TwinVQ (VQF) - Normal Quality Level

If you don't know much -or know nothing at all- about this compression format, I suggest you pop right over to www.vqf.com, keeping in mind that it does have a slight bias towards, surprise surprise, TwinVQ. The technology was developed by Japan's NTT, which is the biggest telecommunications company in that country.  It's intended for use over ISDN lines while giving CD-like audio quality. Yamaha has licensed TwinVQ technology and released an encoder and player, neither of which ever got past the free beta stage it seems. Luckily, a Winamp plugin is available, though it needs you to have the TwinVQ player installed since it needs support files which cannot be distributed without permission.

The NTT VQF encoder

While TwinVQ is a lossy compression technology, it is quite different from the rest of the pack. It uses a mathematical concept know as Vector Quantisation (the simplest form of which is akin to the 256 color pallet in standard VGA). This means that the artefacts produced tend to be different from the other encoders. The most notable form it takes is in mellowing out the music.

Observations

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In the album music based test, we noticed the same problems as above in most every song. For example, little details like rain falling and water flowing in the Enigma CD seemed to be washed out. The rendering of Machinehead by Bush seemed to lack any spunk whatsoever. A lot of claims have been made that the treble can be corrected by upping the treble level of your sound card. Well, this didn't really yield satisfactory results for us and it should be done in the player anyway.

While this may be a great format for distributing music on the net due to the small file sizes it does not really meet the quality level for music jukebox and archive usage. The one saving grace it may have is that the small size may make it a good choice for handheld players. While the Rio and the Nomad don't support VQF they probably could be made to. There is also word of a Rio-type VQF player.

( Rating: C )
  
 

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