good enough to fool the 'Golden Ears Brigade' representative

IMHO, at least with classical music, the processing of MP3 makes the music
fatiguing and unsatisfactory when listening for any period of time ( 30
mins) even if you can't 'instantly' tell which is which. I've been using
..flac and .ace for classical rips.

I seem to remember someone somewhere saying that the highest rate MP3s can
be spitchy and wonder if anyone here can confirm or deny this?

Surely rather depends on the encoder? LAME's 'insane' preset seems fine on
pop/rock. That said, since joining the ranks of the iPoders I think (so far)
I prefer AAC to MP3 at 320.