In theory, higher bitrate equals better quality.
Bitrate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sometimes though, people will reconvert & reconvert a file (losing quality all the time) so that the file can end up showing a high bitrate but be a horrible piece of crap to listen to. Read LOTR's post here to see how that sometimes happens.
http://www.gnutellaforums.com/downlo...wma-files.html

If you want quality, go for the highest bitrate you can find. But make sure to preview the file during download, to make sure that it's sounding ok

Stars just show connection quality, not file quality. The number of sources (in the # column) has nothing to do with file quality...just shows how many people are sharing an identical version of that particular file