Early Opinions of MP3Pro

notes by various listeners

6/13/01: These are early opinions formed by people whose ears I trust, concerning the sound quality of MP3Pro.
6/24/01: I have some listening tests of my own here.

Dibrom (on the r3mix forum):

Just gave this a shot.  Kinda interesting, too bad its limited to 64kbps.  It really does seem to make quite a difference though, I mean listening to an mp3 encoded with this in winamp, and then listening to it in this where it takes advantage of that spectral reconstruction stuff or whatever it is.  Still doesn't sound very good overall at that bitrate but it definately sounds better than any standard 64kbps mp3 I've heard before.  I wonder what kind of an impact this could have at higher bitrates.  Anyone know if there has been any talk of trying to include the technologies used by this in LAME or any other free encoder? or is that even possible?

bAdDuDeX (on the r3mix forum):

Wow. This sounds good for only 64kbit/s. Probably better than Blade at 128kbit/s, heh. FhG improved their Joint Stereo code quite a bit because this is the best JS I've ever heard from MP3. I looked at the pie chart with MAD and it was about 75% M/S, which is low.

The SBR still needs a lot of work though. It has a metallic sound to it, very similar to WMA (hmm, I wonder if WMA uses something like this?).

and later:

I didn't test those files mentioned on ff123's site because I'm not interested in low bitrates, but I did mess around with mp3PRO a little bit to see how it sounded. Based on what I tested, mp3PRO sounded about equal to (or maybe a little worse than) a good 112kbit/s encode (MP3Enc or FastEnc). Definitely better than 96kbit/s though. If you talk about using Blade or LAME (which I think perform poorly at those bitrates), I would likely take mp3PRO over a 128kbit/s MP3. People obviously use LAME and Blade so I don't see FhG's claims as entirely false.

JohnV (on the VQF forum):

Hehe, not just like CD, but I was quite surprised. I expected it to be worse, given that the stream is still playable (although with MUCH worse quality) with ordinary mp3-decoder.

Just tested few times against wma8-64, and MP3Pro handles at least those test samples I tested better.

So seems like Spectral Band Replication (sbr) is not just hype...

Ivan Dimkovik (on the VQF forum):

Yup. I am surprised, too :) It is much better than I expected... However it is not exactly like mp3-128, but it sounds cool...

[JohnV]: So seems like Spectral Band Replication (sbr) is not just hype...

It is not, at all... However, we still need to find "sweet spot" for this technology :)

2Bdecided (aka David Robinson, on the r3mix forum):

I'm not as sensitive as many at 16kHz (it's near the limit of detectable low pass for me), but the "energy" added by mp3PRO above 11kHz sounds quite harsh and metalic. I'd prefer 112kbps mp3 (carefully coded - as you did), but maybe not 96kbps mp3 at default bandwidth. If I increase the bandwidth (which increases artifacting too) it's close - but both sound nasty, and I think I prefer mp3PRO, maybe because I've not grown to hate the sound so much yet!

I think you've shown the lie of the claim that the quality of 64kbps mp3PRO = 128kbps mp3. This is simply untrue! But then, FhG said 128kbps mp3 was CD quality

Return to ff123's Home Page