OT: this is rather good

While a high bit rate for mp3 (320kbps) it is still compressed audio.

If you like classical there are various uncompressed streams available, my fave being

Andy

Firefox does - very nice too.

True, but there is a law of diminishing returns: the errors caused by "lossily" compressing (and discarding) information decrease as you increase the bit rate, to a point that the original uncompressed or losslessly compressed sound is indistinguishable from the high-bitrate MP3. At that point (and for me it's about 250 kbps) it doesn't matter that it's compressed in a lossy way.

That is true and I accept that your figure of 250kbps is a reasonable figure. However, It does much depend on what you listening to, through what, under what conditions and how intently. I would prefer to say that as the bps increases the more ideal the conditions need to be to hear the difference and for casual situations 250 probably is enough. I'll not get controversial by taking that any further.

I still don't like it though, actually I hate it. Decades of improving sound reproduction now takes a backward step for convenience. It seems to be a similar argument to say cars should not be built which are capable of more than 70mph.

Personally, I built my music library using flac and with GBs of NAS storage at the price it is today there is little reason to not do so. I have read on forums of people ripping their CDs to mp3 and then later realising they're not as comfortable with that decision as they thought they would be and doing the whole thing again to flac. It's a bit like having a tape recording of your mate's disc or having the disc yourself.

With flac I have CD quality and better for my music collection and I can generate an mp3 album for portable use in moments from the flac source.

Bob.

Even though your ears don't