I know everyone hears music differently, but I was wondering if anyone else thinks 320 kbps sounds bad?
I don't use MP3 on a regular basis, it was while trying to find very dificult to encode sounds that I came across Autechre -- Second Bad Vilbel (http://www.ff123.net/samples.html), that sounds not so good in --alt-preset insane (top of the art fine tuned 320 kbps). Dibrom said that these kinds of samples are impossible to encode in MP3 anyway, and that's why he prefers other formats like MPC.
Naturally this depends on the software you use. If you are using LAME encoder with good settings it should generally result excellent quality. There are some rare problem samples that MP3 just cant handle though. If you really feel that MP3 is not enough for you, you should have a look at the Musepack (see software section).