My old boss and I did a very nerdy test where we took Mp3 (Quicktime), AAC (Quicktime), Mp3 (LAME), ALAC, FLAC and uncompressed files, for control, of the same tracks and did a comparison. ALAC was the best but the difference when you dropped to AAC 320KBps was minimal (192 wasn't much below that but there was the tiniest hint of artefacting at the very high end and we needed so very high end headphones to hear it). LAME was better than QT for MP3 and Steve's equivalent rate is about right, except in cases with very high dynamic range.
― Ed (dali), Tuesday, 13 February 2007 11:22 (seventeen years ago) link