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When your ribbons dont start rolling off till 40k and have usable responce to 60k, you want the recording to hold up.

I think this is extremely misguided, and suggests a lack of understanding of how digital music works. The original CD that you get your "lossless" files from has a sampling rate of 44kHz. As such, it can only reasonably represent frequencies in the original recording up to about 22kHz (google the Nyquist theorem). Even at 22kHz, it won't have much fidelity. In other words, your speakers do NOT have "reasonable response" to 60kHz, because they are limited by other parts of the system (the source). Its silly to have speakers that are flat out to 60kHz because the source is only good up to something less than 22kHz. In fact, you could argue that you may even want to filter anything above the Nyquist rate, as it is probably extremely noisy. This is OK, however, because human hearing is typically considered to extend only to 20kHz. For that matter, any sampling noise is probably inaudible too.

If you want to acoustically represent something that comes out of a signal generator (rather than a CD), and is considerably beyond the range of human hearing, then fine. But it ain't about the music. In fact, it ain't about the "sound" either, because "sound" is the human perception of air resonating up to about 20kHz. Oh, and if you're going to do that with the idea that you are going for accuracy, then you don't have tubes in the circuit. "Color" is another word for "distortion".

That's why I'm an engineer, I suppose. I think those practical considerations are the whole point. If you want to rub money on it for the sake of "bragging rights", that's cool. I guess we have different world views, is all

Jim

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Early mp3 rolled off way to early to compress the files.

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You won't be able to tell the difference between a really well encoded MP3 and the same song as FLAC.

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I've encoded my music library 3 times now and I can still tell the difference between a CD and my 320kbps EAC/LAME encoding.

Well, then, you've got good ears. My first suggestion is to follow mbcouple's tips for getting FLAC to work properly on the empeg. My alternative suggestion is simply to turn the volume up. After a couple of months, you'll no longer be able to spot the difference. It worked for me

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I've encoded my music library 3 times now and I can still tell the difference between a CD and my 320kbps EAC/LAME encoding.

Well, then, you've got good ears.

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Regarding the "noisy" car environment where everybody seems to think mp3 distortion should be tolerated... here's my problem: road noise tends to be lower frequency. Audio compression artifacts tend to be very high frequency. (...) So to me they are compounded errors - I now hear road noise PLUS compression artifacts. I choose to fight both as much as possible.

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but it sure is a hassle trying to figure out how to create a "really well encoded MP3".

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If you look a couple posts down, i did get flac to playback. It took some small changes to the config file forcing the drives to stay spinning at all times.