Sound quality of Tmpgenc: Is it that bad?

[Banleno007]

I've encode most of my vcds using Tmpgenc. I heard rumours that the sound quality of Tmpgenc sux. I didn't bother coz the sound playback was still considered fine on my vcd player (yes i encoded into vcd) Then recently I played a vcd on my new vcd player (the old one spoilt) and found the sound quality SUCK TO THE BONE!!! I thought of the rumour, and tried playback under Vdub with the original DivX file. To my surprise, the sound was almost exactly the same during music playback! (sounded good)

Using ver 2.59
Original audio: 128 kbps mp3
Converted to: 224kbps mp2 (is this how you write mpeg layer II?)
Sound system:
ICH2 soundmax
and a brandless pair of headphones which could differentiate the sound quality from my com. with the one on my mp3 player.

So my question: It is really true that the sound of Tmpgenc is really bad?
There might be other factors that leads to sound degradation (e.g. lack of bitrate which is most likely to happen) which might not be Tmpgenc's fault.
And I also saw on a site that says all mpeg converters come with a bad sound engine. Is that true also?

[El Heggunte]

I think the author of TMPGenc himself was the first one to admit the "native" MP2 encoder in his software sucked.

Seriously though, IIRC there was an option for selecting external MPA encoders (toolame for MP2 and Lame for MP3).

[jman98]

It's been a while since I encoded a VCD, but I think the BeSweet can also encode to MPEG-1 layer II audio (this is the technical term although if you say MP2 audio here, people will know what you mean). There's a lot of crap that's been said for years about how MP2 audio supposedly "sucks" but in reality it is capable of higher quality than MP3, it just doesn't produce files as small as MP3 does at the same bitrate. MP3 was designed basically to produce smaller files at acceptable quality and it wasn't designed because MP2 had any deficiencies other than it didn't compress very well. Some people will always talk trash about any audio codec that differs from their favorite one so take such talk with a grain of salt, although it is fair to say that you probably should encode your audio with something other than TMPGenc.

[loster]

Besweet can do that as can ffmpeg.