Hello,

Up until now I used Itunes Decoder (Combined with foobar) to burn out music into my Ipod.
The Settings I used were -

ItunesEncoder.Exe
Format : Lossy
Higest BPS Supported : 24
Bitrate: 160

The quality was just fine with my old headphone, but I grabed Ultrasone HFI-550 and I can swear they songs sounds much less in Quality.

I want to pumb the quality up a bit.
When I Encoded my mp3, Itunes mp4 used to be *the best* around for mid quality.
Can someone please recommand about new Encoder/Settings for me?

Have you ABXed the difference? Its probably just your imagination.

I'm in the process of going the other way - converting a heap of FLACs that are on my iPod as 160 CBR/VBR AAC files over to 128 Kbps AAC, just to recover some space. My hearing is so bad that I could probably even use the 96 Kbps VBR setting. But I CAN ABX iTunes AAC @ 80 Kbps CBR!

Same here. I used to encode everything as 'xtreme' profile musepack, which worked out around 210kbps over the collection. I've recently switched to standard at ~170 and it sounds fine with nothing obviously bad jumping out of the speakers.

This is quite handy too as my tunes are on a 320Gb drive with only 5Gb free, so reencoding let's me stuff more tunes on there.