Seen over on 9 to 5 Mac is the story (and video) where a Mastering engineer proves “Mastered for iTunes” doesn’t ‘sound closer to the CD’.
If you don’t know, Apple launched a “Mastered for iTunes” section where they said the tracks were remastered to sound better than the standard iTunes encoding for their audio. Sadly this is (allegedly) not true. I was hoping that this was more than just a PR and cash grab by Apple, but unless this guys methodology is simply wrong, it seems it is just lip service… His conclusions come in around 9:50 in.
Course, these days 99% of people listen to music on crappy laptop speakers or even crappier earbuds and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between lossless WAV and a 64bit mp3 anyway.