If the bitrate reduction is too much (too much compression), the sound quality will be lousy. Some say that 128k constant is the bare minimum but I disagree; the minimum is 160k constant. Too much compression definitely manifests itself as audio that tends to have a “watery” characteristic to it, particularly in the mids and highs (percussion, vocals, piano, etc.).

Sound quality of the resulting compressed file is partially dependent on the quality of the CODEC used to encode the sound into MP3. For instance, LAME is superior to BLADE.

And, the biggest point: no matter how little compression you use and how good the CODEC is, it will never compare to the uncompressed original.

It must be known that bitrate reduction schemes, such as MP3, work by eliminating various frequencies selectively and allowing louder passages to conceal this loss through psychoacoustics. The greater the bitrate reduction, the more aggressive the CODEC will operate in this manner.

Because of this, lossy compression, such as MP3, is the antipathy of hi-fi: it's purpose deliberately distances itself from the master recording by design, unlike the LP and the Compact Disc.

More unfortunate is the push from the mainstream press for downloadable content, such was the case of a recent “50 worst things in music” article on AOL, with the CD being one of them followed by a rather foolish maxim “CD sucks! Download your music!”

If there is music that I seriously like, I'd rather buy the CD or the LP; MP3s allow me the benefit to audition a potential purchase.

I'd rather keep my Sony ES setup (it may not be considered as hi-fi to a few because it's Sony, but it's on par with Denon and the like) than go to an iPod with a speaker dock. – Reinhart

Let me say that I'm a “recovering audiophile” who at the height of his addiction owned a Koetsu Ruby phono cartridge that cost $2,500 to play his 1,200 disc collection of those now nearly defunct 12-inch licorice pizzas on his $10,000 stereo speaker system with tube electronics. Today the background music system in our living room is my wife's iPod connected to a Klipsch iFi sat/sub system that delivers a very pleasant experience. For more serious listening we retire to our media room/home theater with its rather modest ($1,2000 retail) 5.1 on-the-wall speaker system, $1,000 A/V receiver, $500 DVD player, etc., all connected with some higher-end but far from esoteric cables.

I can hardly wait until Mark delves into the moon dust world of esoteric power and signal cables, hopefully to reveal what many of us have known for decades, electrons flow “around” the wire not “through” it so a lot of the claims for truly esoteric interconnects simply don't hold water.

So, grab your favorite CD or two, head on down to your local A/V emporium and let them show you just how magnificent an experience can be had these days for considerably less cost than 3 days for a family of four at Disneyworld.

Only this weekend visited my sister who has an above average sound system with monitor audio speakers. She has only gone and replaced this and made the iPod and Boss docking speakers the music source now, there is no comparision in the sound quality, but trying telling her that.

My dilema is this, I have an excelent sound system and a big music collection on CD, I also have a portable digital music player (who doesn't). I Like the convience of selecting tunes and making up playlists from iTunes or equivalent, but need the uncompressed file quality coming through my amp. The problem is these files are too big to store in qualtity on the 'iPod'. Do you then have two copies of the song one big one small? Where to from here? Can Apple come up with a two in one solution and save high end for the good of our children's ears?

A lot of people use portable audio players while they are on the go, and because of that they have become their primary means for music. So when they come home, it's convenient to just slap your iPod into a base station and stream music from that so they can listen to their favorite play list rather than having to rip music from their collection into a better format like FLAC so they can listen to the same play list on their high-end gear.

It all comes down to time and convenience and unfortunately digital music is becoming more important than the CD in people's lives and it?s a shame. eMusic which is one of my favorite digital download sites lets you download them in 192kbps which isn?t bad, but it?s definitely better than iTunes.

I am waiting for a high-end audio MP3 player to hit the market which supports FLAC, AAC and uncompressed WMA.

For me there is nothing like locking yourself into a room with a nice pair of speakers and a nice amp, dimming the lights and bathing yourself in beautiful music?.