Simple question about Ogg Vorbis (which sort of concerns me since I'm thinking of making an indefinite jump from the mp3 camp to Ogg Vorbis when it comes to encoding my music):

Ogg Vorbis is flexible and continually (or maybe not as rapid should I say) tuned to get the best quality for a bitrate range. I've heard the tuning done for medium to low bitrates (< 128 kbps) is pretty good and I have listened to my own samples coded at (-q -1) and just said 'wow'

But does that mean the medium to high bitrates (> 128 kbps) are "untuned"? In other words, does the quality start going slightly downhill as bitrate goes up or does it just plateau and not get any much better as we waste more bits?

The quality steadily improves, but it is very much the case that there is still quite a lot of room for improvement within the format.

As said, that's exactly the case, there's just much room for improvement, personally i'd love to encode all my music with Vorbis but i'm just not completely satisfied with it at it's current stage, but can easily assume it's going to improve much. So for mid to high bitrates i use MPC which is very well tuned, and i guess there IS room for improvement (not talking about low bitrates, there's tons of room there ) but now it's already at a very advanced stage, and -drastic- improvement are simply not possible, but with vorbis it is, and so it will be . THE IMPORTANT THING however is if the quality satisfies you currently, no matter what coder, you should use it, no matter what i or anyone says they prefer and why. (really i'm sorry for inserting MPC to this thread, i hate that too but it's necessary )

That's true I guess. I've listened to most of the songs I've encoded with ogg vorbis and have been quite happy with it. But then that was my same reaction when I first used Xing