Personal notes on quality:
I'm an engineer\producer, I spend my life in studios, generally 10-15 hours a day, but thankfully only a few weeks here, a few weeks there. After about 6-7 hours, my ears get fried. I don't do intense audio after that amount of time.
#1, it is not true that most new music you hear today was created in a digital medium. That's a myth, but much more is digital today than say ten years ago.
#2, you never hear what I hear in the studio, never. Ogg this and APE that, you ain't really gettin' it like I do. Not even close.
#3, since most of it is in fact recorded analog, a digital transfer takes place in the chain, and it never goes analog to 16 bit stereo (CD quality), so a few bit depths here, a couple of dithers there, and now your listening to a CD. Oh yeah, let's not forget mastering to "even it out" in various forms using mulitband compression, perimetric audio doctors and the favorite brickwall digital limiters (L2 anyone?).
#4, any digital recordings are done at 24b-44k, or 24b-96k, far and away better than any normal CD.
Lastly, what does it all mean? Unless you want to replace those CD's on the shelves with hardrives or those low quality CDR's that CAN be volatile at random, strongly consider LAME encoded MP3's.
Why? Because the difference between what I hear in the studio and a CD on my home stereo or car player is a canyon to the crevice that is CD to LAME. And my home system is very nice, as is my car system. But even I can barley hear the difference between a 256kbs LAME file and it's CD counterpart in my car. Yea, there's a difference, and I could point out every nuance of the difference, but in every day life (traffic, wind through the windows, or surfing the net, friends hanging out, whatever...) I don't hear it, I'm not listening for it, I just hear the sweet music. And I've been trained to focus on unfortunate nuances in music for over 20 years now.
Music today is mastered to sound good in many different environments, on many different sound systems. Most people today listen on small stereos, boom boxes, desktop speakers or even their TV speakers. And I've never been in a car and ever thought to myself "gee, let's record in here, what great acoustics!" It's also been taken into reason what happens when the song gets compressed some more later on, like broadcasts of radio or (M)TV. Basically, it's prepared for what you want to do with it, even a digital encode of LAME proportions.
Enjoy.
PS - In a test I did with some other engineers in a very nice studio with $8K monitors, we put VBR up against CBR. Three of us swore we could actually hear the VBR working as the bitrate changed rapidly, and found it disturbing. Two others heard no difference at all.
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Topic: Quick Re-Encoding Question (Read 3556 times)