confirm your result (but you did abx it already). I downloaded it and encoded it with MPC 1.15v --standard and listened to the encoding.
To be honest: if you hadn't written about the problem spot I don't think I would have heard this problem. It is very slight to me. When abxing I arrived at 5/5 (so I really beleive there is a problem), but continued badly and finished at 5/8. I don't think I can do better, at least not at the moment.

BTW this is one of these samples where voice is already distorted for me in the original (very slightly in this case).