Quote:
I would be curious to see if there were any compression artifacts.

If you've ever looked at an MP3 file that contains silence (say, if there'a a fade in or fade out to or from silence) in a binary editor before, you'll see that silent frames are filled with FF's. In other words, every sample is exactly the same, i.e., silent. So true silence in the source file should theoretically translate to true silence in the encoded file.
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Tony Fabris