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Audio Format Listening Tests Concluded
Pointing to the conclusions of this listening study, nullity writes: "The results are interesting, and show a high variation in the performance of the various codecs on different musical styles. Ogg seems to work well on dance music, WMA8 on chamber music, etc."
64Kbps is where the flaws of a codec are truely exposed. It's a great median between being too high to produce much results and too low where everything completely falls apart. You may not think any of this has any relevance to you as you're encoding above 128Kbps, but it actually does make a difference when you stress your encoder with a difficult piece of music.
However, if the difference between sounding 'good' and sounding 'accurate' mean little to you, as someone who'd make an argument of 64Kbps tests being worthless would, then you really aren't the intended audiance of such tests. You can merrily use any of those encoders at 128-192Kbps without ever really noticing or caring much.
I, personally, would like to see OGG1.0, MP3 Pro and WMA8 take on some real tough to beat codecs such as Dolby's AAC High-Complexity Mode (which no AAC freely available encoder supports, including QuickTime) and Sony's ATRAC3. But, that'd be kinda moot, because most people out there do not have access to those toys.
For now, I'm content to just watch people hop around and proclaim whatever they want as king of audio formats while sticking to 256Kbps Fraunhoffer MP3 (archival purposes) and 192Kbps LAME HQ MP3 (general usage) as something both widely supported and pratically indistinguishable from the source. Even if AAC-HC and ATRAC3 were freely available, it'd take an awful large effort to wean people off of MP3 so far as support base and to migrate them to a new format. New P2P programs, new players/plug-ins (in some cases) and new hardware players. Not gonna happen for a while.