Being an audiophile is not easy these days.
Really useful article looking at the often ignored issue of sound quality and the emergence of mp3..............
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1928324,00.aspTo be fair, I'm not one of the "golden ears" set. You know the type—they can't stand to listen to music unless they're sitting in the stereo sweet spot, and the music is played from a vinyl record on a manual turntable with a moving coil cartridge, through their monoblock tube amplifiers and tube preamp. Call me a "silver ear" audiophile. I'm picky about speakers, and I can't listen to music with too much lossy compression for long periods of time. Most of my music is ripped using Microsoft's Windows Media Lossless format, but I have yet to find a portable media player that supports WMA Lossless playback. I can still recall the sheepish look on Phil O'Shaugnessy's face (Phil is the lead PR guy for Creative Labs) when I asked him if Creative's spiffy new Zen Vision:M would support WMA Lossless playback. The answer, alas, was no.......................