Well first of all I would like to know what you think is the best audio format?
Meaning stuff like asf, mpeg, wav, mp3, wma, rm, ogg, atrac... and blah blah blah

and for that particular audio format, what's the best encoder for it?

I just discovered my mp3 player could read asf files so i started searching for an encoder, couldn't find one.

I'm seriously taking a look at the LameEncoder for mp3 apperently it only takes about 128kps to rival with cd quality sound while the windows media codec needs 320kps.

wav, come on, lossless .wav, and ofcorse sndrec32.exe

OGG format will be slightly smaller in filesize of the same quality. It's open-source and free too.
I choose MP3 codec because it is widely available, its players, songs etc.
OGG however is not so common. There's no standard players for OGG yet and you can't find OGG files easily anywhere.

At this point, I'm going with WMA format. The reason is simple: my current interest is revolving around DVD creation for my work and home. And instead of creating a real DVD player format, most of the times I am saving directly as a file. With Windows Media Player 9 Encoder, I can add Dolby 5.1 surround sounds to my mpeg4 video. And the best of all, it's free. Now, you can't tell me that's not good enough. Hee hee. The compression ratio of WAM to DIVX is almost comparable. There's been many tries to make DIVX Dolby 5.1 capable but with so many add-ons you have to do, I think WMA Encoder is simple enough that anyone can just click and add.

I use RazorLame to encode my MP3s, but I'd seriously doubt that there is any encoder that can get near CD quality audio at 128kbps.

Just MP3 And MP3 and MP3
I think after 1000 Years MP3 is first Because Many softwares link winamp and .. support it
You can easy convert MP3 file to other format and ...
Many CD players support it

on my Mobile, rm format is also good. its small. same quality( guess how) and eats up less space.