Meh.

I've heard lossess off iTunes. I'm not impressed. Give me Blu-Ray audio.

You pretty much nailed mainstream marketing. Excellent point about the bandwidth requirements.

Hey, as long as it's lossless Blu-ray audio.

Lossless is lossless. The final level of quality of that lossless track still depends on the recording itself. With Blu-ray you might get a lossless multi-channel soundtrack.

Not that this changes the argument much, but you keep mentioning 320 kbps like that's the popular bitrate. The two most popular online stores that I buy from are iTunes and Amazon.com, and they both sit at 256 kbps for the most part. Apple's 256 kbps might be a wash with 320 kbps MP3. I haven't read enough to know. I doubt I would be able to tell the difference between 256 kbps and lossless for a lot of material. I'd probably have to listen to stuff that was picked to highlight the inadequacies of the lower bitrate. Anyway, I was just nitpicking.

I think you’re right that the multi-channel is a big plus. I’ve also noticed that with many of my SACDs even the 2ch ones the real improvement is that they have been re-mastered.

I wasn’t assuming that 320 is all that popular just that it’s the best I’ve found. I actually assumed that 128 was the most common since I get most of my mp3s off internet radio and that is the most often streamed format. I agree that most people wouldn’t be able to tell 256 from lossless either especially considering the systems they are playing it on. For that matter they probably couldn’t tell the difference with 128 either.

I still have the M3's hooked up. Regarding the volume problem I had before. This is what I noticed. Some cds are mastered louder than others. The loudly mastered cds play without having to turn the volume up higher like I complained about before. But for some reason the quieter cds require me to turn the volume on the M3's higher than I remember having to do with my other speakers. Even on my other speakers I always would have to raise the volume on quieter cds. But with the M3's I seem to have raise the voluime even higher. Is there a reason for this or am I just nuts?

Speaker sensitivity?

I think there is also a clarity factor. I find that the clearer the presentation, call it better mastered more dynamic range (usually not mainstream rock or pop songs) the higher I want the volume to hear and feel the dynamics of the recording.