First of all, thank you to everyone who responded, I gained a valuable
education on this subject simply by reading all of the posts. I am now
going to re-"rip" many of my CD's at a higher compression rate (I use the
LAME encoder). I had heard in the past that there was little difference
going higher than 128, but after reading all of these posts I know now that
is not the case.

of the BIG advantages of a car HU that plays MP3 encoded disks is that you
can
get a dozen or more albums on one disk making a changer a completely
obsolete
piece of equipment. No way would I want to give that up by going to
larger
files.

Well, that's really the crux of the issue, isn't it? When you get right
down to it, aren't many of life's important decisions the choice between
quality versus convenince? Do you want lots of files or do you want really
good sound? Hmmm....

MOSFET