And, if it does ... and it is true that old LAME engines v. new LAME
engines differ in this apparently most critical sense then I suspect
that (1) the effects of the ATH filtration on the quality of resultant
MP3s are greater than some might like to admit

Not necessarily.

The people working on Lame put in a lot of effort in every part of the
encoding process. They try hard to adress *all* issues affecting the
quality of the encoded audio as well as those affecting files size and
encoding speed. Both the big issues and the small.

From the history document we can see that modifications to the ATH handling
have been done both for raising qualilty and for minimizing file size. It
is quite possible that changes for minimizing file size actually affected
quality in a negative way in at least some cases. After all, minimizing
file size at the expense of quality is the purpose of Lame even though they
try very hard to make this expense as low as possible.

I don't have the knowledge necassary for assesing how big the impact of
Lames changes in handling of ATH has been on the quality. If knowing more
about this was important I'd go the the Lame home site, find a link to the
discussion groups/forums/lists where I'd be most likely to find people who
has that knowledge.

And I bet those same people could answer a whole lot of other questions
about the MP3 encoding process as well as tell me what parameters to Lame
they personally likes to use. :-)

Personaly I have no idea what of the changes Lame has had since it first
became a complete encoder has been the most important changes WRT sound
quality. I do know that I've never seen the ATH changes mentioned before I
looked at the history document, and that I have seen other changes
mentioned as beeing important.


Thank you Jonas, you may have won the prize. :-)

Thanks. What do I get? :-)

Actually, I feel I have won something. I've won some knew knowledge about
MP3 encoders.

But I honestly think that I'm not the only person in this group who has
come to that conclusion nor the only person who has posted it to the group.

Regards
/Jonas