Oh I am with you on experts, if I followed the experts here my media would be all mkv and true HD or some other nonsense high def sound codec, found out MP4 H264 and AC3 5.1 was practically unnoticeable for quality and definitely the most compatible within the first few weeks of my Plex adventure.
Since then turned 2 others on to Plex and they have discovered the same.
Very likely they were comparing these two codecs when their samples were both encoded from an uncompressed source file.
Transcoding from a “lossy” codec to another lossy codec is something you should avoid. There will always be a reduction of fidelity when you do that. And AC3 and AAC are both lossy.
If all you’ll ever do is listening with the in-built speakers of your TV, then all of this doesn’t matter, though. You’ll never be able to tell the difference.
With different audio hardware, it may get discernable.
I use what a pretty decent “high mid range” audio system 5.1 and have had “audiophiles” over who could not tell the difference. It is alot more than just the system, the room, the arrangment of furniture, materials in a room all matter.
I have come to believe 99% of the users have no way to experience a significant sound difference in a home theater system once you have a good mid range system and a quality audio recording even if lossy compressed. Comparing flac to AC 5.1 people at my house could not tell a difference.
So many factors impact audio that without a studio you just can not get there.
Having said all this - the bottom line is IF you must convert an audio stream do it to the original track on the VERY LAST VERSION you’ll be putting on the server. With XR you can do that to a secondary track while leaving the original intact - if there’s any danger Murphy (or @Elijah_Baley 's grandkids) will visit and show up with his LAWs to make a shambles of your life’s work.
(for instance - if you’re going thru Handbrake for a video pass - be passin’ thru that audio for XR to deal with at the end of the work flow chain - for instance)
Speaking of XR:
The latest version will work well for single files. The Audio Normalization/Fiddling routine is located under the ‘Filters/Previews’ tab (not under ‘Audio’ - where you might expect). If you want to do several files at once, in a queue, Version: 3.4.5.2 is the last version that does this well:
https://www.xmedia-recode.de/en/version.php
I can detect no other differences - that matter enough that I’d detect them.
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