Thanks for those plots, BradJudy! Very interesting stuff. They just confirm what my ears have always told me, 128-bit MP3s suck.

On my car stereo, MP3's sound ok. CD's are better, but MP3's (usually 128mb/s) are ok.

On my HTM-200s at home, the difference is noticable. This in no way encourages me to dump my Ascends for some crappier sounding speakers, it encourages me to find music sources that sound good! Duh.

Recently, Directv switched their music channels from MusicChoice to XM radio. I was pretty psyched, as XM is supposed to be "da bomb". However, I found that the sound quality is lower and not as enjoyable for me now. I guess the old channels were 198 encoding and the new stuff is 128 encoded.