CD Freaks member Sebastian Mares posted three weeks ago a thread on our forums to invite people for a public multiformat listening test. The files were encoded at 48 kbps and as a reference also a file encoded at 96 kbps was included. The following codecs were in the test; iTunes AAC 7.0.2.16 (96 kbps High Anchor), Ogg Vorbis AoTuV 5 Beta, WMA Professional 10, Nero HE-AAC May 26 2006, WMA Standard 9.2, iTunes AAC 7.0.2.16 (48 kbps Low Anchor).
A few days ago the results of the tests were made available. As expected the iTunes file encoded at 96kbps was voted the best quality but a good second was the Nero HE-AAC codec. Is anyone already converting their entire music collection to lower bit rates to save disk usage, or is the only option to use low bitrates to save bandwidth?
