[buzglyd]

I still prefer to buy the cd. I can find almost anything I want, used, on Ebay for a dollar or so.
Digital songs are ok for iPods but I agree with other people here. On a good home stereo, cds or LPs are better.
My 11 year old loves breaking out my old vinyl and watch it go round and round.

[gershom]

I've got pretty decent ears (as well as absolute pitch :-)) and my observation is: "depends". 192kbps with Apple's crummy MP3 encoder isn't the same as with LAME; your computer speakers aren't the same as a stereo system or, especially, a good pair of headphones (even my $50 Sennheiser PX100 headphones blow our family room's stereo out of the water!).

Most of all, it's very dependent on the music itself. Solo piano music achieves transparency at comparatively low bitrates, while cymbals in a sonically intense metal track will sound synthetic at all but the highest bit rates. Whether the artifacts sound unpleasant or not depends again on the material: for example, spacey electronic music may sound noticeably different when comparing two bitrates, but the lower bitrate will often just sound more "electronic" and not unpleasant.

I personally swear by variable bit rates (lame --alt-preset standard), and in particular avoid Apple's built-in MP3 encoder like the plague. But the only cases in which I've kept lossless versions of music files was for manipulation other than trimming (to avoid transcoding artifacts).