It really depends on your computer's speaker system on what bitrate to use. 
If you have cheap low wattage speakers 128 kbps sounds pretty good - but on 
a great pair of speakers you can hear the compression roll off the high end 
(past 16khz) or do strange things to cymbals and high-hats (a watery or 
phlanging sound).  I have a friend who just upgraded his computer and now 
he's hearing all those problems and dreading re-ripping all his favorite 
CD's again.

I prefer using 192 kbps for all my home "rips" of CD's. It seems to be the 
best size/quality compromise to me. For mono recordings and vinyl 45 rips I 
prefer using 96 mono. I use CDex or Exact Audio Copy for CD-R's and a nice 
frontend program for Lame called Razorlame for compressing wav files.

Billy

At 11:20 AM 3/13/03 -0500, you wrote:

>simplist explanation is that the higher the bitrate,
>the less compression and the less data that's "chopped off"
>from the original .wav file, leaving you with something
>more closely related to the actual sound.
>
>personally, I only encode at 192kbps unless i'm
>going to send the file to someone over email, then
>i'd probably just do 64kbps.
>
>I absolutely hear a different between 128 and 192, especially
>in the higher registers of the music or when there is a lot
>going on (multiple layers of sound).  Can't hear too much
>of a difference between 192 and 256 to justify the larger
>file size vs. improved sound quality.
>
>-kev
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: audities-owner@smoe.org
> > [mailto:audities-owner@smoe.org] On Behalf Of Jim Kosmicki
> > Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2003 11:25 AM
> > To: 'audities@smoe.org'
> > Subject: question about bitrates
> >
> >
> > I have been working a bit with mp3 files, and would like to
> > know what the
> > actual difference is between the different bitrates.
> > Obviously there's going
> > to be a difference between how much data in encoded, but what
> > difference is
> > there to the final product?  I know some people have
> > indicated that they
> > don't like 128 kbps, but my untrained ears don't seem to hear much
> > difference when I play them back.  What else do I get besides
> > a larger file
> > if I go with 192 or 320 kbps?
> >