They spend countless thousands of posts on this at www.hydrogenaudio.org
If you're looking for a "this is the best format" single post, take a look at: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=28124 and note: "Best Quality: archiving -b 320 - This is the strongest setting for MP3, with the lowest risk of artifacts. With the exception of a few situations, quality is rarely better than the highest VBR profiles described below. Alternative: Lossless formats like WavPack, Flac etc allow true archiving bit for bit like on original CD. High Quality: HiFi, home or quiet listening -V 3 --vbr-new (~175 kbps), -V 2 --vbr-new (~190 kbps), -V 1 --vbr-new (~210 kbps) or -V 0 --vbr-new (~230 kbps) are recommended. These settings will produce transparent encoding (transparent = most people cannot distinguish the mp3 from the original in an ABX blindtest). Audible differences between these presets exist, but are extremely marginal." So with CBR files, go with the highest bitrate, same thing with VBR. Between CBR and VBR, you should pick VBR if they average out to the same bitrate. Of course, you would be well advised to rip in FLAC for future rips, provided you have the hard drive space. zooropa320 wrote: > I'm in the process of creating a jukebox of all of my CDs which have > been ripped to VBR MP3s. I have a lot of compilations and soundtracks > which have resulted in a number of duplicates which I'd like to filter > out (over 2,500). Of course I can listen to them all to find which > ones sound best and remove the others but I'd like to know if there's > an objective way to determine which ones are "best". These aren't > meant for critical listening but if I'm going through the process I'd > like to know (or at least think) I'm playing the best ones. I suppose > this question can also be extended to remastered albums. They > certainly sound louder (which is mitigated when using ReplayGain) but > are they necessarily better. Any recommendations or references you can > point me to? Thanks in advance. > > -- ___________________________________ Mark Lanctot ___________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Find your next car at http://autos.yahoo.ca _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
