alpha1 and everyone else...lets forget about the listeners and audiophiles in general. What about the artists ? I love my artists & bands. And if they go to great lengths to produce DVD-As, HDCDs, SACDs, Blu-Ray Audio, high quality FLACs, Vinyls & LPs etc., surely they notice a difference. (case in point: Porcupine Tree, Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Tool, BT, Aphex Twin and a lot of others)
If you contest that, well then, there's nothing more to say.
Fair enough. However, the artists themselves, or at least their record labels, are also selling music in all kinds of lossy formats. Radiohead very famously released all songs of their album In Rainbows first as downloadable mp3 (you could pay what you wanted), and only later, as CDs. The experiment was of course something different - they wanted to see how much their fans would pay for legal download of songs - but the fact remains that they were only selling mp3s, not even FLACs.
I completely respect the fact that an audio purist would not want to settle for a lossy format that results in a loss of audio information. However, the purists should also realize that the CD itself is a lossy music format, that is merely a digitized sampling of the original analog audio signal. At best, a step-ladder jagged approximated wave representation of the original audio signal can be extracted from the information stored in a CD. This digitized and sampled signal gets further approximated by the DAC, which essentially tries to guess and reproduce the analog wave from the digital samples that it gets as input.
Back to the point, people hold up the CD as some kind of a gold standard, which it is not, strictly speaking. Loosely speaking on the other hand, it is lossless enough and retains enough clarity that for all practical purposes, we choose it over an (older but better) analog recording medium. If the reason for our convenience is "no discernible audio fidelity loss", people should at least give high bitrate mp3s a chance. After all, it is a de facto and ubiquitous format, and does save a lot of space. Plus, many people all over, with or without golden ears, and with varying qualities of audio equipment do claim that they hear no discernible difference.
Now, having said this, if I'm paying good money (which I regularly do), I would rather prefer to buy a CD or FLAC. However, as a secondary format and especially if space is a concern as it often is in portable flash based players, a good bitrate mp3 packs quite a bit of wallop. In fact, VBRs are quite good too.
