MP3 VS AAC Reaper Project Nulling Test

MP3 VS AAC Reaper Project Nulling Test 

I havent done any nulling tests but just using my ears i prefer AAC to mp3 as well. All my cds get ripped to AAC using foobar and the free nero AAC encoder, which i prefer to the itunes one.

Yeah, I wish my Sansa player could read AAC. Doing a AAC to mp3 conversion isn't an option...

the thing to remember is that any lossy audio compression does all sorts of weird stuff with the frequency balance/phase. the idea is that the stuff that is affected isn't really that audible (in theory) - so the null tests aren't really a good way to do that test. i'd suggest the standard way - do a large number of double blind A/B/X tests. (AAC is a smarter algorithm at the same bitrate, though...)

I believe the only way to properly test codecs are blind ABX-tests; the folks over at hydrogenaudio.org are doing those things more-or-less regularly. In fact, they have just recently finished another test at 128 kbit/s which you might want to check out: Given the high marks at 128, I guess that for almost every source material 256 kbit/s using a modern codec should give near-transparent or transparent results. Then again, live material could prove to be a bit more challenging for the compression codecs, which are probably more tuned to cope with "normal" studio recordings: YMMV. :-)