So many here seem to not get the point. When you rip music, you control a lot about what you'll hear. You can even use uncompressed format's if you wish with many of the players.

I can hear the difference between a SACD and a CD. Does this mean that CD's are SH*! and have no place? Of course not. I can't imagine going jogging with a SACD player strapped to my back.

Sitting on the plane listening to music, or in my car, could I even hear the difference between a CD and SACD? I've done some tests, in my car, and on a plane, it's difficult to tell 96Kbps WMA from 128 Kbps WMA. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I do hear the difference, as it wasn't a fully blind test, and they sounded really close. I can definitely hear the difference at home, on the player using the same earphones. So why couldn't I tell the difference in the car or on the plane? Because there is a great deal of ambient noise in the environments in which people listen to these devices. Playing SACD quality music in a portable music player is similar to placing the highest end esoteric speakers in a subway station for critical listening!

Like many things in life, when audio quality isn't perfect, most of the time it's good enough to be considered very good... and for most, that's good enough!