Not necessarily. I wouldn't call myself an audiophile, but even I can tell the difference between a 256kbps and lossless file. It depends on the music, of course, and probably even if the lossy track was encoded with VBR (or some other tedious techy thing), but some 256 rips sound 'crushed' in places.
So I tend to rip from CD to computer with ALAC (because it's a Mac) and then use the 128 transcoding doobry when synching to iPod. Real audiophiles would probably baulk at that, but frankly if you're listening through earbuds on the train, anything else is just pointless. bastard by name, bastard by nature |