As it said in HA-wiki "The latest version is aoTuV beta 5, which improves the low bit-rate quality in relation to Noise normalization without sacrificing compression ratio. This version is currently undergoing peer-review at Hydrogenaudio. "

So,how low is low bit-rate? <96kbps?or?

THX

Off the top of my head, low bitrate on HA means <128kbps.

I don't know what the author meant...

When I say "low bitrate" I mean "low quality" or "compromised quality", where a small file (or low bitrate for data transmission) is the the main goal of compression, and quality is secondary.

When I say "high bitrate" I mean "high quality", where audio quality is more important than bitrate.

I'm not sure I'd give a numerical answer... A high bitrate for spoken voice, might be a low bitrate for music.

I'd say the dividing line for "low bitrate" is when it is virtually impossible to maintain transparency for the majority of music listeners. For any sort of half-decent listening environment, that is 128kbps and has been for quite some time.

For high noise/portable situations you could make the case that <64kbps is low bitrate since HE-AAC, Vorbis etc are so good, but that is something of a codec-by-codec call to make. All of those codecs still have transparency issues up to 128k.

it should also be noted that there is no hard cut line between trnasparent and detectible.

the type of sound encoded also makes a massive difference. for instance, a simple sine wave in theory could be transparently encoded a few hundred bits/s or less with a suitible codec, losslessy too. but anything more complicated would sound crap though.

thanks you guys! It seems there's no standard definition for low bit-rate.To me 128k OGG is enough.