The prevailing wisdom is that the higher the bit rate the track is encoded in the better the quality, and the uncompressed is better yet. While this is true - it remains a fact that the human ear cannot perceive these differences beyond a certain point. Once you have a AAC encoded above 160 or so it starts to become indistinguishable.
The real clincher is the DAC (Digital Audio Converter). Digital audio conversion must be done regardless of the compression format or lack thereof. It's the changing of a string of binary data into soundwaves. If you have a high end stereo system, or PC with a serious studio quality sound card and speaker setup you will hear the difference between different compressions up to about 160, but not beyond unless you have seriously trained ear.
Carrying around lossless files on an ipod is really pointless because the DAC is the weak point. It's just too small to have proper DAC. Even with top of the line earphones in a soundproof room you won't tell the difference beyond 128 on an iPod (on AAC that is, MP3 is over 20 years old and quite sucky so larger files will make a difference).
...but that said, it's nice to have the larger files on the computer with the good DAC (and the Apple PCs native soundcards' DACs are not too shabby) and not have a separate library of smaller files to sync with the iPod.
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on audio compression
The prevailing wisdom is that the higher the bit rate the track is encoded in the better the quality, and the uncompressed is better yet. While this is true - it remains a fact that the human ear cannot perceive these differences beyond a certain point. Once you have a AAC encoded above 160 or so it starts to become indistinguishable.
The real clincher is the DAC (Digital Audio Converter). Digital audio conversion must be done regardless of the compression format or lack thereof. It's the changing of a string of binary data into soundwaves. If you have a high end stereo system, or PC with a serious studio quality sound card and speaker setup you will hear the difference between different compressions up to about 160, but not beyond unless you have seriously trained ear.
Carrying around lossless files on an ipod is really pointless because the DAC is the weak point. It's just too small to have proper DAC. Even with top of the line earphones in a soundproof room you won't tell the difference beyond 128 on an iPod (on AAC that is, MP3 is over 20 years old and quite sucky so larger files will make a difference).
...but that said, it's nice to have the larger files on the computer with the good DAC (and the Apple PCs native soundcards' DACs are not too shabby) and not have a separate library of smaller files to sync with the iPod.