How does a good mp3 sound?

For a portable mp3 is okay but in a HIFI application all lossy codecs are lacking. Ogg Vorbis (codec) while being lossy seems to me to produce near CD quality if you encode at 256kbps VBR or higher. BTW there is no way in the world any lossy codec can sound as good or better than the source CD....physics 101

If you are considering ripping your CD's and putting them on a PC hard drive for playback via your hifi you should consider a lossless codec like FLAC or APE. These will give CD quality playback and the stored file will be smaller than a WAV file but not as small as a lossy one i.e. mp3, wma or ogg.

sdz

Thanks for all the informative postings - sounds like it's time to get back to a Turntable.

Don't give up on digital sound just quite yet. Yes accept that digital sounds different to analog, better worse, like wine its personal.
And yes MP3 has about as much depth as a string tied to a tin can, but given that there are now several lossless compression codecs and given that hard drive space is cheap there is very little reason one would even consider storing digital music files as MP3's.
I listen to a great deal of digital music and having several thousand items cataloged and cross referenced for instant playback has profoundly changed the way i listen to music... better, worse like i said just different...