Awesome post from Jeff Atwood over on the Coding Horror blog: The Great MP3 Bitrate Experiment.
CDs, unlike DVDs or even Blu-Rays, are considered reference quality. That is, the uncompressed digital audio data contained on a CD is a nearly perfect representation of the original studio master, for most reasonable people’s interpretation of “perfect”, at least back in 1980. So if you paid for a CD, you might be worried that ripping it to a compressed digital audio format would result in an inferior listening experience. […]