[FlameGrilled]

For ferks sake, how many times do i have to remind people that judging a performance by saying, in a blanket fashion, that xxx kbps is rubbish and yyy kbps is good.

You cannot, ever, take 100% of all audio and define one even a close group of rate ranges that give good or superior reproduction (for lossy audio purposes) regardless of input.

The only way to get the optimal level quality encoding, is to allow the encoder to use whatever bitrate per frame it needs - you only restrict it to keep file sizes down (DAP and archive purposes) or to suit a bandwidth restriction.

There is a lot of audio that sounds good at 128k, given a decent sample of audio to start with (i.e no modern crappy quick-win audio engineering), and plenty that dont sound right.. but a slighty boost on the 128k avg figure can make all the difference. Some literally wont sound decent at any low-range encoding rate (low range - narrow band).

Who really is gonna be finding a life or death destruction of their listening experience if they encode at 128k and people tell them they are using an un-optimal codec at that rate..??

Very few, in practise, would really care - and good for them.. as it's only really people with too much time on their hands who do this kinda testing for amatuer interest.

I wish i could spend time putting together an equally pointless test and watch the HA and other groups waste more time on pointless perpertual 'for the sake of it' testing, but i got better things to do.. and more respect for the short time we all have on this god forsaken existance..

In other words.. get a grip.. and do what works for you.. and say ferk it to all this bloody pointless 'for the sake of it' testing.