"Serge Auckland" wrote
in message

I would bet money that the VAST majority of iPods, Sansa
Clips etc are playing at whatever is the default bit rate
for the device concerned.

None of them have a default bit rate. What they do is solely determined by
the music files they play,which are totally at the discretion of the user. I
believe that every device you specifically mentioned suports both lossy and
lossless files.

The people I regularly come
into contact with have generally no idea what "bit-rate"
means, or the difference between MP3, MP2, AAC, lossless
data reduction or WAV.

No argument from me about that!

As far as most people are
concerned, they use the device as it comes out of the box
and NEVER reconfigure any of the settings.

There are no settings to configure.

Yes, those of us here and on similar fora may find this
hard to believe, but in my discussions with many
music-literate people at our local radio station, only a
couple out of the staff of around 50 had any idea what I
was talking about. None of the others had any idea what
bit rates were, why it made a difference, and how to
change their ripping setting so that they didn't play
low-rate MP3s to air.

How the technological training of radio station staff has fallen!

I've no reason to doubt that a portable player can
perform equally to a fixed player provided the audio
files are to a decent standard.

As a rule these portable players are capable of sonic transparency, given
appropriate music files. Some have built-in frequency response variations
that can be removed, but the default is for specific variations to be in
place. Some may evidence frequency response variations when loaded with
common kinds of earphones and headphones. If you back out the default
response variations and load them with a resistive load, they are as a rule
very good.

Unfortunately, the Great
Public have no knowledge of or interest in maintaining
audio standards.

Agreed. However, the general run of settings they don't choose tend toward
higher average sound quality than they have ever enjoyed in the past.