scooter
you can get the mp3 files to sound as good as a cdrom with the bit rate set to 196 or higher. they say 160 is all you need but i found anything lower then 196 has trouble with songs, with both sets of lyrics one in the forground and one in the back ground. some rap songs do this with that rap beat which will also make it mess up.
reason it messes up is the compression codes will toss out bits it thinks does not matter, just to get the size smaller, and in doing that you can get the beat in the foreground mixed with the word in the background and the word in the forground, making what is hear a completely different word.
the latest song i heard this on is a rap song from missey elliott with fat man on. when compressed to much they words are mixed more then needed. so all the tracks layed out make for some bad lyrics that way.
when i did a search on the web for the lyrics they were not what i heard.
so the only thing is too low of compression the wma was at 128 kbps which messed it up.
i use an fm transmitter to play songs on my stereo unit also. but i use ogg format at 320 kbps which is equal to about an 500 kbps mp3.
even with that compress i turned on the surround sound in the pc and it is transmitted to the stereo also. so there still is enough bits in the ogg files for that to work.
wav's are of course just like the old records. but now think how much room did those old records take up.?
you can always do some editing on the wav's and get them to sound just as good as they do now when compressed in to the ogg format or the higer kbps mp3 's
go to my website and look for the tip on restoring music that page will tell you how to adjust the wav file for best sound and then when you compress it, the song will still sound good.
http://www.angelfire.com/tx3/rovingcowboy/truck.html
that is the page look for the button in the table near the top of the page.
you should atleast check it out even if you still don't want to do the compression of the songs you will know how to have better sounding wav files.
unless your not in the 1 out of every 100 people group that can hear that the digital format is missing some freq's, then you wont hear the difference.
but there is a slight difference between the records and the digital wav files.
slight but there and only 1 in 100 of us can hear those freq's.
just some thought input for you to check out and think about.
also a wav file takes about 10.1 mb's a minute where the 320 kbps ogg files take about 3.5 mb's for 3 to 4 minutes