At higher bitrates mp3 (and AAC) is OK, but through good headphones the difference between common 128kbps mp3 files and CD audio is night and day.
Every store I know that sells MP3s gives you either 320k CBR, or a high quality VBR encoding. Neither is perceptively different (by humans) from a CD, even with the best equipment.
And most stores are now offering lossless downloads anyway.
If you're making your own MP3s, don't make 128k MP3s.
Later codecs (AAC, Vorbis, Opus, etc.) all allow you to use fewer bits for the same quality.
Time to delete them has come though, funnily it's much quicker to <arrgh me hearties> CDs I already own than rip them myself.
I think there is way more individual differences here than what some people assume. I have a few friends that often perceive way more details in images and image quality than me, to the point that some compressions that are fine for me will bother them. I think the same is true with sound: some people will benefit from CD quality, and some others won't.
That may also depend on the music that people listen to. If the tests are not made with the music you listen to, is the result the same? Is there a way to say "there's no difference for song X, so there is also no difference for song Y"?
There are certain trouble files that can't be encoded well with MP3 even at 320k. I once successfully ABXY tested one such file 20 times in a row.
That particular disc seems to have been made at the cross roads time during which seamless natural-sounding digital effects were possible in music, but were still blocky enough in implementation to cause some type of Moire effect with digital encoders.
Both are a night and day difference from 128kbps.
Agreed about jewel cases - I have about 150 odd CDs and I just -despise- the cheap jewel cases.
It depends on what you are listening to. High dinamic range (classical music for example) is hit hard by the mp3 compressor.
The box sets above mostly house the jewel cases in a plastic moulding (which helps them not get damaged). The "Tougher than tough" set unfortunately uses the digipak style of packaging, so when the little plastic fingers in the CD centre start failing, the disks fall out every time you open it up and it can't be repaired. Not sure how they managed to come up with packaging that was worse than jewel cases, but digipaks succeeded remarkably well at just that.