What About MP3?

Ornette, Meridian 588 CD player plays MP3.

Depending on the type of music you listen to you might not be able to tell the difference. Most rap, commercial country and any other types of overly loud, heavily processed music is so dynamically compressed that you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between redbook and high rate compressed formats. As such, I agree with Bomarc.

My personal experience ist the difference between 256 and 320kbs is very difficult to hear, but even the best MP3s can always be identified when compared to the CD source. The difference between CD and MP3 also depends on the complexity of the music.

I know no CD player that plays MP3s but a lot of DVD èlayers do it. I have the Philips DVD963SA, which has an excellent audio section (SACD playback and CD upsampling) and sounds very good with MP3s. It's probably the best sounding MP3 player around.

It's not perfect, but you could fool a lot of people (including audiophiles).

You had a start up with a good system, why are you bother to feed them with garbage. That what people said "garbage in garbage out". You should get some good sources of cd and you will see how good your system could perform. Just a thought.

In my limited experience (two weeks) with MP3 and AAC encoding I don't believe that even 320kbps recordings are the equivalent of redbook digital. There's a definite flattening of the soundstage and a loss of texture to the sound. There's also a sense of added grain. For non-serious listening (car or background) these are not particularly big issues.