Over the past two weeks, a second round of AAC listening tests was carried out across five different AAC codecs at Rarewares . This test has been carried out due to significant quality improvement across most the codecs. The AAC codecs tested were Nero AACenc v.2.6.2.0, Compact! 1.2beta3, FAAC 1.23.5 (all three in 128kbps VBR), Apple iTunes 4.2 and Real Producer 10 beta (both in 128kbps CBR). The test closed on February 29th.
In 12 songs tested, iTunes had the best score on average with Nero close behind. The remaining three are closely tied in second place (or third place if Nero is considered second place). The scores did not vary as much as in the original AAC listening test which means that any recent AAC codec will produce a good quality encoding.
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Then I performed an ANOVA analysis. The results are graphed below. iTunes is more or less tied to Nero. The security margin (LSD/2 overlapping with ranking) is very small, which would likely indicate iTunes is the winner. Real, Faac and Compaact! are tied at second place. (or third place if you consider Nero as the second place) This test showed some very interesting developments since the last AAC at 128kbps test. The most obvious one is surely Faac, that lost relatively badly before, and now became a very serious contender. Nero also got improved - it clearly lost to QuickTime/iTunes last time. And the newcomers Real (actually CodingTechnologies) and Compaact! show lots of promise. It's worth mentioning that according to a key developer of the QuickTime/iTunes AAC encoder, this codec nearly didn't get tuned since the last test because they were busy with porting the iTunes platform to Windows and working on speed optimization. Makes one wonder how much it can improve once the engineers start tuning it again and if a VBR mode is eventually implemented Anyway, it's safe to say that all codecs represented here are pretty mature and, no matter what your choice among them is, it's very likely you'll get very good results for your encodings.
See the complete results here. |
With continuous work on improving the quality of AAC codecs, they are getting near to the best quality that AAC can perform. Roberto's previous test carried out towards the end of January showed Lame 3.95 to produce the best quality out of five MP3 codecs in the listening test. With iTunes' AAC encoder pretty much the leader in AAC quality, it means iPod lovers can stick to iTunes for encoding their audio CDs as well as transferring their tracks to their player
Feel free to read and discuss about AAC and other audio topics on our Audio Forum.
Source: Roberto's public listening tests
FAAC is on v1.24+ in the meantime with automatic cutoff changes when using different -q values, so the -q 115 setting used in the test would use ~17.5 kHz now, not 16 kHz. It also includes MP4 tagging switches on the command line in this version. All available output plugins (cool_faac.flt, out_aac.dll, libfaac.dll) have been updated to v1.24, too.
http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/wiki/?page=FAAC
Nero AAC used ~140 kbps overall for the whole sample suite instead of 128 kbps.
The latest iTunes version 4.5 is said to sound worse than 4.2.
The comparison did not use a low-quality anchor (necessary for group listening tests), so the differences between the codecs were exaggerated.Top news
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