In reply to:
(Yea, I'm a big computer geek with all this stuff...If anyone on the boards ever needs computer help I'm the one to come to)
There are a few people here worth talking to in this regard.
As chess mentioned, I report for ArsTechnica and moderate a couple of their fora, though I've been sadly far too busy lately with the new job.
A new receiver would definitely help your overall experience but it may very well make the MP3 problem worse. The higher end you go, the better your equipment becomes at producing all that information a cheap pair of Logitechs and a TBSC can't. MP3 was designed specifically for portability, both over the net and in your hand. It eliminates information most people won't hear on their low end equipment and applies mathematical formulation to the remaining material in order to describe the wave form in terms of parameters instead of discrete waveform points. Most compression does this making neither MP3 nor Divx especially unique in this fashion. If you really want to see cool compression, do a little research on cell phones.
Newer schemes have been developed that go further than MP3 in either sound quality or size or both. Sony's ATRAC3 is even better than MP3 and it dates to about the same time though it incorporates DRM. Newer formats such as ogg and WMA will produce a better sound, though the latter is often deamed evil simply because of its owner and it can include DRM which terrifies me in general. .APE is actually losless, meaning that not one bit (no pun intended) of the original waveform is lost though it compresses to a significantly larger file. And unfortunately, not all 320kbps MP3's are created evil. On decent (not even good) equipment, a 320kbps MP3 encoded using something like Musicmatch (far more likely than anythign else sadly) and the Frenhausen (or however they spell it...) codec will sound significantly less acurate than a LAME encoded file using even -alt standard (let alone -alt extreme or -alt insane). If you want to find the best MP3's possible, you need to get yourself on the Ubernode and delete all the crap you have now. Ubernode requires you to use EAC and LAME to encode your MP3's which is the best you can hope for.
Sadly, the main reason for using MP3's, the ease with which one can find music, perpetuates the problem of crappy sound files. The majority of computer users aren't savvy enough to find an alternative and the majority of computer users outnumber us geeks thousands fold.
If you are dead set on being able to download heavily compressed audio files, you can't hope for greatness and you'll likely have to simply grin and bear it. The only other semi-worthwhile alternative is to buy used and independent CDs from a local shop so as to screw the RIAA out of royalties, rip them in .ape and sell them back to recoup some of your expenses. Personally, I've just given up on recorded music all together until the RIAA is dead and something other than corporately generated crap is available in a format more worthy of my Axioms than CD.
Regards,
Semi
