I find the quality of music that is mostly vocals suffers a lot when encoded at a average bitrate like 128/160. Electronic music is much more forgiving with lower bitrates as is music with heavy guitar although it seems you lose a little bit of the "grittyness" but it totaly depends on how much you listen to music and how much you care. I have been encoding my music at 192 and am thinking of moving up a bit to 256 just because harddrive space is so cheap nowdays and I want the best sound I can get. A lot of my music is ripped from CD's that I don't have anymore so having music that still sound good to me while I continue to upgrade my sound system is important. I would love to just keep all my music on CD but I really value the quick song access and the abilty to make playlists.
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I find the quality of music that is mostly vocals suffers a lot when encoded at a average bitrate like 128/160. Electronic music is much more forgiving with lower bitrates as is music with heavy guitar although it seems you lose a little bit of the "grittyness" but it totaly depends on how much you listen to music and how much you care. I have been encoding my music at 192 and am thinking of moving up a bit to 256 just because harddrive space is so cheap nowdays and I want the best sound I can get. A lot of my music is ripped from CD's that I don't have anymore so having music that still sound good to me while I continue to upgrade my sound system is important. I would love to just keep all my music on CD but I really value the quick song access and the abilty to make playlists.