What do you recommend for adding the highest quality streaming audio to a website.?

Adobe Flash is by far the most popular tool for embedding audio into a website. Another solution is to use a blogging platform such as WordPress. WordPress has a great plug in called podpress which allows you to connect anymedia  hat is hosted - mp3 most likely for audio. For audio, it has its own imbedded player with a skin that can be customized. Quality is then as good as the recorded medium. Most exerts will prefer Adobe over Wordpress and other Real Network Solutions, because it is most optimized for professional Streaming like  Internet Radio and Video Streaming.

But as far my personal experience is concerned I will  suggest more new and innovative platform. I run a large web site for home recording musicians and I have tried many different players. On the whole my favorite, and what I stick with now is Wimpy Player. It is a Flash player that can play single files, list files in a directory, read playlists or query databases for the lists in a totally dynamic situation such as I have.

The trick to me is not only how you encode it, but how much the player itself processes it. Listen to some flash player and whether the player, or their uploading processes will compress it or downsample it even further for encreased streaming speed. It sounds to me as though Wimpy plays exactly what you give it, no further downgrading for the sake of performance, so you get the quality you put into it. It's not only the sample rate and bit rate it's compressed to, but also what you compress it with, some are better than others.

22k should be fine for spoken word recordings, and I see no reason why spoken word needs to be stereo, as a single voice is mono, if you make it stereo it'll just be two channels of the exact same thing...increasing file size and streaming time unnecessarily.

Hope you liked that new esperience...