Ogg quality relative to Mp3

[Ned]

Vorbis gives you excellent sound quality already at 64kBit

As quoted from the Ogg project site.

So what exactly does "excellent" mean? Is audio done in Ogg at 64kbit equivalent to:

128kbit mp3
160kbit mp3
192kbit mp3

It looks like a strong contender to replace mp3 in divx but how much better is it?

[Slogra]

Well, just tested a bit with the new OGG DS (found in this threat (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=17723)).

And came to the conclusion that it sounds quite good at 64kbps (qualityrate: 0.001). I compared to LAME 112 ABR and i can't tell much difference. I don't know which sounds better...

I just listened to one song (comparing some parts over and over again comparing), so i haven't tested it heavily.

[Ned]

I made some ogg's at various bitrates of 1 song;

64kbit - sounds like 96kbit mp3, not very listenable, certainly not "excellent"

96kbit - big improvement, similar to 128-160kbit mp3, would deem it "good"

128kbit - starting to sound quite good, I encoded the same track using --alt-preset standard and in many ways the ogg was superior and no obvious inferiorities to the much higher mp3 bitrate (~190-200kbit)

64kbit - 1.7mb
96kbit - 2.65mb
128kbit - 3.35mb
--alt-preset standard 6.1 mb

Track length was 4:02

[Slogra]

Originally posted by Ned
64kbit - sounds like 96kbit mp3, not very listenable, certainly not "excellent"


Aren't you a bit harsh now? I liked the quality for 64kbps. Good listenable and better than 96kb mp3.

[Ned]

Well you might be able to get away with 64kbit Ogg if you were doing a quiet movie that just had dialogue. If it had any intense action scenes or lots of music then it's rather poor.

Ogg at 128 and 160 is quite impressive though. 160 is very close to the original wav file.

[tangent]

When it says "Vorbis gives you excellent sound quality already at 64kBit", it simply means that no other codecs can beat Vorbis at 64kbps. Not WMA, not MP3Pro.

[tangent]

Oh yeah, there's no way to point out exactly what the equivilence is between Vorbis and MP3 bitrates. For some reference you might check out http://www.ff123.net/tamsjam.html where across a some different samples, WMA 64kbps seems slightly worse than MP3 (Fhg alt CBR) 96kbps and MP3Pro 64kbps slightly better than MP3 96kbps