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That was a nice little read, and surprising. I recently just finished getting transfering all my music and finally set up more stereo for playback off the PC, this is when I could hear a difference. I had started encoding in 128 .m4a, which was very noticeable for some music. Went to a mix of 160 and 192 .m4a, both of which seemed to do the trick, I really don’t notice a difference at a higher rate. I have found that some CD’s just won’t compress well no matter what the bit rate, so I have been experimenting with FLAC (tried apple lossless as well). I use CBR, thought about trying VBR, anybody use it with much success with .m4a?
One thing I have noticed, that if I were to purchase a song on iTunes at 128, and later purchase the CD, I have to rip it at 160 to achieve the same quality.