Hard to explain. Not as crisp sounding basically. My term when I try to explain the artifacts to someone is "wishy washy". I don't know if that makes sense. Like a low bit rate encode of say 96-128kbps CBR but much less pronounced. Comparing against a true .WAV file and it disappears.

Now this can happen on any encoder and I think LAME is probably using a higher average bit rate than Xing, but since Xing won't go any higher I am SOOL. I don't mind a slightly higher file size for better quality so I can't hear any artifacts. Bad sounding (whether recorded, encoded or ripped) music really s**ts me off.

I definitely have some recordings though that are bad. "The Who" comes to mind immediately. I went back to the CD and had the same sort of static type sound. In the car it actually sounded like one of my RCAs had a slightly dodgy wire that was making and breaking.