I laughed when Reddit suddenly spent months claiming Spotify is garbage despite It using 320kbps Vorbis and that the other 3 streaming platforms would dethrone It. Despite the fact I doubt any of them would tell AAC or Vorbis at 160 ~ 192kbps from FLAC, Hell I doubt they even tell 192kbit/s VBR LAME from FLAC let alone the modern lossy codecs. lol
MP3 is only good at 18KHz at V0/320kbps, Yet AAC & Vorbis can handle full 22KHz at 256kbps VBR with hotter audio(-15 ~ -5db) their VBR models can just use 384 ~ 960kbps. Yes Vorbis can actually reach 1.35mbit since It has no frame cap.
Every encoding tool I've seen & use, All use Apple AAC in the QAAC wrapper. At ~160kbps VBR, It far better than Vorbis which needs 256kbps in some genres like Noise/Industrial and MP3 is just severely outdated needing V0 or 320kbps to be transparent. I use FHG AAC(winamp encoder) as a fail safe measure when Apple encoder chokes on something.
There something darkly funny that Opus could act psychotic because It glitched out or was fed something really complex. But you could argue transparent lossy compression at 80 ~ 320kbps is a controlled Deliriant like hallucination going by how only rare few can tell them apart from Lossless.
Love how Opus 1.5 is now actually transparent at 16kbps for voice and 96kbps is still beats 192kbps MP3. Meanwhile xHE-AAC still feels like It was farted out since It 96 ~ 256kbps area Is legit worse than AAC-LC(Apple, FDK) are at ~160kbps.