Another thing to consider is the quality of the encoder itself. They
are not all equal.

It's not a problem now, but 5 years ago, encoding songs was a 5-6
minutes process *per song*, so "faster" encoders appeared at the expense
of the quality of the encoding. So people used higher bitrate to offset
the bad sound.

Personnally, I'd take a great 128 kbps joint stereo over a lossy 192
kbps. VBR at about 140 are also excellent.

The efficiency of the encoder also vary between formats. I tried the
Apple AAC format and it sound way better than mp3 at equal rate.
Actually, if I was to re-encode my entire librairy in AAC, I would
choose 96 kbps, it's better than 128 kbps mp3 and produce tiny files!

--
Eric (Dero) Desrochers
http://homepage.mac.com/dero72

Hiroshima 45, Tchernobyl 86, Windows 95