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

Agreed.

I have a reasonably high-end system installed in my car, and when people deride me for playing those awful-sounding lossy MP3 files, I sit them in the car and play a special demo file I have prepared: a track from one of the IASCA competition disks, repeated six times, three times as a .wav file, three times as an MP3, random shuffled.

So far NOBODY has been able to reliably tell which was which.

tanstaafl.

ooops, sorry Bitt -- nobody has been able to tell reliably which was which.