"As you'd expect, nobody can hear the difference between a 320kbps CBR audio file and the CD. From the basic summary statistics graph only one audio sample here was discernably different than the rest—the 128kbps CBR. And by different I mean "audibly worse." I've maintained for a long, long time that typical 128kbps MP3s are not acceptable quality. Even for the worst song ever. So I guess we can consider this yet another blind listening test proving that point. Give us VBR at an average bitrate higher than 128kbps, or give us death!" - Adriano

yeah, Cristo, for a zero sampling rate is almost equivalent to a deletion from your song list :-) - Adriano

I wonder how much this has to do with the Loudness War. - Akiva

when range compression is abused to get more peak amplitudes, I run the tunes through normalize-mp3 which helps esp. when a playlist contains different genres. That problem is independent of the sampling bitrate though. Normalization does also help boost older feeble recordings. - Adriano