Remember, I’m doing this for the academic purpose of comparing the merits of different audio encoding algorithms, something which I believe falls under “fair use” copyright provisions.
This guy has done the homework and conducted some head-to-head comparisons of the leading compressed audio formats to see what yields the best experience. Surprisingly, AAC is a poor third, behind lame, even at lower bit rates (I’m glad I have been using the — extreme setting on my lame encoding). Not that I’m a complete Apple partisan, but I had expected that, given the trouble of designing and releasing a new format, it would be demonstrably better.
<grumble>
I think I have been using AAC @ 192kbits for my CD rips, and they sound OK to me. My vinyl conversions seem to be too loud: there’s noticeable clipping on loud passages, so I may need to redo them and crank down the input volume.
NB: I haven’t listened to the samples posted at the link above yet. If anyone has, weigh in with your findings.