I was going to say I hate those brittle hard plastic jewel cases but there are many better form factors out there and this blog post shows box sets made from better materials.
At higher bitrates mp3 (and AAC) is OK, but through good headphones the difference between common 128kbps mp3 files and CD audio is night and day.
Every store I know that sells MP3s gives you either 320k CBR, or a high quality VBR encoding. Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment.
And most stores are now offering lossless downloads anyway.
If you're making your own MP3s, don't make 128k MP3s.
Later codecs (AAC, Vorbis, Opus, etc.) all allow you to use fewer bits for the same quality.
I still have a NAS full of nasty 128kbps MP3 files I really should just delete. All that time ripping CDs 20 years ago wasn't a complete waste of time, the MP3 player I had only had a tiny amount of memory and the fledgling NAS I had didn't have a lot of disk space as it was.
Time to delete them has come though, funnily it's much quicker to <arrgh me hearties> CDs I already own than rip them myself.
> Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment
I think there is way more individual differences here than what some people assume. I have a few friends that often perceive way more details in images and image quality than me, to the point that some compressions that are fine for me will bother them. I think the same is true with sound: some people will benefit from CD quality, and some others won't.
That may also depend on the music that people listen to. If the tests are not made with the music you listen to, is the result the same? Is there a way to say "there's no difference for song X, so there is also no difference for song Y"?
I have yet to find the encoder that encodes The Downward Spiral good enough where I can't AB test it from the CD. The album is neigh unlistenable on Youtube.
That particular disc seems to have been made at the cross roads time during which seamless natural-sounding digital effects were possible in music, but were still blocky enough in implementation to cause some type of Moire effect with digital encoders.
The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.
At higher bitrates mp3 (and AAC) is OK, but through good headphones the difference between common 128kbps mp3 files and CD audio is night and day.