[joecool1029]

>Opus is a codec for speech.

As I understood things Xiph intended for it to replace both speex (for low-bandwidth low-latency voice) and vorbis (for medium bitrate lossy audio). Is this understanding wrong?

>Ogg Vorbis and AAC hit similar levels of quality as a 192 kbps MP3 around 160 kbps. (That actually depends a fair amount on the MP3 encoder. The LAME VBR is particularly good.)

While this is true there's a bit of nuance to add. Some people really don't like the sound of vorbis's artifacts on difficult to compress audio. Maybe it's growing up with fried mp3 recordings being common, but mp3's artifacts are less jarring.