I've ripped most of my music to MP3 for my ipod at 320K. I played around with variable bit rate mp3 for a while but found it a pain that sometimes the time reported for songs were always way off.

I use my Ipod in a special dock made for my Yamaha reciever and the 320K mp3 sound excellent. If the origional CD sounds better I think it has to do with the fact that the Ipod is analog to the reciever while my Oppo DVD player is digital over coax.

Yamaha RX-V2700 / CDC-815 , Oppo DV-980H , Axiom M22s , Paradigm DSP-3100