Stimpy wrote:

Rich Wilson wrote:

I prefer quality of sound over technical possibilities.

If you're listening to MP3's and radio, you have no concept of quality
sound.

Disagree - at least *I* can't tell high bitrate, LAME encoded MP3's from
original source. I doubt many people (if any) could.

I'm with you on that but I don't think we'd manage to convince many people
round here!



Thirded... After some months of consideration and testing, I decided I
couldn't tell the difference between CD and 320kbps, LAME-encoded mp3s so
moved exclusively to the latter when I set up my media server about 18 months
ago

Conbsidering that this is a 50% reduction in bit-rate over the
original and compression under the 40-60% range has basically
no meaningful lost data(see typical "lossless" compression
methods - they all clock in at about 320k MP3 size), plus
the fact that CD quality is much better than most peolpe can
hear, yes, 320K properly encoded will give you a recreation
of the original that a side-by-side test would be hard pressed
to reveal.

Lower than that, though, it gets plainly audable. Quickly.
128 is very "gritty" sounding, like FM radio, and 192 is
maybe like tape but without the wobble and hiss.