Advice on Audio for Web?

Hello.

I have a few audio files I am looking to use on the web, however I'm
not sure what format to use.

At the moment they are 16 bit, 44.1Khz, wav's in stereo. The sounds
are very noisy deep bass and deep vocals. I have tried converting
them to MP3, however the quality doesn't seem to be too great even if
it takes a lot less space. If I improve the bitrate, the quality
still seems to be poor, and obviously the size of the files gets too
big. It seems to be the quality of the vocals that is effected the
most.

What I would really like is a format that allows good compression
without loosing quality. The only way I can explain what I'm looking
for is comparing with picture formats. If I have a bmp file and
convert to jpg I then have a compressed file, but I lose quality. If
I converted to a tif file though I could still have the compression
without loosing quality. So I guess what I'm looking for is something
like a tif format but for Audio.

Any suggestions anyone?

Thanks in advance

John

John