I've a Nomad Jukebox (a HDD-based MP3 player from Creative Labs), and it uses the same chip from SBLive! Card, so it resamples all to 48 kHz. I was wondering if it's better to resample my rips to 48 kHz using ssrc before encoding them with '--alt-preset standard' in order to lower the bad quality of the resample process of my player.
Thanks!

Anyway, with the SB live, it worked.
48 kHz resampled files sounded better than 44.1 kHz originals.

Hrmm.. I'm not so sure this is a good idea. While with .wav files it makes sense perhaps to resample to 48khz with something like ssrc to bypass the sblive stuff, with MP3 it's not going to be so simple. LAME doesn't handle 48khz files so well. This issue has been brought up before, and I'm not exactly sure what the problem is (I don't think any of the other developers have looked into it either), but LAME produces more artifacts when encoding a file to 48khz. More specifically, pre-echo often becomes worse (though theoretically it should be better, and it is sometimes but not in the majority of cases). What usually seems to happen is the pre-echo gets smeared across the stereo field. Sometimes you get a short garbled chirping sound or low frequency noise too. The latter artifact almost sounds like something you'd hear off a damaged tape.

At any rate, I'm not sure what the lesser of the two evils would be here. If it were me, I'd probably live with the worse resampling. On the bright side though, the 48khz "issue" with LAME should be fixable, someone just has to actually find the problem and do the work.

In theory, would you get a better quality/size ratio with 48khz or 44khz? If it would be better with 48khz, it seems that it could potentially be the next big development in lame if somebody fixes the bug...

Thoeretically, 48khz should be better. Pre-echo's should be 10% shorter than in 44.1khz, I believe, and the bitrate/size difference should be negligible.