  We suggest an infrared-insensitive quark mass, defined by subtracting the
soft part of the quark self energy from the pole mass. We demonstrate the deep
relation of this definition with the static quark-antiquark potential. At
leading order in 1/m this mass coincides with the PS mass which is defined in a
completely different manner. Going beyond static limit, the small normalization
point introduces recoil corrections which are calculated here as well. Using
this mass concept and other concepts for the quark mass we calculate the cross
section of e+ e- -> t t-bar near threshold at NNLO accuracy adopting three
alternative approaches, namely (1) fixing the pole mass, (2) fixing the PS
mass, and (3) fixing the new mass which we call the PS-bar mass. We demonstrate
that perturbative predictions for the cross section become much more stable if
we use the PS or the PS-bar mass for the calculations. A careful analysis
suggests that the top quark mass can be extracted from a threshold scan at NLC
with an accuracy of about 100-200 MeV.
