They mention 256kbps in regards to that, at which point all of vorbis, aac and mp3 (lame) are 'perceptually lossless', so it wouldn't be much new. While it is hard to tell (because tests at higher bitrates don't really work out/ produce winners), it seems that any sonic advantage held is at the lower bitrate end.
Measuring the point where something becomes perceptually lossless is quite difficult because, by definition, you're measuring at the bounds of perceptibility.
In terms of simple objective measures (e.g. the masking weighed SNR, http://people.xiph.org/~greg/celt/NMR.v.c.l.png) Opus does better than Vorbis (and AAC) at high rates too. Between that and the overall better time domain performance, my _expectation_ is that Opus can become perceptually lossless at lower rates, but this is hard to validate.
Getting the lowest possible average perceptual lossless rate is also a product of the encoder having a good psymodel, and released opus encoders have pretty much no explicit psymodel at all (but still manage to be competitive). So this reduces the interest in doing a bunch of very difficulty listening tests to determine the exact perceptually-lossless points, since they'll likely go down with near term encoder improvements.
Lossy audio compression over about 160kbits is a boring subject these days because for the vast majority of users and samples it's more than good enough.
I'd imagine this would have to be at least competitive with mp3/aac/ogg at those rates.
In my listening opinion with very good isolated headphones: the music is very good but you can hear the drop-off of the highs in the vocal examples. It's good but not good enough for 'professional' use at the lower bitrates.
Audio compression is generally not used for production audio (film sound, television etc), but on occasion they'll use MPEG2 for remote transmission. This is a lossy codec but sounds better than the example provided, albeit at 128kbps so I'd need to hear the Opus codec at 128kbps to compare.
MPEG2 isn't an audio codec, it's a suite of standards. But based on my experience writing hardware encoders for this use case, you're talking about MPEG1 Layer 2 audio.
Opus outperforms that greatly, but it's not going to outperform MPEG1 Layer 2 at 256kbps while only outputting 64kbps itself. (Will likely need >= 96kbps for that).
I already posted tests results elsewhere in this topic. It outperforms it at low bitrates. I suspect also at higher ones but once both codecs get imperceptible for most listeners (which is the case for AAC and Opus >128kbps) it's very hard to get statistically significant results.
