Good suggestion BrenR...

FLAC and monkey audio are GREAT lossless alternatives to MP3! They do have bigger file sizes, but it is worth it, in my opinion. If you chose to keep with a lossy standard, why not try Ogg Vorbis. It uses a better compression algorithm, so a 192k .ogg sounds much better than a 192k MP3. Finally, if you are completely intent on retaining MP3 format, try enabling VBR in lame, and setting the quality preset to 10 or 11.