Quote:   That's ham-fisted Engrish marketing speak, hollow one-upsmanship that has nothing to do with any actual technology.   The various MPEG standards are best thought of as containers and inside they contain various profiles which consist of various codecs at various bitrates...

The problem with the 240gb iPods is that when you get above a certain number of files the iTunesDB breaks down because the amount of memory in the device can't handle the DB, seems to be around 30k files.  I've been trying to work around that but haven't had success yet.    On the other...

Quote: There's also support built-in to iDevices for Apple Lossless (ALAC).  Easy enough to convert with dbPowerAmp or XLD.

The compression (dynamic range compression -- open up your favorite music in an editor like Sound Forge or Audacity and look at the shape of the waveform) on most CDs makes things sound harsh.   But one factor that hasn't been mentioned of CD versus Vinyl is sampling rate and sample size. ...