[Quantum Leap]

I'm plannig to buy Yamaha EPH-100 in-ear monitors for my portable mp3 player. Mostly heavy metal music.
 
Some of my mp3 songs are with constant bit rates of 160. Will I be missing out the full potential I could get with these earbuds? I only have these songs digitally.
 
Most of my music is on CDs tho. Would ripping songs with 192 bit rates be good enough using these earbuds?

 

[billybob_jcv]

Once upon a time, everyone thought CD was the greatest advancement to hit audio since Marconi. The audiophiles jumped up and down screaming that digital audio would NEVER be as good as analog. Then 128K MP3 came along, and the audiophiles jumped up and down screaming that compressed MP3 files would never be as good as CD. Then 320K MP3 came along, and the audiophiles jumped up and down screaming that only lossless FLAC and ALAC was good enough.

Now we listen to streaming audio from Pandora, Spotify, etc and we're probably lucky to get 128K audio.

Most audiophiles will probably tell you to rip the CDs to lossless, because then you have the maximum amount of information available. After that, you can produce reduced bitrate files however you wish - because you always have the lossless to go back to. If you have storage space and the time, that's certainly the best way.