looking for efficient speech codec Options

[chrizoo]

Hi. I have quite a few speech recordings (talkradio, lectures, notes to self, etc.) which I need to encode. I have done some tests with HE-AAC V2 (Nero AAC codec / 1.5.3.0) and am quite pleased with the quality/filesize ratio.

I then tried speex (speex-1.2beta1/$). When comparing to HE-AACv2 files of the same size, speex failed horribly for me during VLC 1.1.11 playback, suffering from major artefacts and lower overall quality. Not quite what I expected. (Unless VLC decoding is broken or the speex version too old ?)

1. How does speex fare against HE-AACv2 for you ?
   
2. Is there any other substantially more efficient speech codec ?
   
3. What software player (Windows) can you recommend ?
   
4. What considerations should I not overlook if I want to keep the files for life (I'm still young :-) ?

many thanks