i personally now rip at 160. A few years ago , 128 made sense because of limitations on Hard drive storage. Now with the advent of consumer offline storage (zip , cd-burners , orbs ,etc) and larger HD space (40 gigs costs $230)
you can store tons of mp3s at 160 or even 192.

I think you can tell the difference on a lot of songs with clear vocals , horns and symbols etc. You hear the difference at home if you have a good audio system for your mp3s and in the car on the EMPEG.

on the whole , the EMPEG plays a lot better in the car and in the house than most other units. I sometimes play my music from the EMPEG in the house. I only switch back because i can only hold 10 gigs on my EMPEG right now , and i have more than that on the computer. I need 40GB's on the EMPEG!

I use Audiograbber on top of the Fran codec. I like the interface of audiograbber , and the options. Try it out , i find musicmatch , too busy.


Empeg Kicks Ass
S/N 00203
http://www.iretro.com