> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I d

> Your friend does not think you hired a string quartet. Your friend thinks you have nice speakers. When I first got nice high end speakers (TY Craigslist) I did this with an acoustic guitar CD. The amount of detail I could hear, and by detail I mean "close my eyes and hear every details of the musican's fingers moving across the strings" detail, was incredible. That is also the day that I learned MP3 encoders of the time (~8 years ago) still had bad encoding artifacts even at 256kbps. After hearing enough clicks and pops, I ended up having to re-rip my CDs as FLAC, or in some cases buy the CDs so I could rip them. Now days encoders are a LOT better. You don't get clicks and hisses except at 128kbps. Also 90% of my listening is done through a wireless headset (...) through spotify (...) so quality has taken a serious nose dive anyway. That said if I want to listen to music as an all immersive activity, yeah, lossless through high end speakers. But I do that maybe once every other month for half an hour.