The author of the article was certainly over entheusiastic, but it's still a good encoder. To my ear the Fraunhofer and Lame encoders are equal in quality and Lame is slightly faster. Lame isn't necessarily the best encoder but it's definitly the best free encoder. Xing wasn't as bad as he said it was and he didn't even mention BladeEnc.
But yes VBR is highly overrated. Even the Sulaco site recomends ABR over VBR. Speed is the easy thing to improve with the VBR settings; quality is hit or miss. The author seems to think that a 192 VBR mp3 will always sound better than a 192 CBR mp3, hard for me to swallow. For me VBR is mostly for shrinking the mp3, not improving its quality.
Same goes for Joint Stereo. Audible stereo data is lost when it's converted to JS, especially when it's strictly enforced. The whole point of mp3 is to reduce size by removing the data you can't hear and keeping the data you can hear. JS only does that to a certain extent.
There's no doubt that Lame is the best thing to happen to mp3 in a long time, but the guys at Fraunhofer are still doing their own research and they've got more funding than the open source community. Not that it really matters because as broadband gets faster and more popular and hard drives get bigger, people will start to use non lossy formats like Monkey Audio to trade their music. (Then those RIAA guys really will be able to complain that people are trading CD qulity songs on the net, not that I give a rat's ass.:f: )
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