So I loaded up iTunes 4 and QuickTime 6.2 and ripped a CD that I’m very familiar with (Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies) at 128kps AAC encoding and compared it with a 192kps mp3 encoding. I’m not a hard core sound engineer and the only spectrum analyzers I have are my ears and my admittedly rather poor hearing.
Bottom line: I can’t tell the difference between the two encodings. In fact the only difference I could tell is the total file size. 83.9MB for the complete album as mp3s. 56.6MB as AACs.
Might be something to this after all…