Jens --

Listen to Dionysus and tfabris.

All you have to lose by encoding at a higher bitrate is disk space, and you have everything to gain. From the reviews I've been reading, 160 is good, but 192 seems to be the sweet spot beyond which diminishing returns takes effect. Disk space is cheap. The difference in cost of an empeg with enough space to hold all your music at 128 Kbps compared to one big enough to hold the same music at 192Kbps is only going to be a few hundred dollars. Believe me, after you've had the empeg for a year you'll never miss that couple hundred bucks.

Anybody who can afford a Mustang Cobra can afford enough hard drive space to encode his music for optimal playback!

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"