MPEG 1 Layer 2 (MP2) - High Quality

MP2 is probably the oldest compression technology in this review. It is very well entrenched in professional use. It is also the compression format used to encode audio in video CDs. Over time MP2 technology has been refined a great deal. While it has no chance of competing at the lower bitrates, it does suprisingly well on the high end of the scale.  For the comparison I have selected Iomega's RecordIt utility which is available free for download on their website. It uses an encoder  by a company called Q Design which makes professional encoding software.

Iomega RecordIt utility

If you look at the enlarged version of the screenshot you will notice I have selected the three star quality level. This is 192 kbps stereo. I have tried joint stereo using a rather more expensive version of the same encoder but it is recommended, and I agree, that stereo is better for MP2 at this bitrate.

If by any chance you're an amateur musician looking to store music, it maybe advisable to use the higher bitrates as it will allow editing, processing and re-encoding without giving rise to artefacts.

Observations

(If you have a problem downloading these files right click on them and select save as)

Even in the music tests the results were quite astonishing. Given the age of this format it seems compression is like a fine wine and ages well. True, it has not brought the bitrate down. But the newer technologies do seem to sacrifice a bit of quality in achieving this. Also, they don't scale up linearly in quality with bitrate. There were few occasions where you could discern the lack of bitrate, causing the quality to drop. This seems to happen when a complex bit of music is playing and there is vocals at the same time making the loss of quality in the vocal apparent. But this is far and in between.

(Rating: A+)
 
 

Table of contents
Introduction	TwinVQ (VQF)
Basics of audio compression	Real Audio G2
Methods of comparison	Microsoft Audio 4
Software and hardware	MPEG 1 layer 2 (MP2)
Selection of music for the comparison	MPEG 1 layer 3 (MP3)
Index of results	Conclusion