Originally posted by: SludgeFactory
no most people can't tell the difference (or don't have the equipment to do so), within the last few months somebody posted blind tests here at 320 and 128 (IIRC), and from the polls most people were just guessing.
I would pick what sounds good to you and not waste space with anything higher. And yes your choice of music matters, and you also have to consider the trend in mastering over the last ~10 years. The state of modern pop/rock CD mastering is such that most of the dynamic range and details are lost and the whole thing is squeezed into a massively-blurred mess, so chopping out 90% of the info with lossy compression isn't really going to hurt much more. When the source is that screwed up, I find there is little benefit in full redbook audio over decently-encoded MP3, it's going to sound like sh!t regardless.
Yea, I did a pretty simple test like a year ago, with LAME 3.94 or similar, and posted two files, wav's of the mp3's at 128kbit, and another at 192kbit.
The votes were somthing like 23 thought 128kbit sounded best, and 8 thought the 192kbit sounded best.
Then after I posted the results, the 192kbit jumped to like 40 votes.. hehehe
On another note, as far as audio encoding goes, check
Tuner2 for some incredible sounding low bitrate streams.. They have 24kbit streams that sound better then 112kbit mp3 streams. You'll need Winamp (with the aac plugin) or Foobar2k.