"Arny Krueger" wrote in message ...

I have personally yet to find a MP3
coder that I consider to be transparent enough for the highest quality use.

The thing is, no psychoacoustic lossy compression scheme gives audibly
perfect results for everything.

For example, LAME 3.90.3 with the "--alt-preset standard" preset gives
transparent quality for most things, but there are still some
pathological cases that expose its flaws (being the castanets and
trumpets1 samples at your PCABX site some of these cases). Using the
"--alt-preset insane" preset cures some of these cases, but not all,
at the expense of raising the bitrate up to 320 kbps. Still, those
flaws are audibly quite subtle, and many times trained ears are
required to hear them.

Other newer and higher quality lossy audio codecs, such as AAC and
specially Musepack (MPC), have an even smaller repertoire of problem
cases (Musepack does fine with PCABX samples at around 190 kbps), but
still have a few of those, even when raising the bitrate to insane
levels. That's why I say that, at least currently, no psychoacoustic
lossy compresion scheme gives always audibly perfect results. However,
for most cases (all but quite rare cases with codecs such as
Musepack), quality is undistinguishable even for well trained ears.