Difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3 Files

A lot of people have confusion about the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3 files. In general, both will be a compressed version of the original wave form, and the lower the bit rate the more obvious compression artifacts become. You can compare it to the compression of a picture using JPEG file format. The lower the quality, the smaller the file sizes and the more blocky the picture becomes. The MP3 format reduces the original file size by a factor of 12 by using a smart compression encoding scheme and by removing the higher less audible frequencies. Compressing to MP3s using the same encoder and settings the distributions change alot. The reduced signal to noise ratio will become worse with increasingly lower bitrates, and is the main reason why you hear a difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. The latter sounds much cleaner, because it actually is, but both does not fully capture the original sound. There is an audible difference between 128kbps and 320kbps MP3 files, but how audible the difference will be for you depends mostly on the type of music you're compressing.