excellent point, RainDawg. i got into an argument on another message board the other day over this... someone wanted to seed a show that had the following source:

betacam masters > DV master > DVD (8 MB/s video, AC3 audio at 256 kbps) + (mixed with) 2nd gen VHS video (8 MB/s video, MPA audio at 192 kbps) and using the MPA audio. i vehemently cautioned against this pratice, especially since the "source material" used for the mix was the 2 DVD versions (which means re-encoding to MPEG-2 video, again)... but the person didn't listen, and most people jumped on me for being anal about the quality.

whatever. i'd rather have 2 separate recordings that one done improperly.