Digital Home Thoughts: Another Take on the Great Bitrate Debate

"There will be no judgment in this post. No sound snobbery. I'm simply asking the age-old question: At what bitrate should we encode MP3s? And I need your help. This test is occurring in two parts. In part one, I'm sampling three songs chosen from vastly different genres, encoded from CD and transcoded into the various popular bitrates available for MP3s (64k, 96, 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320kbps with VBR off). I tell you what I hear, then you sample the files yourself, and tell me what you hear."

There's an interesting test going on over at Gizmodo. Mark Wilson tried to determine the "sweet spot" for encoding MP3s in terms of bitrate. He performed the tests on three different genres of music and shared his conclusions. But more interesting, he's made the sound clips available for download and asked his readers to perform their own tests and share the results. Head over a give is a try!

I've played around with different bit rates and codecs over the years. I gave up on lower bit rates a couple years ago when hard drive storage really stopped being an issue and just decided to re-rip my CD collection in 320kbps MP3. And if I'm reading Mark Wilson's conclusions correctly, I should be safe, at least for a few more years. What bitrate and codec do you use?