I'm curious if anyone has compared the playback quality of a low bitrate MP3 (say 96-128 VBR or 128 CBR) that was ripped direct from a CD versus one that was transcoded from a high bitrate MP3 such as 240 VBR. I know transcoding is re-encoding artifacts, but I would guess the sound quality should be instinguishable since the final product is not very high quality. I know many people recommend using Monkeyaudio or so other lossless compressed format to store all your audio for re-encoding in the future but I'm wondering why not just store them in really high quality MP3 format 240 kbit VBR and above?
It seems the only reason to re-encode in the future if you already have high quality rips would be to produce smaller filesizes but with storage getting increasingly cheaper, I doubt that will ever be necessary.