iTunes music store finally became available in Portugal a couple of weeks ago so on the weekend I signed up and checked it out. Just to try it out I downloaded the new Caetano Veloso album "A Foreign Sound" (see [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001WPS6S/qid=1100561554/ref=pd_ka_1/202-5838870-3643826]here[/url]). Cost me €9.99 for a 23 track album. Not bad considering that to download each track individually would cost €0.99 (which, at around 66p is considerably cheaper than the 79p per track that iTunes charges in the UK ;) ). So, how bad is this 128Kbps AAC rip then? Well, it's not bad at all. In fact it's pretty bloody amazing :eek: . I used iTunes to burn the album to a CD - it does the conversion to 16/44.1 WAV and the burning, really, the more I use iTunes the more I love it. It's just SOOO easy to use and everything just works so easily and intuitively. Anyway, for comparison, I bought a copy of the original CD yesterday and this evening I've been comparing the two listening to them on my system. The first thing that amazed me is that the CD that was made from the 128Kbps AAC files (I'll call it the rip CD from now on) sounds very, very good. If I'd bought that as a CD I wouldn't have any complaints. There's nothing obviously "wrong" with the sound and absolutely no audible compression artefacts such as the digital "phasing" sounds you can sometimes get on poor quality internet radio. Playing the the rip CD and the original CD back to back I really do struggle to tell the difference if the truth be told. The original CD is perhaps marginally better in terms of focus, soundstage depth and "ambience" but it really is the tiniest of differences. Tonally there's nothing to tell them apart. So, the next thing I did was open the same track from each CD up in SoundForge to compare the WAV files and, as you can see, they are as good as dammit identical. [img]http://www.luacheia.com/misc_images/wav_aac_compare.gif[/img] The top one is the rip CD, the bottom one is the original CD and the portion of the WAV shown is the first sounds from Track 1 (Carioca). I'm not that familiar with using SoundForge (just downloaded the 30 day trial version) so if anyone knows a better way to compare two .WAV files let me know. Still, from what I can see it's clear the differences between the rip CD and the original are miniscule. So, the 128Kbps files on iTunes Music Store that we've all been slagging off as unlistenable rubbish just about tolerable for portable listening, are actually pretty damn good. So, before you knock compressed formats, give them an objective listen. You might be surprised :) Michael.