The best MP3 VBR bitrate choice when encoding audio?

My whole life I've been listening to my music on 22.5 KHz 56/64 kbps
because it bore little to no difference to the original for me, and
cuz I felt like 128 kbps was unnecessarily wasteful. Everyone was
telling me "Man, how can you listen to that garbage, like how do you
even make out the words in that song with such low quality?" I thought
they were all being tightasses. But I did realize my choice of quality
was, in fact atypical, so I asked one of my friends what exactly is
the difference between 64 kbps and 128 kbps audio to him. He said that
it's pretty hard to explain, but "instead of listening to music with
headphones that block out all the surrounding environment, try
comparing it at a party with real speakers and you'll hear the
difference."

Now, just recently I was at the Doctor and had my ears done, and now I
hear 10x better than before and FINALLY I noticed what I've been
missing my whole life... 56 kbps is just so friggin' DULL as if the
singers got their mouths stuffed full of ***. It appears before I
could not perceive higher frequencies (e.g. 44.1 sounded the same as
22.5 to me) and so I could tolerate lower bitrates and... I dun think
you guys need more details, cuz the difference between 64 and 128
would probably be OBVIOUS to you.

So, I've re-downloaded all my songs and now most of 'em are at 80, 96
and 128 kbps but NONE below 80 anymore. However, I wanna know the
best, most economic way to encode or re-encode audio to MP3 and keep
the quality.

Currently, I use this script:

lame.exe song.wav -o song.mp3 --abr 128 [80-160] -q 0

A couple questions:

1. Does the choice of frequency (e.g. 44100) significantly affect the
bitrate, and vice versa? If so, is 48 KHz really necessary for most
songs?

2. Are there any disadvantages to using Variable Bit Rate when
encoding?

3. Does constantly re-encoding the audio *** its quality up --
especially when switching from constant bit rate to VBR?

4. How do I know the bit rate I've chosen is ideal? By which I mean:
when I encode at 160 kbps and the output MP3 results with an average
of 137 kbps, was this the right choice? And when I encode at 144 I get
132. Which of these is the better choice?

Most of the time the average bitrate was lower than the target bitrate
set, does it mean I have picked an ideal range? I tried to encode the
same song to 64 kbps once and I got 70 kbps instead. My guess is that
if the output bitrate was higher than the target, it means more bits
were required than chosen and the encoder was straining to keep the
quality while at the same time trying to satisfy the demand to be more
or less 64 kbps.

5. Is 96 kbps good enough for general purpose audio instead of 128? I
notice no difference between the two, with some exceptional fast-paced
songs with high hypervarying frequencies.

Thanks in advance.

.

Quantcast