best sq in lossy format?

[uzziah]

straight up, personal opinion of the best lossy codec available now?

 

[lan]

Musepack.

 

[Gojira]

I concur. Definitely Musepack or "mpc". Especially at higher (192k+) bitrates. Since you are asking this in the portables section however you should know that no portable supports this format. No hardware decoder exists for it AFAIK. mpc -insane, especially, sounds really, really, really good. Perhaps not quite as good as a flac, ape, or wav file, but very close.

For a portable lossy format, I suspect either AAC or OGG could beat MP3. I presume you already have been over to hydrogenaudio. Just remember that those folks are not necessarily audiophiles. In fact many of them are kind of anti-audiophiles. So they don't necessarily look at sound quality the same way we do here. As with audio eqiupment, there is no substitute for testing out the differences with your own ears. Each codec has it's own unique characteristics. Everyone has their own preference.

 

[blessingx]

I've never seen a test that compared 320 AAC, --alt-preset insane, -q10 Ogg, etc. At their highest they mostly all sound pretty incredible, and I suspect no one here has really tested. As for the other end it really depends. MPC sounds very good at moderate bitrates, but falls apart (in comparison) at low bitrates, but Ogg and AAC-HE sound very good there. It really depends on your target bitrate. So it's a little hard to say. Personally, with further tuning, I'd keep my eye on Ogg and AAC.

 

[Krishna]

Definately musepack.

 

[uzziah]

yes i've heard musepack myself. thanks guys. now, best that is currently playable on dig portable player. aac? lame mp3? org vorbis?

 

[Duncan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by blessingx I've never seen a test that compared 320 AAC, --alt-preset insane, -q10 Ogg, etc.

Q10 OGG puts the bit-rate in the mid to high 500kbps...

I guess if you're used to lossless (FLAC / WAV) then the extra 200+kbps of OGG per second wouldn't hurt you or your HDAP though

I'm not sure why but I prefer 256k AAC to 320k AAC, maybe it was a duff couple of encodings that I did at 320k, or maybe I should use something different to iTunes, but 320k seemed to feel a little smoothed over in my opinion, like 256k let you see a painting, cracks and all, and 320k filled in those cracks, and made it look new again, lose some of its character (if you get me)

I'd be interested to know if it were encoding issues on my part, or if others agree (which somehow, i doubt lol).

 

[Krishna]

For portable use Ogg I beleive has the best sound quality. I haven't done extensive blind testing, but I have listened to both Ogg and AAC one after the other and I prefer Ogg. Its just my personal preference though. Ogg eats up the battery life though on portable players. I personally encode my music into Mp3 vbr at around 192-320kb/s and it is a good compromise between sound quality and file size.

 

[zikarus]

I am using Lame 3.90.3 or 3.96.1 MP3 in -ape quality (=around 224-256 vbr) and think this is it. I would like to test MPC, but what would it be worth? Cannot use it with my hardware anyway. Same with OGG-files: Only a few Players are capable to play them (correctly) and those that do - as mentioned above - run out of battery life to fast. The only competitor to Lame right now may be AAC. But still: MP3 can be played on any Hardware - AAC on some... And some even prefer Lame MP3 sound quality over AAC. I have not tried yet to be honest...