At least EncSpot shows LAME 160 (CBR) in green (good) and Xing(new) 192 (CBR) in yellow(not bad). I thought that Xing(new) is much better than Xing(old) and is not much worse than LAME. Is EncSpot right showing quality this way?

use lame

hehe dude u are posting in a LAME forum? What u supposed to get for answers? Ask the question in xing forum, here u always will get the same answer *use damm Lame for rates over 112k/bit* *use damm VBR/ABR mode* and *use damm presets, dont play with command switches* that will result in best quality at the given bitrate

just use xing if u dont hear any diff. and u can live with the psychic terror that your music could be worser encoded than with lame only thing why i would use a xing(new) based product is the speed, but just for day by day usage for portable mp3 players where quality is not the most importand thing.

listen to both, i bet the xing still comes out ontop

My personnal opinion is that the Lame one will sound better.
Dues to its lack of short blocks, Xing needs more bitrate to compensate when there are transcients.

Well, I tried comparing Lame@128 kbps and Xing@160kbps once some time ago and Lame was clearly better.

Unless you are in a damn hurry, there really is no reason to use Xing. It might be improved with recent versions, but the goal for Xing has never been quality; it's maximum speed at barely acceptible quality.

Thanks for your replies. I'm not going to encode with Xing. I asked only because I have some music encoded with Xing 190, I can't hear the difference with the original because I don't have original now (gave it somebody and never saw it again).

P.S. I'm encoding all my music with MPC 5 now. I used Xing 2-3 years ago though.