Low Bit-Rate Audio

It is about time for an authority to step up and talk about the junk that floods online music stores. And who else but Brits. Audio is their passion and they are doing something about it. Namely, British Federation of Audio (BFA) expressed its concerns that consumers are not getting most possible enjoyment with highly compressed downloadable music. BFA tests, as we already know, showed that most popular 128KBit rate compression is highly inferior to CD quality. Even 256kbit and higher do not come close to what CDs offer. True audiophiles are even bitter about CD quality vs SACD and good ol' vinyl.
The problem I see here is most consumers (especially teens) go after convenience and not the quality. Some just take the downloaded audio as if it is as good as it gets. In my opinion music download stores should have a disclaimer saying the quality of the downloaded music is worse than that of CD. Even better, record labels should probably claim the rate of the compression for that particular track on the CD. That would be my ideal world and it is not going to happen.

Source: AVReview UK