It seems to me from reading this thread that pretty much everybody finds 128k indistinguishable from a CD for most of the time. Doesn't this mean that a good VBR is the way to go? That way you get much higher bitrates for the (apparently) problematic cymbal crashes and so forth, without blowing your whole file size out.

Personally, I've been encoding my stuff with lame, with VBR, at a nominal bitrate of 64k. I think in general the file sizes come out to an equivalent bitrate of around 140k. I haven't checked individual frame bitrates yet. So far, listening in the car, I haven't found any audible artifacts. If the psychoacoustic model in your VBR encoder is good, then that's how it should be. I really like the idea of being able to fine tune your psychoacoustic model, so that it knows just what YOUR thresholds for distortion at various frequencies are. Once you've got that, then you can be pretty much assured of getting the smallest possible file size that won't give you any audible problems.

Richard.