I can’t confirm this (but will ask Leif when we next make contact), but I think that the default LAME encoder is the ACTUAL developer version of LAME (“LAME Ain’t an MP3 Encoder”). There have been so many iterations since Mike Cheng’s original.
Cool Edit and then Audition used Fraunhofer’s original algorithm, which I always thought sounded “swishy” or “tinny”. Once it changed to a GPL implementation, there were some great improvements, although some versions were way better than those before or after.