128kbps AAC vs. 128kbps Vorbis

128 kbps AAC vs. 128 kbps Vorbis

  • 128 kbps AAC

    Votes: 5 83.3%

  • 128 kbps Vorbis

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • Total voters
    6
GotNoRice

GotNoRice

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jul 11, 2001
Messages
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Between these two possible choices, which do you feel provides better quality audio at that bit-rate?

I know that neither of these are amazing options, and that there are many better codecs out there (FLAC, etc), but let's assume for the sake of this poll that these two codecs and bit-rates are your only two choices.
 
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AAC because ogg is no go on iDevices (and pretty much every other portable device).
 
B00nie said:
AAC because ogg is no go on iDevices (and pretty much every other portable device).
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Ogg is a container, Vorbis is a codec. It's possible to use the vorbis codec independent of the ogg container, and for the purposes of this poll, ogg is not being used. I'm mostly curious which would provide better quality audio at that bit-rate.
 
GotNoRice said:
Ogg is a container, Vorbis is a codec. It's possible to use the vorbis codec independent of the ogg container, and for the purposes of this poll, ogg is not being used. I'm mostly curious which would provide better quality audio at that bit-rate.
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Yes but as I said iDevices won't handle Vorbis or other codecs commonly used with ogg. I play most of my music through some form of an iDevice so its a no brainer for me.
 
Well that is interesting for sure. I was not really asking this question in terms of compatibility though, but in terms of audio quality as I already know my device is compatible with both. A real-world example would be youtube where AAC and Vorbis are two of the main codecs used for audio, typically using the .mp4 or .webm containers. In cases where I have the option of choosing either (not that either is an amazing choice), i'd love to know which might provide slightly better quality. What you said certainly does provide food for thought though, as with Apple's stingy compatibility protocols it's quite obvious why AAC is provided as an option, but makes you wonder what potential benefits might have caused them to have selected Vorbis as their alternative.
 
I have no idea. What's best for a Moto E4 and PC?
 
I'm leaning towards AAC for this, and this rough comparison I found seems to agree:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/mp3-vs-aac-vs-ogg-a-simple-quantitative-comparison.2168530/

I don't have any vorbis in my collection, but I listen to a few AAC streams that are surprisingly better than the MP3 option.

But its all subjective - so do a few tests of your own and see what you like. Depending on the device, you might not even notice a difference beyond a certain bitrate due to the quality of the DACs in the device.
 
Virtually no excuse to use 128 kbps for audio these days, unless it's spoken word only.
 
128kbps is plenty for AAC if you are using it in your smartphone/tablet.

A while ago I tested 256kbps AAC vs Vorbis vs 384kbps mp3 and IMO both AAC and vorbis sounded pretty much the same, and better than MP3. I currently use 256kbps AAC
 
depends on the encod.r you can get bad and you can get good aac encoders

Personally I use aac because its an iso standard. but if i was a game developer I would use vorbis
 
kumquat said:
Virtually no excuse to use 128 kbps for audio these days, unless it's spoken word only.
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Tons of reasons. you just gotta realsie the entire worlds is not just you.
- Smaller portable devices might not have space for the music you want.
- Embedded devices
- If you have to transfer to many clients on a limited bandwith.

probably tons of more I couldn't come up with just on top of my head
 
Stoly said:
128kbps is plenty for AAC if you are using it in your smartphone/tablet.

A while ago I tested 256kbps AAC vs Vorbis vs 384kbps mp3 and IMO both AAC and vorbis sounded pretty much the same, and better than MP3. I currently use 256kbps AAC
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Thats most likely because your music is hitting some of the limitation of Layer3 and no amount of extra bits will help layer3 overcome those
layer3 to aac is inferioe on a several technical level like when it comes to frame size and mixing. Weird mp3 backwards compatible restrictions are hurting the format.
You would probably still have layer 3 as the worse quality even in free format 640kbps


haz_mat said:
I'm leaning towards AAC for this, and this rough comparison I found seems to agree:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/mp3-vs-aac-vs-ogg-a-simple-quantitative-comparison.2168530/

I don't have any vorbis in my collection, but I listen to a few AAC streams that are surprisingly better than the MP3 option.

But its all subjective - so do a few tests of your own and see what you like. Depending on the device, you might not even notice a difference beyond a certain bitrate due to the quality of the DACs in the device.
Click to expand...

Those kind of testing is really not good for psychoaudio encoders as non of those metrics tells about "quality"
 
SvenBent said:
Thats most likely because your music is hitting some of the limitation of Layer3 and no amount of extra bits will help layer3 overcome those
layer3 to aac is inferioe on a several technical level like when it comes to frame size and mixing. Weird mp3 backwards compatible restrictions are hurting the format.
You would probably still have layer 3 as the worse quality even in free format 640kbps




Those kind of testing is really not good for psychoaudio encoders as non of those metrics tells about "quality"
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Well both AAC and Vorbis promise better/comparable mp3 quality at half the bit rate and IMO both hold up the claim.

I just tried a quick test on mp3@256kbps vs AAC 128kpbs (Vogue by Madonna) and I really couldn't tell the difference, then again I'm using some cheap headphones, but still.
 
Being that this is a poll and we only have 2 codecs to choose from, my answer would have to depend on the audio source.
If it's just some random 5min song being listened to through a cheap set of ear buds, and size constraints are a factor...AAC.
If it's an audio book...Vorbis
If it's a video being uploaded to Youtube...AAC or Vorbis because it doesn't matter at that bitrate, they both will sound like shit.
If it's a soundtrack from a movie (god forbid)...AAC, than transcode with MediaCoder @192kb using the AC3 codec via FFmpeg, than remux. That way you can have true stereo at least.
 
Stoly said:
Well both AAC and Vorbis promise better/comparable mp3 quality at half the bit rate and IMO both hold up the claim.

I just tried a quick test on mp3@256kbps vs AAC 128kpbs (Vogue by Madonna) and I really couldn't tell the difference, then again I'm using some cheap headphones, but still.
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I am not disagreeing with the conclusion necessarily.
i'm just saying that the test methodlogy is very flawed. because its tries to meaausre missing sounds. not the value of what is gone.
So it in no way takes into account how lossy encoders work.

Also the way you are testing now is probably flawed as well.
If you really want to test stuff like that ( to hear a diffrence) you need to look into doing a propepr ABX testing.
anything less than that is just aworthless test due to the high posssible effect from placebo and other bias.

There are proper tools to do it. all free. if you are interested i can find the links for you.
 
Nothing at 128 kbps sounds good. At 128 kbps it would be better to use Opus than Vorbis. Out of AAC and Vorbis I'd pick AAC unless the AAC encoder being used is subpar.
 
SvenBent said:
I am not disagreeing with the conclusion necessarily.
i'm just saying that the test methodlogy is very flawed. because its tries to meaausre missing sounds. not the value of what is gone.
So it in no way takes into account how lossy encoders work.

Also the way you are testing now is probably flawed as well.
If you really want to test stuff like that ( to hear a diffrence) you need to look into doing a propepr ABX testing.
anything less than that is just aworthless test due to the high posssible effect from placebo and other bias.

There are proper tools to do it. all free. if you are interested i can find the links for you.
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I don't think my tests are definitive, not even close. What I do think is that it serves my purpose, which is listening to music on my phone while I jog. Currently I only have a 2gb sd card on my phone, I have all my music @256kbps AAC, but I'd rather fit twice the songs if I can't tell the difference anyway.
 
For spoken word, either is overkill.

For music, AAC is slightly more efficient.

And guys, 128kbps AAC is pretty decent, if you use a good encoder. It's not twice as good as mp3 like all the ads claimed, but it is an improvement.

Hydrogen Audio did a test of the most modern AAC codecs at 96kbps VBR. Apple's encoder was pretty close to transparent, so you can imagine the results will be pretty transparent at 128kbps.

http://listening-tests.hydrogenaud.io/igorc/aac-96-a/results.html
 
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Stoly said:
I don't think my tests are definitive, not even close. What I do think is that it serves my purpose, which is listening to music on my phone while I jog. Currently I only have a 2gb sd card on my phone, I have all my music @256kbps AAC, but I'd rather fit twice the songs if I can't tell the difference anyway.
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Google Play Music.
 
Stoly said:
I don't think my tests are definitive, not even close. What I do think is that it serves my purpose, which is listening to music on my phone while I jog. Currently I only have a 2gb sd card on my phone, I have all my music @256kbps AAC, but I'd rather fit twice the songs if I can't tell the difference anyway.
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You can get a 16 GB SD card for about $6. That's not a reason to encode all your music at a substandard bitrate.
 
B00nie said:
Sorry, I meant using iTunes. I don't want to have several different players. The audio outputs of mobile devices are not high quality enough to get a real benefit from lossless audio files anyway.
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Well, I don't even use iTunes in the first place. But I just use a single App Store audio player and it plays everything I throw at it.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flac-player/id577346786?mt=8

You don't have to use several different players, just 1 different player for everything.

For comparison, Windows support FLAC either, you need a different player, but most people have no problems using a different player on their PC, like foobar2000, so why not a different player on their iPhone? At least that's the way I see it.
 
SirMaster said:
Well, I don't even use iTunes in the first place. But I just use a single App Store audio player and it plays everything I throw at it.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/flac-player/id577346786?mt=8

You don't have to use several different players, just 1 different player for everything.

For comparison, Windows support FLAC either, you need a different player, but most people have no problems using a different player on their PC, like foobar2000, so why not a different player on their iPhone? At least that's the way I see it.
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That's my personal preference. And as I said it's not worth while to play lossless on the phone, it's not high quality enough to benefit from it.

In fact, perhaps 0.1% of the people into hifi have audio gear that is high enough quality to benefit from lossless.
 
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