QUOTE(Mike Giacomelli @ Jul 3 2006, 20:18)

A codec with high SNR would be very, very easy. Just lowpass the audio signal until you hit your target bitrate. Thats going to give you the highest SNR possible for a given bitrate (or at least the highest I can think of), but also probably the worst audio quality

The approach you proposed would probably work well on real music samples (with comparatively small amounts of energy in the high frequencies), but wouldn't, in my opinion, be optimal. As far as I can see, for general signals, the best way to preserve SNR while reducing bitrate would be to reduce sample size. For example, converting to four bit samples would keep your SNR at ~24dB - which is clearly better than MP3 or Vorbis (or even HE-AAC). Four bit Linear PCM is the next generation of cutting edge audio codecs

The point is, as everybody has said, SNR is a very poor performance metric for perceptual compression schemes (for sound or images). For something like MP3, as Garf said, it's likely to be awful. MPEG4 has an even worse effect on the SNR of a video stream.