Internet radio stations that sound really good

"One difficulty is that smaller Internet radio stations are too often short-lived, streaming happily along one day and gone the next."

Often true and often not.

"Their stream URLs change at times, too, which makes maintaining a bookmark list (Winamp is good for this) difficult. The larger stations, like RP and Sky, are less prone to these difficulties, however."

Roku's radioRoku service catalogues stations and their urls and provides services that customers can use on their site to help keep things up to date. I find it's not a big problem for the more popular stations of which there are hundreds out of many thousands total.

Give Purejazzradio.com a shot - great programming. Sounds wonderful.

WUFT, the University of Florida’s NPR station use to stream at 320k, but as of early July, 2009 they changed their format. The have limited their stream to 256k. Previously their programming was a mixture of mostly European classical, with NPR programming throughout the day and in the late evenings (2am till 5am) an excellent straight ahead jazz program from San Francisco hosted by Bob Parlocha. Now, they are 100% European classical. Needless to say I am now searching for a stream of 256k or greater that programs straight ahead and classic jazz.

This is the best one I've been able to find:

mms://media-wm.cac.washington.edu/KEXP-Uncompressed

KEXP, a college station from Washington University, Seattle. This is an uncompressed WAV stream at 1411, yes, 1411kb/s so should be literally CD-quality.

Could this be the shape of things to come?

AVRO has a quite a few 256 kbps mp3 classical channels.

Adagio.fm has a 128kbps Ogg stream, and a user request system.

I'm afraid that Roku's products support neither Ogg nor AAC+, making them totally unacceptable to me.