You shouldn't be surprised that the compressed MP3's sound worse and CD's. The only compression I would allow is lossless, such as Meridian's MLP or other formats. In my case, all my CD's are ripped to WAV format which is uncompressed. Disk storage is so cheap these days that it just doesn't make sense to bother with compression. Although I haven't bothered to compare them directly, I would be very surprised if the WAV's sound different from the original CD's, at least played through Meridian equipment.

There are other advantages to ripping the music to a file server (in my case, a Maxattach). The same files can serve as source for both mid-fi distributed audio for the house and for hi-fi in the theater, or to anyplace else that is connected to the LAN.

Chris Cooper