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Here is something that I wrote awhile ago, and just found:

We started thinking about what format we should encode a few CD’s that I retrieved from storage. We have all been ripping everything into iTunes for a while, mostly because we like the application and that is what we have been using as our jukeboxes. But we started to wonder if we was missing out on the best sound by relying on the default Apple ACC.

Obviously to get the best sound files should be encoded lossless - ala shorten files or Apple Lossless audio but they are just not practical with today’s MP3 players hardives and batteries and for all but the hardcore audiophile not really an option.

So lossy it is.

We decided that we would do a 128 kbps multiformat test figuring that 128 kbps would give us an idea which scheme sounds the best to our admittedly non golden ears. We listened to a wide variety of music ripped from original CD’s - White Zombie, Albert Collins, Willie Nelson, Talking Heads, and Velvet Revolver.

We decided that we would test ogg, acc, mp3, mpc, and wma. We listened to the files on a variety of playback devices and configuration.

The first thing that jumped out at us was that vanilla MP3’s encoded with the Lame encoder was the very worst sounding files - by far. So if you learn anything from this little mini article hear this - don’t encode to standard mp3. I hate that fluttering sound that all cymbals sound like when they are mp3 encoded.

Next up are formats that are polar opposites as far as where they come from - just above standard MP3’s are the ogg vorbis and windows media formats. Despite the disparate origins the files that we ripped into these formats sounded very similar to each other in terms of quality.

The clear winners were ACC and MPC. Everybody picked one of these formats as the top overall, and the vast majority picked the other as second.

So, bottom line, ACC lossy is about as good as it gets - and combined with the iTunes jukebox makes for a winning combination.