What's everybody's thing with VBR here?

I believe "audiophiles" would prefer lossless encodings.

However, as far as lossy encodings go, VBR has many advantages over CBR. By using a variable bitrate you eliminate the problem of certain frames using a higher bitrate than what is necessary. See, even if a track has certain frames, which when encoded in API (CBR 320) displays a noticable incease in quality over a say, CBR 160 counterpart, you can be sure that far from all the frames on the given track would display the same inceased quality. So basicly, if you use API over a VBR encoding string that maxes out at 320 you're simply wasting your harddrive space.

Hell, I doubt people would even be able to tell the differance between properly encoded CBR 128 and API most of the time.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Trench: If you can recognize that there are certain parts of a given track that would require more, power, a higher bitrate than other parts, isn't it then only logical to encode the track in a way that is in accordance to that? Obvious parts of intrest being the few seconds (or whatever it may be) of silence at the beginning and end of the track. And I mean, even if you were to compare a lossless version to a (properly encoded) VBR copy I'm sure there would be many parts were any audiable differance would be impossible to distinguish.

What I find pretty intresting is how this debate always seems to be limited to the question of bitrate vs. bitrate, when the question of what encoder you use is so much more important to the quality of the track. You will see people passing of a FhG CBR 320 encoding as highest possible quality merely because of the CBR 320 part when in actuality it will be fundamentally flawed since FhG is such a bad encoder.

Let's face it, unless you have superhuman hearing you will not hear sufficient (if any) differance between different VBR encodings or between VBR and CBR 320 (if they've all been encoded using the same version of Lame).

Quote:

Whether you can hear it or not doesn't matter, technically it is better.

This sounds like something some dumb "audiophile" would say. Whether it is technically better is completely irrelevant unless you can actually notice any audiable differance, right?

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