What's the best 'bitrate' for music? 128 or 192 and why?

[Big_John]

ok, i had a little fun with this.. just found out that my software encodes ogg too. anyway, here are a couple more 30s clips that i just encoded from the CDs. first one is vocals, second one is jazz that's a bit louder than the other stuff.

notice the differences in filesize, and how the same vbr method can lead to relatively smaller (first set) or larger (second set) files than 192kbps.

128 voice 408k
192 voice 612k
vbr voice 516k
ogg voice 892k

128 jazz 550k
192 jazz 825k
vbr jazz 898k
ogg jazz 1299k

the ogg files were encoded with the dll version "xiph.org libvorbis | 20020717". they were encoded at quality 9 (~320kbps).

imo, the ogg is the only one that sounds noticibly different, and it simply sounds like the treble has been turned up a tad. but i'm not using high-end equipment by any means.


here's an interesting thing i discovered that my software can do, it's a delta (difference) file made between the 128 and 192 vocal files. basically, what you are hearing is the audio information that was left out of the 128 file, but included in the 192 file. unfortunately, this doesn't work with the ogg file.

difference