Audio quality degradation in EBU test with xHE-AAC after the latest update.

[celona]

I merged the 6 speech tests of EBU, 3 men, 3 women, 3 languages, into a single 90 second file which I compressed with EZ CD Audio Converter 9.5.3 in xHE-AAC at 36kb / s (VBR mono), obtaining artifacts previously absent at 48000 Hz.

I already wrote about it in another forum (see https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic= ... msg1007157 ) where I left the source file in FLAC to use to reproduce the problem and the compressed file obtained without the DSP options.

[celona]

I created a 90 sec file. with the EBU tests, 3 men, 3 women, 3 languages and compressing it with the latest update (Fraunhofer IIS xHE-AAC VBR, 36 kb / s, mono) the audio quality has significantly deteriorated with version 9.5.3. Could it be due to "other minor improvements"?

https://www.celona.it/test/ebu-test.mp4 (xHE-AAC, 48000 Hz, 26 kb/s, 292 kB)

https://www.celona.it/test/ebu-test.flac (FLAC, 48000 Hz, s16, 379 kb/s, 4.1 MB)

[poiko]

There has been no changes to xHE-AAC encoder for while

Are you getting this after update from 9.5.2 to 9.5.3 ? There has been absolutely no changes in xHE-AAC encoding

9.5.2 added few more supported sample rates (lower than 44/48 kHz) for low bit rate encoding but that does not affect 44/48 kHz encoding at all

I will take a look into it

[poiko]

Your xHE-AAC file has ReplayGain information embedded, resulting different (clipping?) output in Foobar. When I remove the ReplayGain tags the audio sounds better.