"There still remains a huge gap between lossless codecs at ~800kb/s and MP3 at 128kb/s with seemingly little interest to fill it."
Not only does mp3 go to 320kbps, 192kbps was considered the 'standard' for ripping audio CDs, with the V0 variable bit rate being another common choice. if this only does 277, what am I getting aside from. another audio codec?