Ogg qual 4.99 vs ogg qual 5.00

[The Belgain]

For stereo, at quality 4.99 and below ogg uses channel coupling, and then does not from quality 5.00 upwards. So is there a sudden just in bitrate when you go from using 4.99 to using 5.00, or is there a drop in quality, but the same bitrate? Or is it a mixture of the two?

Which setting to people recommend for ripping audio CDs?

[canadian_fbi]

well, ogg vorbis still uses channel coupling at 5.00 and above, it's just lossless, which increases the bitrate a good deal. for this reason i do most of my divx at 4.99. for music cds, i use vorbis at around 4.00 for (relatively) low-quality stuff, and mpc for high quality.

with newer versions of headac3he you can turn off lossless coupling above 4.99 though, which saves a lot of space. not sure how headac3he works for music encoding though, as i've never tried it. but it could be a good solution if you want better quality than q 4.99 without lossless coupling.