Handbrake is perfect to make a low bitrate file that looks almost equally good in comparison with a much higher bitrate file I render out of Edius, the audio quality however is not good and I have not been able to find a setting to get a high quality audio file that doesn't sound like it's recorded in a tin can, anyone had more success in creating good audio quality and cares to share the settings? Thx!

This is because FFmpeg/avcodec has a crude AAC encoder. You need to use the FDK AAC encoder and at least 320kbps. The last Handbrake FDK build is 0.10.3. After that, they had to omit the FDK libraries.

Thx for the suggestion, meanwhile I did some further testing and got some good results from the ac3 codec at 192 bitrate and a stereo mixdown. When I find some time I"ll compare with the FDK AAC codec.

I've had problems with the AAC codec that Handbrake uses, but have had good results using AC3. I stick to that now.

when encoding high quality mp4 source files I use AAC passthrough on the audio settings ... this will pass audio "bit to bit" without reencoding the final (audio) file ....Im assuming my mp4 source file was made with high quality AAC encoding .... my 2 cents ...

I believe you can just passthrough any audio, so I would encode it to AAC out of Edius if possible and just passthrough to the Handbrake video encode.

I use AAC passthrough on the audio settings

Thx for the tip, will try that as well.