Neil Young Hates the iPod - The aging rocker says that Apple has contributed to the dumbing down of music.

[Electronic House]

The iPod is both an icon of design and usability and also a relic of the technology past.  The iPod is a portable means of using music purchased from iTunes.  Apple employs a proprietary means of limiting where and how you can use your purchased music via DRM.

iTunes and the iPod are a relic of the past because they were created at a time when high-speed broadband and massive hard drives were still expensive and uncommon.  iTunes reduced the size of the music file and thereby the quality to allow for slower connections and smaller drives.  Neil Young says that this was the beginning of the dumbing of our music senses.

Today with broadband and large hard drives commonplace, there's no need to sacrifice quality for size.  That being said, in a study, 'Few listeners can distinguish between "average" and "best" MP3 samples' by Cognitive Daily, few listeners could tell the difference in music quality between 128 and 256 kbps MP3's.  They could however tell the difference between these higher data rates and a low 64 kbps MP3 of the same music. 

The recommendation is to always rip music in 320 kbps MP3's or a lossless format for maximum flexibility and the highest quality sound for everyone.