Rob said:Debating mp3 sound quality is futile. If you want sound quality, buy vinyl, if you want portability, buy an mp3 player.
The test is designed to find out which MP3 encoder can produce the highest quality at a certain bitrate. Why is it "futile" to help the people - who want portability - to choose software that gives the best quality results for that format?
If you're talking about digital formats (CD vs mp3), it all depends on the sample rate.Surely you mean bitrate? (The audio on a CD and an MP3 rip will both have sample rates of 44.1kHz).
The interesting thing for me is that I've always considered a bitrate of 128kbps to be inadequate for MP3, and that CD-quality was only achievable with bitrates of 192kbps+. In the Napster/Audiogalaxy days, this was probably true, but on these samples encoded with the modern software I'm having a really hard time telling the MP3s and the WAVs apart.