128K or 320K audio quality

Long story short, 192Kbs is cd quality so that says it all...Id go with that.If all you had in your iPod was 128Kbs songs you probably wouldnt notice any difference.But you do notice it when one album is in 128 and the other in 320..cuz the 320 sounds louder/crispier. 192 is the golden line because anything above that is not noticable to human ear...it can be 100000Kbs and you will still hear it the same as you did before.Hope this made things clearer.

Yes, the iPods can play Apple Lossless.

Although 192kbps is considered CD quality, if you've got the physical HDD space to accommodate 320kbps, then all the better. Even to a non-audiophile, with decent headphones or good speakers, there is a big difference between 192kbps and 320kbps. IMHO, the lowest to go for is 224kbps for MP3 or AAC, after that, the quality improvement is barely noticeable with standard Apple earbuds.

HTH, Jamie

As a test, a group of about 10 of my friends sat down and did blind listening tests on a high end home stereo. We listened to 128kbps AAC playing through an iPod, compared with the original CD it was ripped from.

Most of those in our panel were not audiophiles. When they listened to the iPod, they thought it sounded great, but they could all tell that the CD sounded better.

One caveat, and this may be significant: we connected the iPod to the stereo using the headphone jack on the iPod. A better connection would've been through the dock connector instead, but we didn't have the proper cables.

I decided to rerip all my CDs using 192kbps AAC as a compromise solution, since I didn't want huge files.

Thank you, Wes, for correcting me.

Sometimes all those different encoding codecs get me all turned around.

Wait, so can the iPods play lossless?