Comment 77 for bug 195483

You know an awful lot of nonsense gets dogmatically said on the topic of sound digitisation and this and other related Bug Reports have been no exception to that rule.
Ignoring the inflammatory, not to say ignorant nature of some remarks, yet not yielding to rude bully-boy tactics, I will just make one last attempt to explain.

CD audio digitisation of music is a compromise, originally derived from techniques used to digitise audio speech over buried copper wires, back around 1970.

To then recode those results with MP3 inevitably imposes further limitations on the perceived quality, although 128K CBR coding is found acceptable by quite a lot of folk who have probably never heard anything better or who have already damaged hearing.

More discriminating listeners, who may have experienced live orchestral music or old technology vinyl records and valve amplifiers or even modern products from the likes of NAIM (who haven't forgotten that it's user perception that counts) may be hoping for something better.

CD-like Quality, provided that the reproduction equipment and listener perceptions are good enough, is generally recognised to be a better compromise for MP3 re-coding.
On a 'please most of the folk most of the time' basis, 32-320K VBR coding seems to be acceptable, but most disagreement seems to have been about whether that new compromise is perfectly achieved, without stopping to simply listen to the results.

When I simply stop to listen, 128K CBR sounds 'muffled' to my ears, whilst different VBR codings impose their own colouration, so it was with relief I found that Linux Sound Juicer could be modified for perceptibly better results, rather than using Windows hosted CDEX or later Foobar2000 as directly recommended by a Hydrogenaudio forum member.

Using 'Bruce R' profiles I have received some very favourable comments from my circle of friends and others, including some musicians. However, the bottom line is that if they report an improvement using a 'KennoVO' profile, I may re-encode my CD collection for their listening benefit, but I hope to retain the freedom to make that choice, which is why I was distressed to have that apparently being desperately prevented, for whatever reason.