Unfortunately, I encoded most of my MP3s some time ago with earlier versions of lame.... I have been upgrading as new releases become available, but I haven't gone back an re-encoded the older stuff yet (but intend to eventually). I just added another hard drive to my home system which should give me enough spce to archive everything losslessly (using MAC) so I don't have keep re-ripping my CDs everytime there is a major improvement in encoding technology..... eventually, I'd like to just play back WAVs or losslessly compressed files on the EMPEG as well (maybe in another year or so.....when laptop drives are avaiable in sufficeint size at reasonable cost).

This is the command line I have been using typically
-b 256 -m j -h -V 0 -B 320

I haven't experimented too much yet with turning joint stereo off..... but I intend to do some comparisons with it onn and off before going back and re-encoding all my older MP3s. See if there is a trade off to be made with stereo separation (imagin, soundstage) and MPEG artifacts.

Thanks for the reply.....